Early video games were the height of mainstream surrealism. We just didn't know it.

[nasu_dengaku]

If there was a *book* about a blue hedgehog that spins himself into a featureless orb as he dashes through an island filled with strange and highly distinct biomes, each meticulously constructed to both let him both revel in the pleasure of moving as fast as possible yet threaten him with constant (but temporary and thus perhaps meaningless) death

Comments

[easwaran]

Some modern games make the surrealism more explicit. I'm thinking in particular of the new Kirby game, which I just saw an ad for recently on my Wii, in which everything is made out of yarn, and various interactions are based on tying or untying knots. But yes, it's quite interesting how the limitations of very old video games gave rise to conventions that are just accepted by consumers, rather than seen as the absurdities that they would be seen as in another medium (as in, Scott Pilgrim).

I suspect there's something similar to be said about the conventions of comic books - also relevant to Scott Pilgrim, but perhaps first made explicitly surreal in the Batman movie that first had plastic nipples on the suit.

[sacra_imbri]

Early video games, though enjoyed by adults were placed in the surreal and imaginative worlds attractive to children. Being only in elementary school when that blue hedgehog first taught me to battle the evils of mechanization and corporation to free the essentially wild souls of my friends, it didn't seem overly surreal. Remember, we who encountered things like Mario and Sonic young had been prepared by the surrealist realms inhabited by Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Micky Mouse, and all the denizens common to Fantasia...

[nasu_dengaku]

True... IIRC the world and morality of Sonic seemed very straightforward to me as a kid too. Now all the songs from the game are stuck in my head.

[arethiel]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXukwNQG0uA :D

[sacra_imbri]

thank you ^_^ that was just the mellow music I needed to re-integrate to the digital world ^_^

[proctologiste]

You might be interested in Josh Diaz's MIT CMS master's thesis on narrative structures in Dwarf Fortress: http://cms.mit.edu/research/theses/JoshDiaz2009.pdf

[arethiel]

Course, there are those fun games that harken back to the good old days of surrealism. Katamari Damacy for example. Rhythm Heaven and Elite Beat Agents are others that have some lovely strange oddities, but that's more in the realm of music-driven gameplay.