#this dream has no Minecraft in it but it was used to artistically recreate the White Cube Complex

[strange-and-dynamic]

Dateline: December 29th 2022

This dream started with me and 3 old friends from 7th grade talking with eachother in I think the staircase of a subway about where we’re gonna camp out under the context that we’re on the run from the law, as to what we’re being chased for I don’t know

Eventually at some point of us talking we hear police sirens, and then we all split up to run in different directions, where we reach this big white cube apartment building in a neighborhood full of others like it, and we start running apart again, me and 1 of the friends were around the big white cube complex, I was trying to look for a way in even though I saw people clearly lived inside it (it was night time and there were a few lights on) and the other friend was just kinda, chilling??? (Oh so the police aren’t gonna chase him but they’ll chase me 🤦‍♀️ smhhh) Even tho the police were right there??? And as I was trying to look for a way in the building, ‘running’ (you can never run in dreams—) around it, there was this cop car with its siren lights on and the police siren from it playing way too softly to be a true alert, like it was so quiet it’s like it was playing from a phone speaker— And the cop car wasn’t even speeding or anything, it was just, driving really slowly, in this menacing manner, like it was stalking me,,,

Eventually I find a way in through this unseen flight of stars on the side of the building, I run up the stairs and then cut to morning I wake up in an empty 1 room apartment with no window panes and no doors, just the front door (WITH NO LOCK BY THE WAY,,) and wide open window holes where the glass should be, the whole thing resembled Minecraft honestly— the threat of the police is gone as it’s morning and there’s no way they’d do a stake out on a singular building overnight, and I leave my apartment, with the thought of finding something to eat for breakfast, and instead of, idk, heading to a store, I go to other people’s apartments, in which in all of the apartments I get ignored, like they were just ok with me coming in like it was a work room or something— none of the doors were locked, they just opened like bedroom doors, the doors didn’t have peepholes either and they were all the same brown wooden door with golden door knob combo

This is where the dream starts getting REALLY weird: I go up another flight of stairs on the big white cube complex (that’s what I’m calling it now ig) to find out there’s a whole convenience store on the roof??? With no ceiling either it’s just there out in the open, all the shelves and fridges just there in the open like it never rains— I get happy at the sight and start looking for whatever’s cheap that I could buy for a good breakfast, I get a head of lettuce and a bag of raw chicken wings, with the idea I’ll cook up and the shred the chicken and stuff them in lettuce leaves, lettuce pockets! I go up to what I’m assuming was self checkout and I put my 2 ingredients on the counter (the chicken was really gonna be unseasoned like that??? 🤨🤨🤨) and pay with,,, a singular quarter,,, with the context that it was one dollar— and the guy takes the coin and says something along the lines of “you need to learn how to count change, that won’t get you by out here mami” (he had a Spanish accent for some reason) and gave me back 6 coins??? For buying the food?? and I take my ingredients in a little plastic convenience bag, and as I’m looking for my apartment I stumble across a doorless apartment where the light doesn’t reach the same as the others, and in the apartments, on a bed, I see my mom and my brother, sitting together looking down at something resembling a smartphone, I get scared and back away from the doorway’s view, while still sneaking peaks at them, as if to see what they’re doing

After THAT I, for some reason, run to a remote island (with my ingredients still in hand) across a skinny bridge made of sand, kinda like a sandbar, as to why I ran there, I don’t know, but I think my context was I was just looking around my surroundings, the island had like 2 palm trees what looked like some mini volcano the size of a hill, and nothing else. When I made it there and looked around for a bit I turn behind me and see part 2 Joseph Joestar swimming towards me in the ocean really really fast— once he makes it to my island he jumps out of the water in cartoony way and lands right next to me, for some reason once he lands next to me he’s suddenly part 3 Joseph Joestar, and he puts his hands on my shoulders and is kinda rejoicing saying something along the lines of “There you are! We all really missed you back at home! Your family really misses you!” (Am I??? Not on the run from the police anymore???) And then we turn around to the mini volcano only for it to now kind of awaken and become a huge volcanic magma monster, and then I woke up!

Some weird tidbits about the dream:

• for the entire dream all the way from the ‘circling the big white cube complex’ part, I had on house clothes and was barefoot, but the concrete felt like, smooth waxed wooden floors?? And my friends were all in their school uniforms

• I realize any dream that contains my old friends they all have on their school uniforms, I guess cuz that’s all I ever saw them in 🤔

• The complex looked like just a big white cube with windows on the outside and a glass double door on the front when I was outside at night, but when I was inside it and started walking around it in the morning, suddenly there was these balconies to act as hallways (think of japanese apartment buildings, not having hallways and instead just walkways on the sides) and a whole open roof area with 2 stores, and when I went back outside to the island it looked the same as it did at night! Just a big white cube with windows on the outside! Minecraft recreation of it on the outside vs inside because I can NOT draw buildings (obviously ignore the mobs and grass n stuff because the main purpose of the image is just to replicate what the buildings look like):

• It was only around my 3rd time circling the outside of the building did I find the staircase on the side of it, like it was trying to trick me into running away or something, bitch let me in I’m not gonna keep running I’ve had too many running dreams 💀💀💀

• None of the cop cars had cops inside them that I could see, all the windows were tinted pitch black, none of hem came out either, just cop cops, just standing there, 😱 menacingly 😱

• The best way I can describe the cop car playing it’s siren way too quietly is like it was a whisper close into my ear, with the same feel as a threatening voice but it didn’t hurt my ears like a police siren would, it was just, menacing—

• My friends were there at night but in the morning they were nowhere to be found, in the dream I briefly thought of it but then started focusing on myself (damn I didn’t think to get food for them??? Selfish—)

• There were other cop cars but they weren’t chasing me, they were kinda just sitting outside the building, with their siren lights on but their sirens off, like they were there just watching or something

[whnvr]

Brain Drain

Ah yes, here we go. The very first Brain Drain. According to Julia Cameron I have to fill up roughly three pages or 1500 words in order to meet my daily requirement. I suppose I will simply just start typing, in fact, I refuse to even look at the screen - instead opting to gaze intently down at my keyboard. I have to say this feels a little unnatural. How many words is that? Ah, 74. Oh dear.

It should be said I'm still unsure as to the format I want this to take. The Artist's Way suggestion is as a stream of consciousness, which is what I'm doing now, but I am also considering doing a sort of blend between that method with academic writing. Ie: doing blocks of the Brain Drain at different times of day alongside my usual work and then taking the time to cite, reference, format, and edit my ideas. It's slightly counter to the original purpose of the Morning Pages but I may actually get more benefit from it this way as it will allow me to understand and explore my ideas in greater detail. Plus, what are these things for if not to be innovated upon?

The Morning Pages, or 'Brain Drain', are typically supposed to be done in a solid block before any other of the days' work. Instead, I may ensure the three pages/1500 words are done and published before I go to bed. However, I don't mind doing a stream of consciousness today just to get the ball rolling.

I guess the point of the Brain Drain is to get all of my cluttered thoughts out of my head and get in touch with the 'me' that is decidedly more creative, and absolutely less critical. I suppose taking the pulse or 'measure' of my day would be a good place to start? Today I feel a little listless. I still feel as though I have a lot that I need to do to get this journal up and running, and that this is halting me from moving on to anything else.

I'm essentially starting this journal because I've been doing so many things in the last couple of weeks that it has become impossible to keep track of it all, generating this sort of anxiety of a future wherein I'll have to look back on everything I've done for some university project but the steps of how I got there will be lost. Now that I have a format in which to record my work I feel the pressure to go back and document everything that I've been doing.

Should I do that, or should I just press forward and allow my work to naturally sort itself out as I'm doing it? I'm leaning toward the latter.

It's decided then, I will continue onward as though my imaginary journal audience has been listening in the entire time.

Next steps then. I suppose I should focus my energies on learning Unreal Engine from the ground up. I want to become proficient in that program in order to move my art-style and experiences into a realtime format that can then be explored and made via the burgeoning medium of virtual reality. I need some 'case study' examples of the work that I want to produce and learning Unreal as an artistic tool is my current obstacle to doing this. In which case, I will need to locate a good, artist's-oriented course on the subject.

I suppose I have three general concepts I'm pursuing at the moment. The first is this journalling documentation system that will eventually become an app, the second is an AI-driven 'personal butler' life management system that I've drafted up as a companion app for 'journlr', and the third is the creation of a new workflow for myself for VR worldbuilding. The first two were born out of me needing those exact services for my work but being unable to find any out there (so why not just make them myself! hah). I plan on going into detail on them another time. The third is my immediate focus and something I will go into more detail here.

Workflow is important. I am a very 'systems & procedure' oriented artist. The work itself, final output, tweaking, and set-dressing are far less important to me than how I set up my work environment in the first place. For music, I have created an environment, pipeline, toolset, and framework to work within that are my asset libraries, procedural sound generation/processing tools, procedural AI writing & editing tools, and arrangement techniques. These create an initial working bed for me to then operate within as a songwriter, producer, artist, and sound engineer.

However, I don't yet have such workflows for visual art. The good news is that I do have one in mind.

Video games, though decidedly an art form, are only recently starting to seem less strange within the academic 'art world'. For me, they are exceedingly important. I am not particularly a 'gamer' and I prefer to spend my time playing in creativity, however, being a child of the early 2000s video games can't help but form an intrinsic part of my life and artistic DNA. For my younger self, this was truest of 'Sandbox Games'.

Animesh Jha, MA Video Game Development & Visual Effects at Simon Fraser university defines a Sandbox Game as: "an unrestricted or exploration-based environment in which the player gets to create his version of fun", of which the popular block-building game 'Minecraft' is probably the most titular example. He also goes on to refer to it by the term "Emergent Gameplay" which is the notion of content discovered by the users that weren't explicitly planned or determined by the system's creators. (1)

The idea and potential of Emergent Gameplay as an art medium excites me. It is my inner child-creative's dream that all my creative practices eventually resemble 'emergent gameplay'. What could be more fun? The work for me then as an artist is in setting up these creative systems. In essence, I'm looking to build a virtual playground or 'sandbox' for myself that I can then create works within.

In order to talk about my plans for this methodology, I must first talk about one of the pieces of software that most inspired it, as well as one of the artists who have used it to its fullest potential. The little-publicized, niche, but much-loved, literal-definition-of-a sandbox game 'Garry's Mod' and one of it's most prominent creatives: Michael 'Vioxtar' Efraim.

Garry's Mod (or GMod for short) is a game produced by developer Garry Newman as a third-party modification for Valve's Source game engine in 2004 published by Valve themselves. The game functions on the premise of the ability to essentially spawn game assets (characters, props, settings, buildings, and miscellaneous) from Valve's revolutionary, narrative-driven game Half-Life (a game I will be talking more about at some point as it represents a singular, life-changing source of inspiration for me in terms of art direction & word building) and being able to manipulate those objects in a physics-driven, 3D environment. (2)

What the players were to then do with it was up to them. Michael Efraim is one such player, working with hundreds to thousands of Half-Life 2 game assets in order to build complex and expressive 3D imagery in an art practice he calls 'scenebuilding' with a pointed focus on the meta worldbuilding of stories that take place within his own art program. (3)

"Over time I began gravitating towards building my own universe within the realm of Garry’s Mod: a reimagination of the Garry’s Mod Sandbox gamemode. I started asking myself questions: 'What would it be like if there was a world out there populated by players with working Physguns, Gravguns, and Toolguns, and the ability to spawn whatever they pleased?'" - Michael Efraim on worldbuilding. (3)

Another concept I have gravitated towards recently is kitbashing, the act of taking pre-existing modelbuilding kits and combining them into something new, a classic example of which was the use of kitbashing to do essentially all of the prop, architecture, and vehicle designs within the original Star Wars trilogy. (4)

In lieu of this, for my own virtual playground, I'm eventually looking to put together an asset library of props, characters, buildings, furnishings, flora, fauna, and procedural texturing systems for Unreal Engine alongside a virtual reality toolset that will allow me to play around with these components and create my artwork from within the virtual space, creating not just art but a brand new art framework that encourages art as an emergent gameplay environment.

For the time being however, I will be focusing on learning the base toolset, developing a traditional non-vr workflow, and building out a tentative asset library with the aim of recreating the piece 'Out of Map Bounds' by Michael Efraim as my first test, benchmark, and case-study for this approach.

^ Out of Bounds, by Michael Efraim Eventually, it is my hope that I will be able to use these frameworks as a basis for incorporating my own 'whnvr' abstract, constructivist art style into these worlds along with my music, and then to be able to create everything from directly within virtual reality.

[entergamingxp]

Harmonix’s Fuser bets on user creativity as the future of music gaming • Eurogamer.net

Where do you go after Guitar Hero and Rock Band? That’s a question the music genre has been trying to answer for about 10 years, with varying degrees of success. Some games have looked to VR to replace the physicality of performing on peripherals, yet the platform still remains out of reach for many thanks to cost and space requirements. Others have taken risks with unique spins on rhythm-action – often brilliant in their own right, but none have captured the mass market like the guitar games of the 2000s.

Does the answer lie in user-created content? That’s what Harmonix is betting on with its latest title, Fuser, a music-mixing game officially unveiled today. Part performance game, part creative tool, it’s a far cry from the days of rocking out with a peripheral in your living room – instead favouring a Coachella-influencer vibe as players mix current tracks together to satisfy crowd demands.

“A lot of our traditional games – whether it’s Rock Band or Dance Central, even some of the stuff we’ve done in VR like Audica – are very different in that those games are either a recreation of, or performance to, an existing song,” Harmonix exec Dan Walsh told me during a preview session. “Fuser is a music-mixing game where you are creating things as opposed to recreating things.”

Launching with over 100 tracks, players will be able to pick and choose from set song lists to develop a mix. The gameplay centres around a deck where you can play four different discs at once, with each song broken down into four components: drums, bass, lead instruments (such as guitar, synths and horns) and vocals. Players can mix these into any combination they want – even four voice parts at the same time, although this doesn’t sound the best.

Oh, and there’s no peripherals: just a regular release on PC, PS4, Xbox One and Switch sometime this autumn. That’s pretty close to when next-gen consoles launch, but Fuser will also be playable on PS5 and Xbox Series X thanks to their backwards compatibility support, “so you won’t be shut out or have to wait”, Walsh confirmed.

All it takes is a tap or drag-and-drop to add music tracks from the cards above to the deck below.

It’s an impressive bit of tech, with tracks automatically adapting to the key and tempo as they’re introduced. Both can also be adjusted by the player as part of the overall mix, such as switching between major and minor. Harmonix used a similar system for its 2017 card game DropMix, in which songs were divided into parts and then mixed together on a peripheral. Fuser expands on this by giving players more creative control, allowing them to change the texture by muting tracks, or adding in custom sounds via what looked like an in-game MIDI pad with six instrument options (something Harmonix plans on detailing at a later point).

So, that’s the mixing interface: how does this work as a game? Fuser is divided into three core gameplay modes: campaign, freestyle, and multiplayer. The latter is listed as two to four players in the press release, with the opportunity to “collaborate or compete with players from around the world” – but Harmonix is waiting until later on to reveal more details of how this works, too.

Freestyle gives players the opportunity to mess around, save mixes and upload them directly onto social channels. The campaign, meanwhile, is about 10-15 hours long, and follows the career of a DJ from “some level of success” to headline act.

Points are scored by fulfilling crowd requests, keeping the mix moving, and hitting mission goals such as keeping the track within set bpm parameters. You can get combos on crowd requests by dropping a track that satisfies two at once: for instance, Billie Eilish’s bad guy would fulfill a request for pop, and a request for 2010s music. If you introduce new tracks on a downbeat you get bonus points, while yellow lines on the time bar indicate “musically interesting” parts of loops which are particularly suitable for changes.

Players are able to fully customise the character, and perform in six different venues. To keep things varied, the campaign gives different narrative reasons for each mission: such as playing the second day of a festival when everyone is…. fragile, and wants something calm.

In the context of the release of Media Molecule’s Dreams this month, it’s interesting timing for Harmonix to announce Fuser – and it feels like part of a larger trend giving players the tools to create content within a game. I asked if Harmonix felt this was the future for the music genre, too.

Pushed to the periphery

Almost inevitably, the topic of peripherals came up when discussing music gaming – and it’s unsurprising why the industry has moved away from them.

“I will never speak ill of the Rock Band instruments – [they] really sell that full experience,” Walsh said. “But it’s also a lot of complication… you’ve got to figure out manufacturing, shipping timelines and inventory logistics, and selling people on them. Also getting retail to dedicate the space, and asking people upfront to make a much larger investment than a traditional game because they have to buy all the extra stuff.

“It’s nice to be able to have people either purchase it physically or digitally. You don’t have to worry about whether or not you have something that’s compatible with the last generation, and it’s going to work with your current generation. [It’s] much more straightforward.”

Not to mention all that plastic probably isn’t great for the environment.

“At the moment, yes, just because if you look back at when rock band and Guitar Hero came out, rock star culture and the rock star fantasy were very much of that time,” Walsh explained. “Late 90s, early 2000s, mid 2000s. People wanted to be on stage at Lollapalooza, they wanted to be shredding on the lead guitar out in front of thousands of people.

“Music culture has sort of shifted over the last 10-15 years to where DJ culture is influential, mashup culture is really influential. Festival culture is bigger than it’s ever been right now. So this game is sort of our attempt to reflect modern music culture in a way that’s still a game, but it’s also creatively fulfilling in a different way than Rock Bands or Dance Central or Guitar Hero.

“From a creative standpoint, you look at influencer culture as well where people just want to create and share things all the time. And this is sort of a reflection of that, Dreams is a good reflection of that. Mario Maker is another example, Minecraft of course – it’s like turning people loose into a sort of gamified playground with a lot of access to a lot of like tools and interesting and interesting things.”

The music-mixing aspect of Fuser is something Harmonix has been thinking about for a while: Walsh told me the studio “started experimenting” with games Fantasia and DropMix. “[With Fuser], it feels like we figured out the rest of it, the game wrapper around it that makes it still accessible,” Walsh said. Getting the balance between creative freedom and game rules was a challenge, so Harmonix tried to focus on “purposeful decisions that are also musical in a way you [can] score them.

“Figuring out that balance took a little while and some of our other experiments… I don’t think quite found the way to make your creative decisions ‘gaming'”, Walsh added.

Fuser is already launching with a significant number of tracks, but Harmonix hasn’t ruled out adding more post-launch. ‘Harmonix has a long tradition of supporting its titles with ongoing content and features,’ project director Daniel Sussman told me over email. ‘You can expect Fuser to be similar.’

Given Fuser’s focus on influencer-style sharing, I started to wonder how the music world’s strict licensing rules would work with publishing mixes to social media. How do the music rights work with that? Well, Harmonix doesn’t quite have the answer yet.

“It’s definitely complicated. For normal people, you’ll be able to share to your personal timeline,” Walsh explained. “When it comes to like influencers or YouTubers, things of that nature… that’s something that we’re still working through, both with licence holders as well as platforms. We know them both very well over the years. Obviously, when the game comes out it will include guidelines on how to do it.”

Is it more of a problem when people are monetising on top of the mixes they’ve produced?

“Monetisation does add a layer of complication… yeah, that is harder to navigate,” Walsh added. “Not necessarily impossible, but still something that we’re working through.”

Much to sphinx about.

I did manage to get a little hands-on time with Fuser for 10 minutes (and watched some gameplay expertly demoed by community manager Zoe Schneider) – and I was pretty bowled over by the mixing technology on display. It’s easy to use, packed with a good assortment of current hits and classics, and complex enough that players will be able to produce some unexpected mixes. Dropping new tracks on-beat was surprisingly satisfying in a different way to timing a Rock Band note, as hearing a great transition is rewarding to the ears. And there’s a certain novelty to hearing Smash Mouth and Migos inexplicably work together.

That said, I’m not yet entirely convinced by the core gameplay shown in the campaign, particularly the request system. In later levels these requests come in “pretty frequently”, Schneider told me – and while you can ignore them, the game encourages you to hit as many as possible to get a high score. This means the track is constantly shifting, and it often felt a little frantic and unnatural to my ear, as the music wasn’t given time to settle. The alternative, I suppose, is to dial back the amount of crowd requests: but then this risks making the gameplay slow.

The idea of responding to crowd requests also seems a little weird to me, as it suggests successful music artists only follow the demands of fans – and I’m not sure how many people actually want to live out a wedding DJ fantasy. And, unfortunately, the gameplay often looks quite static. It doesn’t have the drama of Rock Band – either on-screen, where rows of glowing blobs would hurtle towards you, or in the entertainment value of watching a friend perform on a peripheral in your living room. I wonder if this will impact the game’s ability to spread on social media platforms, as Harmonix would clearly like.

There are still so many unknowns surrounding Fuser it’s impossible to know how it’s going to pan out: we still know very little about multiplayer, precisely how the custom instrument tracks work, or what players will eventually make in freestyle mode. I really admire the focus on creative elements, along with the strength of the mixing system which makes the process accessible. Personally, I can see myself spending quite a few hours in freestyle mode tinkering with tracks. But is there enough of a game amongst the mixing tools to keep me hooked? We’ll see.

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2020/02/harmonixs-fuser-bets-on-user-creativity-as-the-future-of-music-gaming-%e2%80%a2-eurogamer-net/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=harmonixs-fuser-bets-on-user-creativity-as-the-future-of-music-gaming-%25e2%2580%25a2-eurogamer-net