EITHEROutside Somerset House this week, you might notice two lamp posts blinking at each other. However, unless you’re proficient in Morse code, you probably won’t see that they’re performing Act II, Scene II of Romeo and Juliet. installation by Geraint Edwards welcomes you to now touch this, an experimental games festival, where you can also play get over a breakup wielding a sword while riding a motorbike through a neon city, or listen to artist Laurence Young give a talk on getting his mother involved in the fantasy video game Elden Ring . Inside, attendees lounge around a digital fire, flipping through books of love poetry.
Now Play This, now in its ninth year at Somerset House, can be trusted to bring people together in unexpected ways. It has hosted everything from giant ball mazes to outdoor games to a game about kicking the fascists out of your garden. But this year’s theme, love, has created a particularly open, even intimate atmosphere. In a giant arcade in the largest showroom, you can play Breakup Squad, a game about keeping your friend away from his toxic ex at a party; Outside, you can play Triangulate, a puzzle game in which three players are given random instructions (“point one leg at someone; turn slowly; hold another person’s hands”) and have to negotiate how to use their bodies to find a solution. . that works for everyone.
Elsewhere, you can play a version of Pictionary against an AI, where the idea is to draw something in such a way that the other humans can understand it, but the robot can’t. Called diversion game, the project aims to question how we coexist and grow to understand AI, says co-creator Daniel Coppen, who made the game with Saki Maruyama and Tomo Kihara. Ask humans to draw “love” in a way a computer can’t understand, and you’ll get some very interesting results: moons and stars, cats, a beautifully prepared bento box. “We like how we can use AI as a mirror to expose our collective bias on a particular topic, like love,” says Kihara. “We are collecting how people drew ‘love’ during the exhibition period, and we plan to turn the collected love drawings into a map.”
A smaller room houses two sets by artist Angela Washko. One – The Game: The Game – is a darkly satirical dating game about pick-up artists and their tactics, a game that paints a twisted picture of love through the eyes of manipulators. The other, Mother, Player, is about the artist’s pregnancy experiences during lockdown, a multiple-choice diaristic text game illustrated through vivid hand-drawn sketches. “Love and care hadn’t necessarily felt like a pressing or well-represented topic in the gaming space,” she says. “When I was pregnant in the pandemic, I started to go back to gaming in a very serious way, I was gaming a lot and I started thinking about the lost perspectives of moms and pregnant people in games – how many stories start with a dead mom. , moms you never know? I felt this urgent need to address that somehow.”
Washko’s games illustrate the lateral approach to the festival’s theme: some of the games you’ll find here are about romantic love, but most are less obvious. Nina Runa EssendropThe End(less) role-playing game, for example, asks players to construct the life stories of the last souls on earth from poetic fragments; “It’s about the idea of looking back at a life with a sense of love, and also being able to let it go and move on,” explains its creator. Another game, meow point, presents you as a cat trying to cheer up your human with small acts of caring. I really wanted to play Consentacle, a card game where you “help a tentacled alien and a curious human have a mutually satisfying romantic encounter,” but I couldn’t bring myself to ask a stranger to play with me.
Festival director Sebastian Quack intentionally avoided a selection of exhibits that were too obvious, he says. “We wanted to avoid clichés…games can talk about love in a unique way. In movies or poetry, when you read about love, you may imagine yourself as the person speaking. But video games are systems and narratives, so they put you in a position where you can feel a relationship, both the story and the logic, and maybe the power dynamic as well. All the games here are doing that in different ways.”
The most interesting thing about video games, to me, is how they connect people with each other, whether they are together in the same fantasy world, forming friendships and teaming up for quests, coming together over a shared love of network gaming. social and chat servers, or playing with or against others in real life. Games have brought people together since the days of the arcade, but they rarely do. about Connection. After playing this varied collection of games about love in all its forms, even someone who has been playing it all their lives may see them a little differently.
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