selectparks - Featured Artwork, 'Oversaturation'

Well it's not often we add a game to the art game archives, standalone games often require more work than most of the mods in our collection. This one has become the apple of our eye, so we thought we'd also make it Featured Artwork.

From the makers:

Oversaturation is common in most global processes as the fluxes: material and linguistic evolve real time in shape and magnitude. These fluxes, acting onto limited spaces (of conscience, the earth's surface, bandwidth, etc), add pressure on their 'host' surfaces, and that pressure is defined by each process itself.

As organisms keep multiplying and processes evolving in complexity, the available space becomes more limited and eventually tends to disappear. This game is about keeping your personal space clear, and as in life it's theoretically an infinite process.

'Oversaturation' can be thought of as a play-lab for exploring assumptions at the root of both scientific and modernist thought; that because mathematical space is infinite, so too must be the limits of our mobility. In this way Oversaturation offers a self-conscious space; where our present agency is directly informed by past vectors, gradually dissecting/folding/compressing territory, cumulatively informing our lines of flight.

The questions seem clear: What if my actions defined the shape of my environment, and that of others? What if my movement were a graph? These questions were of course first tackled in Tron, where lightcylce riders try to accomodate themselves within ever decreasing bounds until the last player stands. It may not be surprising then that the work is built from the source of the popular open-source game GLTron.

That said Oversaturation offers an important expansion of the 'Tron Problem' the addition of a 'Y' vector. This will be especially significant for retro-gamers who'll finally have that nagging question answered: "What if the lightcycle could also go up?" To top it off Ungravity's new game is hauntingly beautiful, lattices drawing in a soft yet strangely cool room..

Oversaturation runs on MacOSX with ports being made to Linux and Windows.

Visit the project page http://ungravity.org