Stellations

Stellations is an interactive thought loop that must be internalized and escaped. Gameplay combines concrete poetry and connect-the-dots, mental maps and muscle memory, as players jump between thoughts, rendered as words connected by lines. Each grouping of thoughts forms a thought pattern that players understand kinetically, as they race, jump, and glide between each word with increasing intensity.

As momentum builds up the player can break free in search of new maps. The tension between mastering a loop in order to escape it is the ground upon which Stellations makes it conceptual claims about the relationship between game loops, thought loops, and the messy business of moving around our minds. The mental map the player creates calcifies as muscle memory, past decisions modify future movements, what started as a line becomes a labyrinth.

Stellation’s narrative is comprised of a series of poems reflecting on the motions I make each day. The player begins in an apartment, explores and meditates on the body, moves through the city, and then ends in a series of abstract shapes. The visuals are at first schematic (rectilinear floor plans, diagrams, graphs), then gestural (curvilinear drawings, contours, waves), and eventually geometric (symmetries, mandalas, fractals). Installations of Stellations are accompanied by an edition of 4x6” copperplate etchings depicting these structures, and a custom controller housed in altered art books.

For a couple years I have felt a conviction that game loops have much to say about the thought loops we fall into when moving through the world, whether they be habits, memories, anxieties. With its repetitive and energetic movement, Stellations questions how we construct vicious and virtuous circles in our lives.