I love his Solaris more than Tarkovsky's. I do wish it pulled back a little bit on the one scene of schlock space horror/conventional genre bit, but it's such a beautiful movie.

Also the fact he got it made with an 81 page script is kind of insane, dude knew what he wanted.

I made a game ryantrawick.itch.io/glitchpick-p...

As a final point, I think small indies making weird games doesn’t really exist anymore. Most were made by teenagers and college kids in 2000-2014, they grew up and have to feed themselves. The new kids are making what they grew up with, Minecraft, web games, Fortnite. It’s a different thing.

At the same time it feels wrong to dismiss dopamine games because I feel like they are closer to the core of what the medium is. There can be life enrichment from exploration of mathematics, probability, interaction, etc. and it’s hard for me to see it as inherently predatory or lower value.

I’m pretty sad I’ve stopped waving the flag for personal expression games like Myst or Life is Strange or Gone Home, etc. But I think the truth is they were never good games, they were good one-shots, with a lot of art and writing, but nothing to explore beyond that.

I also think as time progresses the collective unconscious gets more complex, more adept. So we need things that we don’t fully understand.
These “dopamine games” are somewhat annoying in that they could be doing something better. They’re almost there, but ultimately feel like empty calories.

I need a real play space to express myself as a player and explore, like Chess.
I admire the creative expression and art of “personal” games, but I think art needs to be of its medium, and the medium of games is interactivity.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, I grew up playing Radiator, KRZ, walking sims, Limbo, etc. and I really wanted to make stuff like that for a long time, but as a player now, those types of games can’t hold my attention. They’re too simple mechanically.