Solaris

[szindrom]

White-foamed lining of a constant stream of waves surrounds the giant floating mind like an electrical storm of cognition ontop the cerebral cortex. Within the mind - there is another mind. Primal subconsciousness. Underneath the crystalline foaming wavestorm there awaits a dark, cold and blue abyss.

 

The ocean and it's depths represents the unknown; mystique and mystery; a veiled canvas. It evokes the creativity of an individual to fill those depths with legends, to explain and to rationalize, to fill in the gaps; paint the canvas. Underneath the ocean layer there lie spawns of creation, focal points of intuition, wormholes from the objective to the intuitive.

 

Descending the oceans' abyss through wormholes into the subconsciousness one finds oneself within pulsating virile pockets of life, primal urges, the mellow redness of the alien colonies. Back in the womb. There you'll encounter primal horror, freudian anal perversion, otherwise known as the tentaculat - utterly disgusting in the very least.

 

* * *

 

What I think is great about TFTD is that the oceans veil the methodical system of the alien activities and initially their activities are a mystery to the player. This activity evokes creativity and intuition. You'll have to make decisions without using precise sharp objective models, intuitively. I think the depths of the ocean theme is what evoked the creativity of the designers too. Explaining the gulf of Mexico..? The sunkens ships, volcanic seafloor, oildrilling facilities, undersea pyramids, even the ruins of atlantis.

 

It's also interesting to make a parallelism between the mind and the ocean, subconsciousness in a rather freudian sense, and the depths of the ocean. With the "resolver" the intuitive models become concrete and tangible. They're revealed to the player. It's also interesting to think that prefix for subconsciousness is the same for the submarines, are the vechiles entering the creations of intuition or visiting the ocean floor? I think it's the intuitive part of the game that's actually fun(ner).

 

I think the end of the game can be explained by the project running out of money. The end is pretty boring. But it can also be explained by the source of creation for the developers being extinguished; Once the mystery is resolved, there's not much encaptivating that remains. The actual solution is boring, knowning only of a mystery is engaging.

 

The ocean in TFTD I think is like 'the goose that lays golden eggs' in a similar sense as Laura Palmer is to David Lynch.

 

* * *

 

Alright I have to get going, but I'll post this 'artsy' (or perhaps slightly manic?) text and am interested in hearing your opinions. Here's some actual questions:

 

Do you think that the mysterious ocean as 'a muse of creation' for the developers has enabled some of the gamecontent?

 

Is it plausible that the ocean for the developers is also unconsciously a metaphor for the unconsciousness?

 

What about comparing the environment of the alien colonies lying underneath the cool and blue ocean (rational cognition) to instinctive, intuitive and emotional?

 

What do you think about how the technical and the biological entwine in TFTD? There's the autopsies, lobstermen etc..?

 

Alright seriously gotta get going, bye!

[Space Voyager]

Do you think that the mysterious ocean as 'a muse of creation' for the developers has enabled some of the gamecontent?

 

This seems pretty obvious, as the aliens are clearly using aquatic animal designs in most cases. Otherwise, the story is not really ocean-limited and could be ported to any environment. IMO.

 

Is it plausible that the ocean for the developers is also unconsciously a metaphor for the unconsciousness?

 

What about comparing the environment of the alien colonies lying underneath the cool and blue ocean (rational cognition) to instinctive, intuitive and emotional?

 

Erm, this may just be too deep for me, but I do believe it is far deeper than the game concepts, too.

 

What do you think about how the technical and the biological entwine in TFTD? There's the autopsies, lobstermen etc..?

 

Technical and biological are far more entwined in Apocalypse, where a lot of alien technology is biological in origin. Like, spaceships are grown and weapons are fuzzy looking things, one that I'd cuddle with instead of shooting. Perhaps I misunderstood your definition of "entwine" though, please correct me if so.

 

I hope a more philosophical soul comes to answer your questions, too. I'm not that good at it.

[szindrom]

..I hope a more philosophical soul comes to answer your questions, too. I'm not that good at it.

 

I think your comments are good as any. In fact in retrospect I slightly regret writing this post, I was having a slight problem of disinhibition which was worsened by being in a hurry. Perhaps melodramatic and expressive style doesn't fit my writing well. I suppose I had some rational points and maybe I should've stuck with those.. I don't know. It's not that bad. I guess I most regret using bodily term in conjunction with Freud, without having an explicit reason to do so, rather it was an association that lit up. Besides I suppose it's good to show some modesty every now and then.

 

In Terror from the Deep the mind of the aquanauts is one of the opponents and a major theme in the game. I suppose the word 'terror' in the name game had very different connotations back in 1995, and I recall myself primarily associating it with the same meaning as horror in those days. In TFTD the word is used with ambiguity, given the alien activities and names of live aliens within the game, some descriptions and graphics of races or USOs are very explicit and horrendous. For examples I can think of the tentaculat by it's very appearance and the zombie animation, bio-drone, hunter USO.

 

I think the graphics in TFTD are surprisingly good, the artwork in ufopedia supports the overall mood of the game. Compare to X-Com Apocalypse, that was a huge disappointment for me. I think it was going for a 'horror in plain sight/daylight' kind of thing, and with the Play-Dough look of the aliens it seriously didn't work out. Higher resolution doesn't mean better. The overall mood is more important than exactness, I think it's similar in art in general, technique is a tool.

 

The way people rationalize and explain away the gaps in their knowledge with at least considerable skill and readiness has to do with the ocean theme. For an example in the recent Iron Sky movie the dark side of the moon is filled. Pink Floyd made a song about the darkside of the moon. The basic idea is that the moon shows same face towards earth all the time, so the dark side of the moon is another one of these inviting mysteries. Is the dark side of the moon somehow different? Perhaps you could make guesses like 'maybe there's more craters from meteor impacts when the trajectories towards the bright side are more likely covered by earth' which would my personal way of becoming creative via explanation of unknown. But then it's not really actually unknown, there's a pretty normal contextual framework where the moon is placed - There's no particular reason to expect the moon('s darkside) to be any different from any other celestial object, moons of the jupiter etc. So it's not an actual blank. What was there before the big bang, would be a pretty huge blankness, but that's maybe different.

 

Cognitive dissonance has quite a bit to do with this. I think it causes dissonance when there's some piece of information in the mind that is completely unexplained, it has to be associated with somethnig, placed within some kind of framework. And if you don't know what lies in the deepest depths of the ocean, then it increases your readiness to accept new information about the depths due to a lack of cognitive dissonance. Any new even fictitious story is more plausible when it explains something that's unknown. Then the explanations regarding the unknown are attached to the context of other information. That's basically what happened in TFTD too.

 

I think 'epic' is the correct word to describe the story of a collision by an alien starship with earth, causing the extinction of dinosaurs and leaving a huge crater. In a way it includes another mystery - What happened to the dinosaurs?

 

I think it's an interesting way of setting up a game that there's this background logic or framework based on which things in the game work and they're not told to the player. And I don't mean like the actual coding, although it's similar, but rather that the abstract player environment/interface doesn't give the player perfect information. Like not telling the player how the guns work. What are the chance to hit formulas. Some people would like to have those formulas, and I think most of the time I might be one of those people.

 

For an example the M.C. Strength of the aquanauts is not given to the player for free. But that in turn can make the game more interesting, especially before you find out the exact mechanics - that there is a strength value. There being an abstract system and getting a hint of it is enticing and also it can be frightening in a horror game. For an example I think horror movies in which the viewer is told exactly what is going on; is given a general broad scientific explanation of what's happening; usually are not scary at all nor even good. Meanwhile a horror movie in which you get an impression that there's a method to the madness kind of gets you on your toes to try and figure out what it is.

 

Actually I have to get ready to go to bed now and am going to stop writing here. I'm not sure what I'm writing about exactly, I suppose it's a defensive follow up on the initial post, or something like that and I suppose I wanted to make some more salient points... Alright, good night / bye for now ^_^