and boy is my Johnson tired
Ekphrasis is a concept from ancient Greece (who bloody loved a good concept) describing the act of creative writing inspired by a work of art. Is a Ryanair Boeing 737 safety manual art? Well, Johnson A Plane Man has done some ekphrasis with it, so I say yes. It’s a short browser Itch game that chronicles the life and times of a man named Johnson, his love for yellow life vests, his existential feelings of confinement (despite the high number of easily locatable exits), and such emancipatory joys that can only be found in yellow slides.
"It's always been a dream of mine to be able to produce interactive works purely using the phone in my pocket and I think this game has been deeply fulfilling for me due to that," says developer Breogán Hackett AKA Hyphinett. Kat Brewster previously wrote some lovely words about Hyphinett’s game Vitreous and other Bitsy horrors in this piece about how the engine lends itself so well to lo-fi spooks. You can find Hyphinett’s collective bits here.
There’s perhaps something lofty to be said about how finding inspiration in mass-produced, utilitarian images speaks to the spirit of the age, but I think Hackett mainly just wanted to do something fun on a long plane ride. I mainly spend long hauls cataloguing the increasingly exasperated facial expressions of whoever keeps bringing me free gin and tonics, so this seems far more productive.
But I am very interested in how the mind naturally jumps to narrativise inanimate or otherwise prescriptive images, and how the in-jokey joys of subverting symbolic meanings feels like a very ancient and very instinctive game. A very small example of this being the "no fucking trumpets, buddy" signs. It also reminds me a little of Joe Richardson’s adventure games using renaissance art like Four Last Things. And then there’s The Pedestrian - a puzzle game that has you play as a public signage silhouette.