Heritage has never been this cool.
The case of video games is particularly interesting for a few reasons. First of all, and the obvious one, is the recent interest by museums in games and game-like activities: while there is literature on the museum as it reflects on games and gaming, why isn't there discussion of how games construct and reconstruct the museum as a location for plot, narrative and gameplay?
In second instance, the museum has always been, and even more so in recent years, a (supposed) place of encounter with The Other: it is the place where different ideas, cultures and worldviews - in a best case scenario, of course - meet and interact. As games become less about pure entertainment and more about ideas and ideologies, in other words a 'serious leisure', will the museum be seen more and more often as an ideal setting for action that also explores cultural spaces?
Finally, I personally find museums to be the kind of labyrinth in which one could, and often does, get lost very easily - not only metaphorically, but physically as well. A perfect location for exploration if there ever was one.
In light of all this, I decided to intersperse the dour, academic commentary that this blog will be mostly about with an occasional sprinkle of escapism, looking at interesting takes on museum spaces in entertainment and games. This time around I will talk about a little known fangame of an amateur game - the collaborative effort Yume2kki.
Brief historical summary: in 2004 a little freeware game called Yume Nikki (Dream Diary), made in RPGMaker 2003 by a semi-anonymous nobody who calls himself Kikiyama, hit the freeware game scene and became a minor cult classic, mostly in force of its lack of dialogue or most language cues; its cryptic non-storyline; its bizarre mute characters and locales; and, for bonus nostalgia, a ridiculously obsolete blocky graphic style. This little thing became so well known in the underground games scene that it inspired a slew of fangames, including an effort among fangames makers dubbed Yume 2kki (an obvious play on the original title). This fangame largely follows the formula of its grandaddy: exploration of surreal location, some populated by bizarre silent characters but more often than not completely uninhabited; most of the reward being not in gameplay, but in the encounter with the absurdist, surreal aesthetic that is the mark of Yume2kki just as much as its predecessor.
Among the many areas that players can explore through their little avatar Urotsuki, is a museum, conveniently split in two parts: the awesomely named Revenge Museum (博物館リベンジ); and a more standard Museum proper (博物館).
The new frontier of museum cafès and shops. Not designed by Zaha Hadid
The Revenge Museum, in spite of being enveloped in the kind of darkness one imagines most museums would be after closing time, shares little with the 'museum-as-toy-shop' of Lewy's Night at the Museum. It is instead an eerie labyrinth, barren of all artifacts, whose rooms are filled with a perverse mockery of... museum cafès. Row after row of coffee tables and chairs, and no one in sight to take an order. It could also be a postapocalyptic museum, or a museum of the future in which consumption of accessory experiences (or, in the face of our future annihilation, lack thereof) has become the museum experience itself. Indeed, a Phyrric revenge for those who think that a museum should be about culture rather than red velvet cakes.
Spot the (futuristic) intruder.
It is, however, through the meanders of the Revenge Museum that we reach the actual Museum, a place far more familiar to those used to prowl ancient collections and relics of 1940s technology. Riding our little motorized bike (fictional museums have, fortunately, no use for rules) we can browse in luscious blue light a little, idiosyncratic collection of artifacts, including but not limited to: a hip Buddha sporting sunglasses; an assortment of Japanese ceramics and dogu clay figures; a Celtic cross standing side by side with tiny reconstructions of pagodas (only in fictional museums, apparently, we can get right the 'themes over chronology thing); and, last but not least, a display of communication technologies that features the past, the present, and the future in one, convenient package.
Each item has a little label attached - insignificant to gameplay, as it can't be read. The museum is barren of other people, perhaps offering through fiction the experience of a 'museum just for me' that many (including, I suspect, most museum constructivists) secretly hope for. Most curious of all, is the strange effect that this tiny collection of pixelated reproductions of (mostly) real-world artifacts had on me: I felt spurred to go 'aha!' and identify them, far more than I ever did in the case of a visit to a physical museum. The smaller the sprite for that raku pot was, the more fervent my Google searches got. My lesson from this, I would guess, is that immersiveness, depth and flashiness are not necessarily the only avenue for spurring curiosity, in games and in the museum; sometimes, all that is needed is a curious little thing just out of focus enough to set the imagination in motion. More than reanimated T-rex skeletons and infodumps disguised as museum edutainment, to me this tiny 8-bit museum felt, for a split second, almost like a real museum ought to.
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