Heavy Metal and quick note about spaces
I played a lot of games as a kid that I shouldn't have. My dad didn't really have very much concern about what was happening in the media that I was consuming. He let me play Doom, Half-Life and other violent games. It apparently didn't bother him, me or my mom very much. I suppose it was a gamble they took and I'd say that ended up well adjusted.
Still one of my favourite things to do was exploring and seeing the fantastical worlds of the games that I would play. Heavy Metal FAKK 2 was a fantasy sci-fi shooter that was very obviously catered to an adult male audience, but played it when I was six. Not really for the actual game play, moreso for the opening levels. I loved walking around the town and interacting with the NPCs and just seeing them kind of exist in their scripted ways. I'd walk into buildings and just admire the 2000's textures. The sci-fi setting was otherworldly and I loved the town's apparent liveliness. For whatever unexplainable reason, it was installed on my grandma's Windows XP gateway computer. Whenever my parents would drop me off there, I would love to walk around that strange planet again.
I watched clips of a playthrough of Heavy Metal recently and realized that, for as much as I played it, I only ever beat it once. Every other time it up would be to walk around and just take in the atmosphere. Planets in the sky and endlessly deep valleys. Waterfalls next to big machine houses. Trapezoidal doors to buildings with cavernously large living rooms. Strange alien animals running around rubbled streets. Bright blue summer day.
I'd do this frequently with other games too: Half-Life 2, Garry's Mod, the Robots game, offline Counter-Strike. Basically anything where a plaza might be and there was no time pressing on you.
When the whole liminal spaces fad came around a couple years ago, especially in reference to Garry's Mod maps, it put a name to what I had always done. Admire the atmosphere of a digital space. Whether it is lonely, bright or oppressive, even as a kid I could feel it oozing through the entirely imaginary worlds.
Does this mean anything for everyday life? Maybe not so much. Most people are bothered with rent and relationships. But when we think about the media that we use to escape, lets consider the feelings that the spaces evoke in us. How can we use these feelings as inspiration for our own work or imagination?
Just something to chew on.
-bzg
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