This week, I’m settling in from my trip to Leicester, UK, where I attended the Kyma International Sound Symposium to premiere my new work, Interesting Decisions. The piece is a digital game that creates music through player interaction with a procedurally generated world. In the guise of a retro, neon-packed walking-simulator, Interesting Decisions engages with issues of the homogenizing effects of technology, as well raising questions about new trends of video-game voyeurism.
More thoughts on the Kyma symposium later (I’m still processing an fascinating remark from Christian Vogel where he said “I’ve started thinking of my studio like a network rather than a chain”).
For now, I have some catching up to do.
At the end of my performance in Leicester, the game displayed a message that one could “download the game at simonhutchinson.com” a little prematurely.
Notice that I blame the game for this.
So, with apologies to the delay, here is the game (available in Web, Mac, Windows, and Linux versions):
By necessity, the audio and graphics have been simplified for this standalone version. The piece I performed at the symposium sent OSC messages from the game in Unity to Kyma, and, in order to do a “anyone can play” distribution, I had to bounce out the audio and bring them into Unity, so there’s less nuance in the real-time audio, but I’m sure this is a compromise that game developers must make all the time.
If you’re interested in the original work, you can see a video of a “studio” performance here: