For example, I didn't fall in love with Titanfall 2's environmental art design---it felt a bit generic to me, like it was meant to be the backdrop for a shooter, as opposed to the Sevastopol in A:I or the station in SOMA that felt like existing locations.
Ditto BioShock: Infinite. The world felt like it was built around the premise of being an arena shooter, not the other way around.
BioShock 1 & 2 are exactly what I'm talking about though.
Even Borderlands 2 has great world-building: the corporate history that can be inferred from the level design, the weapons & the NPCs makes it one of the richer games I've played.
Would love to hear others' thoughts on your favorite FPS environments!
Wisława Szymborska, 1986
What needs to be done?
Fill out the application
and enclose a résumé.
Regardless of the length of life
a résumé is best kept short.
Concise, well-chosen facts are de rigueur.
Landscapes are replaced by addresses,
shaky memories give way to unshakable dates.
Of all your loves mention only the marriage,
of all your children only those who were born.
Who knows you counts more than who you know.
Trips only if taken abroad.
Memberships in what but without why.
Honors, but not how they were earned.
Write as if you’d never talked to yourself
and always kept yourself at arm’s length.
Pass over in silence your dogs, cats, birds,
dusty keepsakes, friends, and dreams.
Price, not worth,
and title, not what’s inside.
His shoe size, not where he’s off to,
that one you pass yourself off as.
In addition, a photograph with one ear showing.
What matters is its shape, not what it hears.
What is there to hear, anyway?
The clatter of paper shredders.
Edward Hirsch, 2020
Instead of a pebble to mark our grief
or a coin to ease his passage
you placed a speaker
at the top of his head
and suddenly a drumbeat
came blasting out of the grass,
startling the mourners on the far side
of the cemetery, clanging the trees,
scattering the swifts
that had gathered around the stone
like souls of the dead,
souls that were now parting
to make way for a noisy spirit
rising out of the dirt.
Tracy K. Smith, 2007
Winter is a boa constrictor
Contemplating a goat. Nothing moves,
Save for the river, making its way
Steadily into ice. A state of consternation.
My limbs settle into stony disuse
In this city full of streetlamps
And unimaginable sweets.
I would rather your misuse, your beard
Smelling of some other woman's
Idle afternoons. Lately, the heart of me
Has grown to resemble a cactus
Whose on flower blooms one night only
Under the whitest,
The most disdainful of moons.
Edward Hirsch, 2020
Moon-head is shouting at me
to back the fuck up
on the forklift
I am trying to jab
into a tower
of wooden pallets
stacked all the way
to the sprinklers
laid out under the roof
of the warehouse
where I am struggling
to control the prongs
of a monster
and avoid dousing
everyone on the floor
of E.H. Sargent & Co.,
my summer of chemicals,
the school where I learned
that someone
is always shouting
at someone else on the job
to back the fuck up.
Nikainetos, 3 BCE
Traveler, I am the grave of Biton:
if you go from Torone to Amphipolis,
give Nicagoras this message: his only son
died in a storm, in early winter, before sunrise.
Muriel Rukeyser, 1962
This journey is exploring us. Where the child stood
An island in a river of crisis, now
The bridges bind us in symbol, the sea
Is a bond, the sky reaches into our bodies.
We pray : we dive into each other’s eyes.
Whatever can come to a woman can come to me.
This is the long body : into life from the beginning,
Big-headed infant unfolding into child, who stretches and finds
And then flowing the young one going tall, sunward,
And now full-grown, held, tense, setting feet to the ground,
Going as we go in the changes of the body,
As it is changes, in the long strip of our many
Shapes, as we range shifting through time.
The long body : a procession of images.
This moment in a city, in its dream of war.
We chose to be,
Becoming the only ones under the trees
when the harsh sound
Of the machine sirens spoke. There were these two men,
And the bearded one, the boys, the Negro mother feeding
Her baby. And threats, the ambulance with open doors.
Now silence. Everyone else within the walls. We sang.
We are the living island,
We the flesh of this island, being lived,
Whoever knows us is part of us today.
Whatever can happen to anyone can happen to me.
Fire striking its word among us, waterlilies
Reaching from darkness upward to a sun
Of rebirth, the implacable. And in our myth
The Changing Woman who is still and who offers.
Eyes drinking light, transforming light, this day
That struggles with itself, brings itself to birth.
In ways of being, through silence, sources of light
Arriving behind my eye, a dialogue of light.
And everything a witness of the buried life.
This moment flowing across the sun, this force
Of flowers and voices body in body through space.
The city of endless cycles of the sun.
I speak to you You speak to me
Muriel Rukeyser, 1962
I think of the image brought into my room
Of the sage and the thin young man who flickers and asks.
He is asking about the moment when the Buddha
Offers the lotus, a flower held out as declaration.
“Isn’t that fragile?” he asks. The sage answers:
“I speak to you. You speak to me. Is that fragile?”
Muriel Rukeyser, 1962
Many of us Each in his own life waiting
Waiting to move Beginning to move Walking
And early on the road of the hill of the world
Come to my landscapes emerging on the grass
The stages of the theatre of the journey
I see the time of willingness between plays
Waiting and walking and the play of the body
Silver body with its bosses and places
One by one touched awakened into into
Touched and turned one by one into flame
The theatre of the advancing goddess Blossoming
Smiles as she stands intensely being in stillness
Slowness in her blue dress advancing standing I go
And far across a field over the jewel grass
The play of the family stroke by stroke acted out
Gestures of deep acknowledging on the journey stages
Of the playings the play of the goddess and the god
A supple god of searching and reaching
Who weaves his strength Who dances her more alive
The theatre of all animals, my snakes, my great horses
Always the journey long patient many haltings
Many waitings for choice and again easy breathing
When the decision to go on is made
Along the long slopes of choice and again the world
The play of poetry approaching in its solving
Solvings of relations in poems and silences
For we were born to express born for a journey
Caves, theatres, the companioned solitary way
And then I came to the place of mournful labor
A turn in the road and the long sight from the cliff
Over the scene of the land dug away to nothing and many
Seen to a stripped horizon carrying barrows of earth
A hod of earth taken and emptied and thrown away
Repeated farther than sight. The voice saying slowly
But it is hell. I heard my own voice in the words
Or it could be a foundation And after the words
My chance came. To enter. The theatres of the world.
@snakesnakewhale
@sh.itjust.works