006: the tabular blue
Adjusting the format a bit...and our first interactive activity together!
This week we look at the spreadsheet, and what it might look like to look at this finance/data tool as a canvas.
Then, Sonic the Hedgehog.
My first full-time job after college was working with spreadsheets. I was a sourcing analyst, where my job was to maintain spreadsheets with a parts list, like for the electronic parts of a washing machine or something. My daily task would be to send the parts list to a list of different distributors, and they would send back the spreadsheets with their prices filled out for each part: 3 cents for a resistor, 10 cents for a capacitor, etc. Then, I would compile all the prices onto one large spreadsheet and then submit that to my project manager for them to make purchases. It was honestly a terrible job, but there was something there.
When I was deep in a spreadsheet, something seemed to have clicked. It was like seeing the bricks to a building. The simple elegance of a spreadsheet, data arranged into a table, made working on it feel like tinkering with the base elements of some technological compound. Of course, our usual interactions with spreadsheets are usually no fun. They either function as a successor to the accounting books they were built off of, or they pop up as finance tools or school assignments.
But what happens if we imagine the the tabular form as a creative canvas? What happens when we give life to each cell?
Here is a work I made on spreadsheet called "Windows Can Only Dream of Landscapes". I would also like to invite all of you to collaborate on a piece together.
The link is here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1IjAthIbJkUiv6XvDD4LdZIl1QoIxBe-HHjlQg2eyQqQ/edit?gid=1125105496#gid=1125105496
Feel free to include or add whatever you desire, add a hat to the dinosaur, create other characters, create abstract shapes, give the background a color. My only ask would be to not change any cells that have changed colors already, so we're not overwriting each other's work.
I've been very slowly working through all the Sonic games in release order. The problem is that there's a lot of games and I get easily side-tracked, and every time I get distracted for too long and come back, I feel I have to start from the beginning. So over the years, I've played the original Sonic the Hedgehog a dozen times, and I've never made it past the Sega Genesis batch of Sonic games.
Platformers, and most games, are all about control. It’s how the the player interacts with the form, the precision to jump from one platform to another or dodge enemies and evade obstacles. What does it mean to tease beyond that, to provide a glimpse of what can’t be controlled or can be barely controlled. How should the player feel when this relationship shifts?