On Virtual Land
Five part video essay series for Client Culture.
Made during lockdown, the series has an informal, sleepy and poetic atmosphere, piggybacking on the form of the ‘Let’s Play’, wherein a host plays a videogame and chats. The academic content is playful and shaggy, considering the relationship between videogames and land, and drawing on ideas of hauntology, pastoral, folklore, land art, data mapping, digital preservation, glitch and deviance.
Click for complete playlist.
Made during lockdown, the series has an informal, sleepy and poetic atmosphere, piggybacking on the form of the ‘Let’s Play’, wherein a host plays a videogame and chats. The academic content is playful and shaggy, considering the relationship between videogames and land, and drawing on ideas of hauntology, pastoral, folklore, land art, data mapping, digital preservation, glitch and deviance.
Click for complete playlist.
Minecraft is Haunted!
00h35m32s
9 April 2020
Beginning the series by examining the ever-popular Minecraft, Sam examines how games promise an escapist fantasy akin to the pastoral literary genre. He posits the inherent contradictions at the core of this promise, mainfesting in technical failures and glitches, create a haunting, lonely sensation for players.
This, Too, Shall Pass - an exploration
00h38m35s
23 April 2020
Sam interviews master world-builder Moth she showcases her ground-breaking, experimental video game This, Too, Shall Pass. A contemplative hiking experience, this game renders the player’s irl surrounding landscape as virtual space: stark and barren. This, Too, Shall Pass allows us to experience a vision of the future where all life on Earth is extinct, only to be reawakened by the player as they encounter surreal, science-fiction sculptures scattered about the surroundings. Sam and Moth also discuss map-making, data collection, climate change and what it means to move slowly through vast, virtual lands.
A (Sort of) Walk Through H
00h17m35s
21 May 2020
Sam takes us on a strange and feral photographic journey through the video games The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Proteus. Connecting these games and their landscapes to the work of land artist Richard Long, Sam will discuss ideas of hiking, paganism, and the way humanity harms or is in harmony with nature. This episode is also a sort of short film… fictionalising the subjects and parodying the Peter Greenaway short film A Walk Through H. In the way that film abstracts a series of journeys through painted maps and unreliable narrator, this episode brings into question wider philosophical concerns with the ways in which we impact our surroundings.
View From the Roof
00h19m52s
25 June 2020
In this episode the tensions of virtual land are brought to a steam-engine spluttering spire. Sam investigates the popular stealth action series Assassin’s Creed, known for its historic urban settings and parkour movement system. Ideas of technology, war, verticality, perspective, rebellion, and how we choose to represent our legacy throughout history are loosely connected through poetic logic.
Special thanks to Spencer Yan and Mars Saude.
Future Craters, Mammoth Caves
00h26m05s
24 July 2020
Sam speaks with Jake Elliott, one third of game development studio Cardboard Computer, about their game Kentucky Route Zero and its depictions of wounded/healed land and community.
Removing his questions from the interview, and thus most of the context, Sam instead pairs Jake’s thoughtful answers with footage taken in the game’s debug mode. This enables Sam to move the camera wherever he pleases, creating compositions outside of what the game chooses to show us. The scenographic land of the game is revealed as an illusion, and becomes wounded or healed in the same way as land exploited for resources, in Kentucky or the UK’s South West.
Jake talks about real places and histories that inspired the game’s locations, prehistoric burial mounds, and the connections between early video games and cave exploration…