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Now Play This livestreamed virtual field trips and hiking tours last weekendDigital walkabouts
Digital walkabouts
There are several neat presentations from Now Play This At Home this year. There’s a bit of improv comedy. Twitch chat plays chess. It’s all fitting with the year’s “breaking point” theme, which they say “celebrates playful creators who break, subvert or remix the rules of the games they make and play.”
Gareth Damian Martin, whose name you may recognize from his new underwater adventureIn Other Waters,leads a groupalong a newNo Man’s Skyplanet hunting for snaps. The virtual hiking group follow Martin around on a jaunt across an unexplored planet looking for excellent views while in first person. Martin explains that he believes the actual walking about is an important part of physical photography and replicates that in game.
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Over inHalf-Lifeterritory, Robert Yang—who you may know for his subversive sex games likeThe Tearoom—leads a field tripthrough theBlack MesaResearch Facility. Yang takes on the job of an actual tour guide, walking players into the first room of the facility to point out easter eggs, Half-Life’s position in gaming history, and answering questions from his tour group. Also like a real tour guide, Yang occasionally has to wheedle questions out of his quiet audience. In games as in life, eh?
Yang stops to point out many signs of the times within Half-Life, like NPC conversations that don’t quite make sense. Yang explains that Black Mesa’s scientists will randomly choose idle voice lines to speak at one another rather than being scripted to make more sense. Naturally, these white coats are also prone to talking over Yang’s tour. Rude.
You can catch the rest of the presentations archived over on New Play This’Twitch channel.
Disclosure: Alice0 is pals with some of the Now Play This organisers and she definitely did not threaten to send me to my newsroom without supper or games if I didn’t write about it.
