Artist Post 2

Mark Esson (MESSHOF) is a video game designer currently working out of Los Angeles. I stumbled upon him whilst looking for artists that appealed to me on Eyebeam. Neither on Eyebeam nor on his own artist site is there much information about the artist and a Google search reveals little else. Video games are an entertainment medium, though non-commercial development of video games has exploded in the last decade. MESSHOF employs a purposefully old-school pixilated style reminiscent of old video games from the 1980s and very early 1990s. The music is somewhat reminiscent of older video games and is glitchy-electronic sounding. Flywrench (download) is MESSHOF’s breakout 2007 video game. The story is conveyed through text-prompts (think Oregon Trail); essentially you are the pilot of some mechanical spaceship contraption. The concept is easy enough: control the “bird” with the arrow keys, which change your color scheme. In order to pass through certain barriers you must match that color, thus movement must be coordinated precisely in order to avoid failstate. Touching any border while not matching it induces failstate; which I might add is seriously obnoxious.

In an age of mega-immersive best-sellers like Grand Theft Auto 4, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, and Mass Effect 2, the pixilated 8- and 16-bit games of the past have all but been forgotten. When video games were still a novel idea, the goal was to reach a state of life-likeness that for the most part has been achieved by today’s popular video game titles. Flywrench is the opposite of these and harkens back to the days of yore. The controls and GUI are simple, the only immersion is pixilated block text prompting you to the story. The game seems to be a critique of modern trends in video gaming, and of our society as a whole. We’ve embraced a gluttonous level of sensory overload as standard, and this is now what we get in every video game. Rather than playing video games as a form of entertainment, the total immersion we’re offered now allows us to escape to false realities, further fostering the growing social space between people in our culture. Why do real life when you escape to your tumbler, twitter, or Facebook friends? Or perhaps to your CoD enemies and friends whom you love to shoot it up with.

The game is successful as an entertaining waste of time, and further succeeds as a conceptual piece forcing people to think about what we value in our culture and if that’s necessarily what we should be valuing. It is digital art through and through; created in digital space for consumption/viewing in digital space (and employing a digitally composed soundtrack too!). Every-now-and-again we need to wake up and smell the coffee; Flywrench successfully does this.

My problem with it; however, is that like most old video games…it’s extremely difficult. Go pick up Mario Bros. for SNES and try to beat it, it’s hard. Stupid hard. While in and of itself this can be considered another critique of video game trends and society-at-large (catering to the lowest denominator with easy games that prey on our inherent laziness), it can be frustrating to the point where you don’t want to play after a time. Or maybe I just suck.

Overall, I suggest downloading the game to really understand the concepts that are at work here. It’s apparent that MESSHOF is of the generation that literally saw technology born and grow up. Our generation is very different, and it’s a valuable glimpse not only into the past, but into the present as well.