One of the central ideas of my game is that it uses the aesthetics of top-down 2D art, but you can flip the camera to view the level from any of the four cardinal directions. Something that did not occur to me is that in top-down 2D art, the y and z axis are added together in a very “unreal” way. This means that rotating a shape in this unreal perspective produces widely different heights, or things that look very wrong unless altered. Ie, the height of a segmented wall with a path in the middle would be (wall height + wall height) in one angle but (wall height + path height + wall height) in another. Changing the ratio between the “y” and “z” axis just compounds the problem.

Choice 1: keep 2D top down art but alter dimensions of each building in a level, essentially requiring four maps for each level and risking mathematical mayhem with entities (which would have to be transported from room to room)

One of the central ideas of my game is that it uses the aesthetics of top-down 2D art, but you can flip the camera to view the level from any of the four cardinal directions. Something that did not occur to me is that in top-down 2D art, the y and z axis are added together in a very “unreal” way. This means that rotating a shape in this unreal perspective produces widely different heights, or things that look very wrong unless altered. Ie, the height of a segmented wall with a path in the middle would be (wall height + wall height) in one angle but (wall height + path height + wall height) in another. Changing the ratio between the “y” and “z” axis just compounds the problem.

Choice 1: keep 2D top down art but alter dimensions of each building in a level, essentially requiring four maps for each level and risking mathematical mayhem with entities (which would have to be transported from room to room)

One of the central ideas of my game is that it uses the aesthetics of top-down 2D art, but you can flip the camera to view the level from any of the four cardinal directions. Something that did not occur to me is that in top-down 2D art, the y and z axis are added together in a very “unreal” way. This means that rotating a shape in this unreal perspective produces widely different heights, or things that look very wrong unless altered. Ie, the height of a segmented wall with a path in the middle would be (wall height + wall height) in one angle but (wall height + path height + wall height) in another. Changing the ratio between the “y” and “z” axis just compounds the problem.

Choice 1: keep 2D top down art but alter dimensions of each building in a level, essentially requiring four maps for each level and risking mathematical mayhem with entities (which would have to be transported from room to room)

jaakko stenros, in defence of a magic circle: the social, mental, and cultural boundaries of play. <- overview of various theoretical perspectives on or pertaining to the magic circle.

the dark side of gameplay: controversial issues in playful environments. <- what it says on the tin. a collection of essays by various authors.

huff, johnson, & miller, virtual harms and virtual responsibility: a rape in cyberspace. <- legal-ethical consideration of harm in virtual (i.e. digital) environments in response to julian dibbell's a rape in cyberspace.

john danaher, the law and ethics of virtual sexual assault. <- consideration of how sexual assault that takes place in primarily vr games, including by any other name, should be legally classified.

chloe germaine buckley, encountering weird objects: lovecraft, larp, and speculative philosophy. <- article mostly abt how larping sustains its game-worlds via objects.

dennis waskul and mark lust, role-playing and playing roles: the person, player, and persona in fantasy role-playing. <- interested in the relationship between the various dimensions across which, they argue, role-play participants operate in.

jeroen jansz, playing out identities and emotions. <- abt what players get out of playing digital game-characters, affectively.

katherine angel cross, the new laboratory of dreams: role-playing games as resistance. <- abt what players get out of playing digital game-characters, in terms of identity/real-life roles. written by a trans woman.

prszybylski et al, the ideal self at play: the appeal of video games that let you be all that you can be. <- psychological study, which argues that games help players bridge between their 'ideal self' and their 'actual self'.

bonnie nardi, my life as a night-elf priest. <- first-hand approach to WoW gaming; i especially liked the chapter "play as aesthetic experience," which more theoretically tries to answer what the goal of gaming is.

stephanie boluck and patrick lemieux, breaking the metagame: feminist spoilsports and magic circle jerks. <- i only read this chapter. it's abt misogyny in gaming culture. critical of any delimited game-space because their rules are often set by men who respond with virulent misogyny to any perceived threat.

gordon calleja, ludic identities and the magic circle. <- i took the term "game-space" from him. though he talks in terms of identities, he's interested in the world of the game, which he thinks cannot be separated from the world "(supposedly) external."

frans mäyrä, from the demonic tradition to art-evil in digital games: monstrous pleasures in lord of the rings online. <- abt the merits and delights of being 'evil' in digital games. deals with ethics as a matter of dialectics.

A minor nitpick I had when watching this movie is that Rocky’s text-to-speech is not text-to-speech at all, but acted lines that have a lot of tone and emphasis in their delivery. I understand that this was done to “humanise” Rocky for the audience, and it’s harder to appease the majority with a monosyllabic robot voice. But it reveals that the narrative is largely uninterested in the language barrier, and by extension, Eridian language and culture as a whole. There’s no Eridian mise en abyme. Rocky’s observations and cultural differences are almost entirely treated for laughs, such as his lack of personal boundaries and his disgust at Grace’s eating habits.

The limitations of the translation technique devised by Grace, which is one-to-one word substitution, results in a rudimentary, grammar replete newspeak that butchers english to its most basic components. “Grace Rocky Save Stars” is unironically said to millions of misty eyed watchers. There’s a few assumptions here; 1) The Eridian language functions similarly to human language, in that it exists as sounds in discrete divisions that allow for a swap-and-play approach to translation (something that does not even exist within languages on Earth); 2) The Eridians have evolved in a way that their cultural understanding of the universe even resembles humanity’s; 3) Rocky’s eidetic memory is allowing him to perform translations of Grace’s language in real time. The complexity of Rocky’s language, the detailed sounds that he makes are reduced down to toddler speak. Bite sized comprehension. It’s as Kuang states in Babel: “Translation means doing violence upon the original, means warping and distorting it for foreign, unintended eyes. So then where does that leave us? How can we conclude, except by acknowledging that an act of translation is then necessarily always an act of betrayal?”

Language is the most politically charged weapon in our arsenal. It is what we use to describe and depict reality. It also works in reverse: language models inform how we perceive reality. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis posits that grammar and word concepts fundamentally shape our cognitive processes. That paradigm is reflected in Memoirs, as Tawada writes that: “A human soul turned out to be less romantic than I’d imagined. It was made up primarily of languages—not just ordinary, comprehensible languages, but also many broken shards of language, the shadows of languages, and images that couldn’t turn into words”.

It’s absurd to think Rocky and Grace had a relatively unimpeded experience. In a way, the insistence of a shared sense of “humanity” that bypasses the language barrier is almost entirely in opposition with the more critical speculation of aliens by the Strugatsky brothers in Roadside Picnic. “Xenology is an unnatural mixture of science fiction and formal logic. At its core is a flawed assumption—that an alien race would be psychologically human.” The Strugatsky brothers are adamant that true comprehension of aliens is beyond the scope of humanity, and that all attempts of understanding reveal more about human psychology. In Project Hail Mary’s case, the “hopefulness” of the movie hinges on a shared psychology, which means Rocky is not exactly alien. Much like the alien species in Star Trek, Rocky is comprehensively human in a different font. He’s simply othered. PHM shows us a genre staple “everyman” American, charismatic in his clumsiness, bridging a linguistic gap in a way that infantilises and subsumes perspective of the foreign “other”.

The representation of language in the movie is not solely a point of contention between Rocky and Grace, either. Grace is a monolingual english speaker. Yao and Stratt exchange brief dialogue in Chinese to exclude him from the convo. English serves are the global lingua franca on the Hail Mary Project - despite showing us rooms of international experts, they all speak English. The ship contains signage in Chinese and Russian, but they are not spoken and easily ignored. And it’s reflecting a worldwide trend. 44% of human languages are endangered. Among surviving languages, English is the highest exporter of loanwords, and its words infiltrate everyday speech of practically everyone with an internet connection. It is the language of global markets, finance, science, business and aviation. I think it’s rather telling that the end of Project Hail Mary does not show Grace’s life substantially changed in any way. He lives a terrarium now, sure, but he still lives in a human house, with human amenities, and teaches in a human style classroom in English. There is nothing that challenges his perspective.