and their audiences, where for capitalist reasons,
companies are selling a certain fantasy of
perfection and ultimate immersion.”
Bugs and glitches are maker’s marks – they
remind you that every game is the result of
somebody’s sweat and toil. Games that simulate
errors are invitations to think about that toil
more analytically – they are a kind of irreverent
making-of feature, more compelling for being
woven into the game’s fabric. This is an important
theme of Pony Island, which invites you to develop
a certain sympathy for the devil even as you battle
for freedom. If the game within this game is an
instrument of torment, the bugs also paint a
portrait of an overwhelmed lone developer,
struggling to fit in some QA before shipping.
None of which is to suggest that we should
tolerate actual errors in our games, but it’s worth
thinking about both the work that goes into
steaming out bugs, and what we lose by insisting
on that rigid barrier between an immersive game
and a buggy one. As Pony Island and its peers
reveal, games are seldom more exciting and
mysterious than when they start to break down.must be purged of reminders that you are
interacting with a piece of software. This
disregards what can be achieved by taking the
software’s status as software as your artistic and
narrative premise. Consider the 2019 indie hit
Anodyne 2, another work of period-splicing in
which you explore an overworld rendered in
PS1-grade polygonal 3D, jumping into NPC
mindworlds that recall 2D Zelda maps.
The game is full of simulated blemishes or
shortcomings – among other things, you’ll hear
characters sneer about the quality of the
background art – but these aren’t treated purely as
disruptions. Rather, they exist “to draw attention
to there not being a hard boundary between the
game’s fiction and, I guess reality,” notes Melos
Han-Tani, one half of developer Analgesic
Productions. “It’s not just like, ‘Whoa, meta stuff!’
It’s tied into the fiction of the game in sort of a
blurry way.” The game’s open world includes
‘Unzones’ filled with incomplete features that
aren’t just ‘director’s cut’ additions, but a playful
elaboration of the core mythology. There is an
isometric horror segment triggered by talking to
a placeholder NPC, which
continues the protagonist’s
personal dilemmas into a
different genre.
BEHIND THE SCENES
Dismantling that ‘hard
boundary’ is important because
so much triple-A videogame
production is essentially about
hiding the developer’s labour
from view – strenuously
polishing away anything that
feels artificial. Analgesic
co-founder Marina Kittaka
argues that this culture
has trained players to be
pathological nitpickers,
branding developers lazy over
the slightest discrepancy, “There
has been for a long time a very
unhealthy feedback loop
between big game companies
Breaking Ground
FE ATURE
ERROR MESSAGES How to make your own glitch art pieces
1
TRY DATA-BENDING
Opening an image in an
audio editor like Audacity
allows you to glitch it by adding
effects such as echo. It doesn’t
always work but may produce
a range of fascinating
distortions (you can always
cheat by visiting
photomosh.com). This is a
glitched shot from Yakuza 0.
2
BE CREATIVE WITH
IN-GAME TOOLS
Videogame designer Gareth
Damian Martin created a
photographic essay series for
Ghost Recon: Wildlands by
flying a military drone to the
edge of its operational range,
seeing in the resulting visual
noise “a symbol of the violence
implicit in its gaze”.3
TRY ECCENTRIC
ART PROGRAMS
Andi McClure and Michael
Brough’s Become a Great
Artist in Just 10 Seconds “is a
chaotic paint program, where
each key on the keyboard does
a different unhelpful thing”.
Give it a try for yourself and
see what you can create at:
data.runhello.com/j/artist/34
A B U S E T H E
HARDWARE
One of the best-known glitch
artworks, 1978 video piece
Digital TV Dinner, was made by
punching an unfortunate Bally
Astrocade until the cartridge
popped out, resulting in
patterns born of invalid
pointers and broken
references in stack frames.5
REBUILD THE
HARDWARE
This piece, Fabricating Elk
Meadows, from glitch artist
Big Pauper, was created
by doing very precise,
unspeakable things to a
PlayStation 2’s CPU, then
capturing shots from Cabela’s
Dangerous Hunts. It’s not an
approach for newcomers.BUGS AND
GLITCHES ARE
MAKER’S MARKS
- THEY REMIND YOU
THAT EVERY GAME
IS THE RESULT OF
SOMEBODY’S
SWEAT AND TOIL