the colour scheme on the Northern Lights and
incorporated Norse runes into the interface.
This blended aesthetic is governed by a
withered grid pattern, redolent of both Norse
runes and the Animus UI, which is present
everywhere in the game. Besides helping to
structure menu screens, it’s a way of subtly
imposing a role on the player – to “lay a pattern
before them, the pattern of the ancestor,” as Rivart
explains. Desynchronise, and the grid tears itself
to pieces. In a way, your objective in Assassin’s
Creed is simply to maintain that grid – to behave
as the simulation requires in order to continue
the art direction’s efforts at blending the ancient
with the modern. In Valhalla, you’re literally
asked to patch up Animus anomalies, marked by
incongruous 3D artefacts that generate wireframe
platforming courses.
Horror game developers have proven more
willing to embrace the jarring effects of glitches.
Like Assassin’s Creed, Bloober Team’s cybernetic
chiller Observer is caught between eras. In the
words of creative director Mateusz Lenart, it is “a
clash between retro-style design and more
typically futuristic technologies, inspired by Blade
Runner and Alien,” and “filtered through the lens
of a Polish communist era aesthetic”. The game
casts you as a cyborg detective in near-future
Krakow, equipped with the ability to hack the
brains of the deceased.POLISHED VISUALS
Observer is also about synchronisation – you
must take pills to stop your body rejecting your
implants, which leads to dizzying effects such
as smeared movement, colour changes, and
compression artefacts. There’s only so much
‘synchronising’ you can do, however, because the
glitches are metaphors for social divisions.
There’s no seamless Animus-style blending of
the high-tech and antiquated in Observer’s
capitalist dystopia; instead, flesh and machinery
are forever pulling apart, and pristine holograms
float eerily against crumbling, insanitarybrickwork. Observer’s rickety cyborg HUD alters the appearance
and colour of pixels according to various open-ended parameters, as
game designer Pawel Niezabitowski explains. There’s “the ‘overdose’
effect, with its blurry shaky screen – large delay, fluid dispersal, no
colour change”. And there’s “the intensely ‘electronic’ glitch effect- short, sudden and drastic colour changes”. Simulating bugs like
these can be pretty hardware-intensive. “Optimisation proved to be
our biggest challenge,” Niezabitowski continues. Bloober eventually
created a complex managing tool to balance more specific
post-processing effects against those resulting from your character’s
shifting mental state. There were some dramatic setbacks. “At one
point during production, one of our designers cranked up the
‘glitchy’ visual effects to such a level that even his computer couldn’t
take it any more and shut down, killing the controller in the
process,” recalls Lenart, adding that “after some intense deliberation,
we decided to leave that particular feature out”.
Players, of course, may be turned off by simulated glitches
long before computers give way. “There’s a wide spectrum of how
various people react to these sorts of visuals, with some suffering
from motion sickness,” Lenart continues. “The effect of our
HUD destabilising wasn’t meant to be pleasant, as we wanted the
player to feel motivated to take another dose of the synchronising
medicine. Then again, we certainly didn’t want the player to
become physically ill from the
experience. Hence, a lot of the
effects we’d tested ultimately
didn’t make it into the game.”
Bloober Team also stopped
short of portraying the glitches
as fundamental problems with
the game. “Breaking the fourth
wall is always tempting,
especially in this genre,” Lenart
adds. “We certainly played
around with some interesting
ideas. Ultimately, however, we
focused on making the player
immersed in what’s happening
to the protagonist.”
Immersion and the fourth
wall are key terms in discussion
of videogame glitches. They
suggest a firm boundary around
the illusion – an illusion that
Gamenamexxxx
FE ATURE
ABOVE: Axiom
Verge turns
glitching into
a p owe r-up.
BOTTOM:
Anodyne 2 houses
many styles of
videogame.FAR RIGHT: The
Animus checks
exploration in
older Assassin’s
Creeds.