[This game isn’t mobile friendly, and requires a mouse and keyboard. Sorry, no cell phones in the gallery.]
One Eye Sees
One Eye Sees is a short, modern art-themed game that explores the relationships between failure and visual memory.
The goal is to reproduce an image that you see on your screen at the beginning of each round. You do this by moving yourself around a gallery of modern art and snapping a picture when you believe your current screen is a close approximation of that image. Each round, you are given an accuracy rating based on how close your reproduction is to the original.
If you want to dive right in and play, here are the controls:
Click the screen to lock your pointer (holding ESC cancels out of this). WASD/cursors move. Right mouse button or ENTER will snap a pic. If you clear the accuracy threshold (found in the top left of the screen), you can reorient one item in the gallery by dragging it around and/or rotating it using your mouse wheel.
MECHANICS
The lower your accuracy rating, the more pixelated garbage fills your screen. The garbage, in addition to blocking your view, doubles as a semi-transparent reproduction of the current round's target image. So if you do really badly on the previous round, you'll get more garbage, and as a result, you'll get a clearer picture of the current round's goal that you can use to help you line up the shot.
Movement around the gallery does a couple things. It helps you get familiar with the layout for future rounds, so you can reproduce shots more accurately. It also erases parts of the garbage on the screen, which has three main effects:
1. It makes your current view less obstructed, which lets you see the gallery more clearly while you explore it.
2. It makes lining up your shot more difficult (unless you've got an eidetic memory or something), because you’re erasing the pixels that can serve as guidelines.
3. It makes art. Pressing each directional button operates like the dial on an Etch A Sketch; if you have a lot of screen garbage, you'll notice that you can actually draw things by moving around. This lets you make little works of… something… while you stumble around the gallery. (Alternately, you might say "fuck the regular game" and just create things in the space of your failures until the cows come home. That's what I do in this game, and in the game of Life).
THE OTHER FEELS
One Eye Sees is mostly me thinking out loud in abstract ways about imitation in the arts, failed artists, and the way failure informs perspective.
Despite the heavy titles of the two pictures at the beginning of the post, this is a game that treats the significance of artistic statement playfully.
Am I saying something about a minority’s artistic struggle with the fact that the quasi-landscape of the white-backgrounded piece has stars in the sky—opportunities?—while the black-backgrounded one is more chaotic, and maybe suggests an urban environment... or did I simply take some random screenshots while mouselooking up at the black skybox, and then down at the white floor?
What if I just took the screenshots and then retroactively assigned them some intent?
Who cares about intent in art anyway?
Who wants to play a game about art failure musings?
Who wants to fail constantly?
These are actually absurd questions. All art is fucking absurd in some ways.
Anyway, here's what two mean critics (a psychopath and a sellout techbro, go figure) had to say about my artgame:
I find this... piece... lacking. The composition... needs something. Art should represent a unified, wholistic picture, something that can be assembled into a body of work. This feels like an automaton, some sort of hexxed collage that you interact with at a distance. There is nothing visceral about this, that is to say there is no viscera, nor feeling. I am numbed by the palette of greys, a stylistic rain-curtain that I cannot penetrate.
-The Artist Formerly Known as ‘Start With Boots’
Oh, how wonderful technology is! Though this amalgam of hex and code is novice at best, I can see its potential to excite limited minds. However, I question its role as a "game." The sense of "mastery" accrued from solving this rather rudimentary scenario is scant, and as a goal-based exercise, it feels rather rote. I ask you: is the coterminous pursuit of an artistic statement and a game worthwhile? In this case study, I do not see the efficacy of that.
-H.R. Dinger
(Characters from League of Legends, please don’t sue me, Daddy Rito <3 | AI-constructed voicework courtesy of : Eleven Labs)