Month: August 2020

Note from the flea market #1

Why blogging this? The flea market is an important site in this project. We try to visit it as much as possible, observing which digital objects are sold, their conditions, the price given by the seller, the discussions around them, and sometimes the body posture of the potential buyers. Two examples here from yesterday in Geneva, with a laptop as well as power adapters and cables.

“Why using old cartdriges?”

Seen on the website of Iodine Dynamics, which recently “What Remains”, an 8-bit game for the NES console (released in 1985) that blends visual novel and adventure elements:
Why are you using old cartridges to house your game? The game was made thinking about having as little environmental impact as possible. The choice for the NES was part of these considerations. The NES is a very sturdy machine, still functioning after 4 decades. The cartridges as well. Producing new hardware and purchasing new electronic components to create a game did not feel right, because in the long run we would just be adding to the already out of control pile of e-waste. There are so many cartridges out there which are abandoned and unloved, they can be brought back to life with a new ROM, giving them a new purpose with very little environmental impact.
Why blogging this? An interesting project that illustrates the kind of practices we are interested in here. Designing a game in 2019 on a console released thirty years before doesn’t mean it’s about privileging the past, mostly because game designed evolved and that the way to imagine game imaginary/design has changed… which is why this is not an example of “retrogaming” even though the aesthetic is close to the one of the 1980s, it’s much more than that, and we’re not sure such a game could have been produced (conceptually) back in the days.