Circle0

2017, Interactive Media

Absurdity, Dada, Anti-games

    A dadaist game about chasing the holy grail created with Dennis Carr, Corey Bertelsen, Vanilla Liu, Jenna Galka, and Longxiao Li. The player progresses down a series of generated levels with randomised objects, non-player characters, and missions. The world grows in size and instability with each subsequent level, culminating in emergent instances of chaos and absurdity. 

    Although an anti-game with no lose-state, Circle0 is bound to crash due to its found assets, poor optimization, and plethora of game-breaking items. Player survival is contingent on understanding, avoiding, or incorporating what is broken in order to persist within an increasingly hostile system.  When we began our instructor Maxi Boch pointed out it’s hard enough to make a working game, why revel in the breaking? I wonder whether our players appreciated the answer.

Circle0 was Nominated for the IGF Nuovo Award, and installed in the Moscone Center with a receipt printer to enumerate the items collected by each player during their session.