What Foddy casts in terms of trash, Data Mutations frames as ‘genomic slush’. Framing Getting Over It as a ‘homage’ to Sexy Hiking, a 2002 DIY game that was itself ‘built almost entirely out of found and recycled parts’, Foddy’s voiceover invites us to consider that ‘maybe this is what digital culture is: a monstrous mountain of trash, the ash heap of creativity’s fountain’. ‘The hysteria around asset flips is a symptom of gaming culture’s deeply entrenched anti-egalitarian tendencies’Ĭonsolation comes from Foddy himself, who chimes in periodically with philosophical musings, uplifting quotations and reflections on the game’s design process. One infelicitous flick of the mouse can propel him catastrophically backwards, cancelling out hours of painstaking, nail-biting effort. Using only a giant hammer, this man must scrabble, hop and haul his way over a skyscraping mountain of debris – a seemingly random assortment of objects downloaded free from online asset libraries. Our avatar is a goateed man whose lower body is lodged in a cauldron. It’s both an absurd game and an absurdly difficult one. Bennett Foddy’s Getting Over It is one of the best-known of these. ![]() In recent years, a number of designers have responded to these developments with games that are essentially interactive collages: games in which the use of prefabricated assets is not just a pragmatic design choice, but also a central part of the message. For Benjamin Nicoll and Brendan Keogh, the hysteria around asset flips is a symptom of gaming culture’s deeply entrenched anti-egalitarian tendencies. For some pundits, these amenities have made it too easy to make video games, leading to fears that retail platforms will be overrun with so-called ‘asset flips’: ‘Frankengames’ slapped together from off-the-shelf parts in the hope of cashing in. Today, clip art CDs have been superseded by online asset libraries like Sketchfab, the Unity Asset Store and KitBash3D, where professionals and amateurs alike are encouraged to upload objects, avatars, scenes and animations for others to use in their projects. In Keita Takahashi’s beloved Katamari series, meanwhile, the world comes unstuck around us as we roll up paperclips, saucepans, pick-up trucks and eventually continents into snowballing agglomerations of stuff – a premise Takahashi has said was intended to be a commentary on consumer capitalism.
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