So this is something we're doing now: game mixtapes.
porpmix
science-phantasm
cool mix
I'm not convinced the analogy quite works; games - even very small ones - tend to be bigger and more self-complete than songs are. Ideally I'd like to pull out a bunch of individual sections from different games and string them together to make something much more closely approximating a mixtape - a track from Soul Brother, a room from Cave Story, one level of Brogue.. this isn't so easy to do with existing games.
I've dug into the idea of albums of games in the past, with Idiolect (which I never finished) and Kompendium. Specifically designing games to be joined together as an album; more distinct than individual levels of a single game, but more coherent than a series of separate games. L mentioned the idea of an album of games from different authors earlier today. I think this kind of approach is more likely to yield something that makes sense as a whole. But a big part of the mixtape idea is just to introduce people to stuff they might find interesting, akin to the Pickford Bros' "games we like" initiative; they don't necessarily have to fit together.
Anyway, here's a mixtape.
side 1:
Kenta Cho - a7xpg
Linley Henzell - Excellent Bifurcation
Chris Morris - Linerogue
Christoffer Hedborg - Cathode Rays
side 2:
Jonathan Whiting - Niña Nueve
Jonas Kyratzes - Alphaland
Robert Yang, Mohini Dutta, Ben Norskov - Souvenir
Stephen Lavelle - The Rose Garden
I chose the mixtape analogy in the initial piece calling for people to do this not because I wanted them to make something that resembled a mixtape closely but because the spirit of picking out specific tracks on a theme or for a purpose and sharing them with people is similar to how I'd like to see people start sharing tiny free game anthologies.
ReplyDeleteStringing together levels or rooms taken out of games and out of context would seem disjointed and awkward to me, like pulling tracks out of concept albums that seamlessly blend in to one another and shoving them together - that is the opposite of my personal approach to mixtapes. With mixing games, sure they're longer but I like that because it's more of an analogy than a direct emulation - applying the spirit of the mixtape to the medium of games.
I hope that helps clarify what I was writing about, and thanks for reading and making a mixtape of your own :D
yeah, I was just running with the metaphor, taking it too literally and seeing where it took me.
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