I actually miss going to games reveals, y’all. Fortunately, I’m not alone. With their common Pittsburgh location shuttered in the course of the Covid-19 disaster, experimental arcade-slash-arts gallery LIKELIKE have taken their present on-line with An Itsy Bitsy Crisis – a digital exhibition of works created in Adam LeDoux’s lo-fi game-making software Bitsy, hosted in an internet museum as pixellated because the works on present.
As written, LIKELIKE Online affords a fantasy world on this period of social isolation, one the place you may “hang out with pixelated friends, stand awkwardly in the corner of a loud gallery, play obscure games together… just like before the pandemic!”
Given this week ought to’ve been the break between getting back from EGX Rezzed and heading off to A Maze Berlin, that stings. Damn.
A curated Bitsy museum really helps clear up one in every of my private frustrations with the motion, in that the Bitsy-making scene blew up so goddamn quick that I utterly misplaced monitor of it. I made a number of of my very own wee games with the software early on, and tried maintaining with the semi-official Bitsy discord, however folks have been rapidly pushing out 1000’s of intimate works, grand collaborative initiatives, and experimental hacks that took the software far past its roots.
LIKELIKE’s themed exhibitions present a place to begin for diving again in. While this month’s assortment incorporates games from numerous neighborhood jams, they’ve all been introduced collectively underneath the theme of “crises and rebirths”. The creators plan with replace the exhibition every month, with a brand new present and “new spaces” debuting on Friday, May 1st.
The present assortment contains, amongst others, Pol Clarissou’s ode to peat in moss as texture as space folding onto itself; cephalopodunk’s gothic time-travelling retrospective The Last Human Touch; and Cecile Richard’s strikingly minimal house-burner Continental Drift. There are six games in all, and so they’re all extremely price trying out.
Each game is a nice work on their very own advantage – and when you’ve had a shot on the featured piece, nothing’s stopping you diving into the remainder of the artist’s catalogue. But within the context of LIKELIKE’s museum, they’re given higher context – an area to discover how these decisively totally different experiences play off in opposition to one another. Clicking an exhibit will instantly open a brand new tab to play the game in, however you may hop again in at any time to debate the work with fellow guests.
Failing that, you are able to do as I do at precise games reveals – stand anxiously, awkwardly within the nook and watch everybody else maintain fascinating conversations. At least there’s a canine out within the again backyard.
Following what seems to be to have been a packed launch celebration final evening, LIKELIKE Online is quiet proper now, with just a few guests popping in. No admission is critical to go on over by means of your web browser here.
Disclosure: Former RPS columnist Porpentine is featured within the present exhibition with the elegantly-named Almanac of girlswampwar territory & the _girls who swim as fertilizer through the warm soil cloaking the roots of the glorious tree of eugenics (giving birth to a black hole in a walmart parking lot at 1am), pictured above.
