Limbo

The game Limbo was very confusing and frustrating.  There was nothing that told you  what controls to use, what the purpose of the game was or the background of the game.  The fact that the setting of the game is  very dark and ambiguous makes this game more confusing.  This confusing and frustrating aspect of the game, along with the blank setting goes with the concept of what limbo is, a place where the dead wonder aimlessly until some kind of criteria is met which allows, in a religious aspect the soul to either go to paradise or damnation.  This game seems to play with this concept because the player has to solve these puzzles in order to find what lies at the end.  Dying in this game has no consequence, expect to restart at certain areas which also plays with the repeating the same actions over and over again. 

Comforting Nature of Limbo

When I first began to play Limbo, I was a little nervous. The ambient noises of the game and the gothic surrounding slightly put me on edge and I was constantly thinking about what was going to happen next. But as I began to move the avatar forward, I felt a sense of calm and relaxation, as I quickly realized that we control the game, instead of the game does not predicting our fate. The fact that there were no limits on the amount of lives we were able to have in the game was also comforting. I realized that death in the game was common, and not necessarily punished. It encouraged me to continue playing to see what the whole game was about. Overall, I probably would have tried to continue on as far as I could in the game if it weren’t due to personal time constraints. The fact that I felt comfortable playing really encouraged me to want to play more. 

Death in Limbo

In most video games place the player has two objectives: Reach a goal, and avoid dying in the process. Usually, this goal will be laid out and explained for the player, sometimes through in-game dialogue, other times through objective markers. Death is an object to be avoided at all costs- Grab cover to dodge enemy bullets, use your shield to stop their swords, grab power-ups for invincibility. Death is an inhibitor, an event delaying the player from reaching a goal.

In Limbo, death is as important, if not more so, than reaching some ultimate goal. The absence of a clear objective for the player, beyond traversing a dangerous and nightmarish landscape, makes the initial object of the game the avoidance of death. Eventually, this proves impossible, and the player accepts death as part of the game’s mechanics. With death unavoidable and no goal in sight, the player is left, quite literally, in limbo.

In class Tuesday, we watched the film Primer. After leaving class, I felt confused and frustrated. The physics wasn't simplified and for a majority of the time, I didn't understand what was going on. The nesting doll was used to forshadow the time machine. I think having multiple doubles is addressing humanity and multi-dimensional aspect of identities. Throughout the time travel it seems as if the two are loosing parts of themselves and accumulating other parts that were there to begin with in the beginning.  The video game limbo was frustrating as well and slightly disturbing. However, with the lights and the character and I was able to identify with the character in the game and go through a trial and error process.

Primer

I didn't like this movie because it was confusing and really hard to follow. I don't understand what's the point of adding all the technical terms of the time machine since most of the viewers probably don't understand it. The movie should have at least ellaborated on what stuff meant if they were going to use such complicated terms. Also, the blond guy constantly had his mouth open with a blank expression on his face that was very annoying.

Limbo

While playing Limbo, it did present dreamlike qualities. It felt surreal, I guess, because of how blurred it was. Maybe it was because everything was a silhouette. The game doesn’t have any dialogue but it seems that the world is one that accepts the supernatural as reality. To get past the spider thing, the character had to harm it and with no expression showing on the character, I feel that I should assume that it was just how to deal with it, like it was no big deal. The puzzles that needed to be solved, while strange to the player outside, seemed necessary and normal to the character. For me, I think it’s saying something about dreams and how often people accept the irregularities in the dreams as normal.

Primer

Primer was a confusing movie, how there was no lead in to the plot, it was like we started in the middle of it. the characters were overlapping each other's conversations and there was a lot of suspense, because a lot times we were waiting for something bad to happen with the machine, like a malfunction while it was running or some sort. the problem, however, arose within the characters, the way they thought they could control time and the manner in which events occurs to their liking. the first supernatural event that impressed me was when the blond one was in the storage room, walked to one end of the machine and found nothing there, and then a minute later the second guy was in the same spot, and thats when it clicked for me that the movie was about time travel, which would explain the clock thing earlier in the movie. it was very supernatural towards the end when there was more than one of the characters at once, their present and future selves in the same scene. it was hard to know which one was which, because they were the exact same person but also not the exact same person, because one was technically older. this business with time travel, an attempt to deviate from reality has its consequences, like there will always be one person who abuses that power. as with the stories we have read earlier in the course, trying to associate one's self into a selfish matter of some supernatural superiority proves to be consequential to their being. in hill house, eleanor becomes too attached to playing a role in the house that her life ends when her interaction with the house ends. in the rats in the walls, delapore becomes so immersed into unearthing the buried secrets of his family history that it consumes him. in the yellow wallpaper, the woman becomes attached to what she thinks she sees in the patterns of the wallpaper that her sanity is degraded the more she tries to sympathize with it.