issue 21 // volume 42

An ode to the glitch

> The underrated art form of the gaming world

Rebecca Peterson
Staff Writer

 

watched them fall around

me—my friends, all of them
dead, and myself about to follow
ina few short moments. In the
last moment before the monster’s
double-fisted strike crushed me
to the hard, icy ground, I had
only one thought on my mind:
“Not again.”

Repeating this one stupidly
hard fight was incredibly
annoying, and I was getting
nothing for my trouble except
for a dimmed screen and a
declaration that Id failed, the
Inquisition had fallen without its
leader, the world of Thedas was
doomed, and so forth. I knew
I was at the right level for this

fight. ’'d even killed giants before.

It was just this one.
Deciding to give it one last
shot, I reloaded from my last save

point and rounded the corner

of the snowy courtyard with my
companions, determined not to
go down without a decent fight.

And that was the moment in
which the giant I’d been battling
with for nearly half an hour took
off into the sky, never to be seen
again.

After a few seconds of rapid
blinking, I pressed on into the
fray, camera panned upward for
any sign of the beast to suddenly
come crashing down on my
head. Nothing. The enemy had
successfully won the Space Race,
apparently, but I was about to win
the war.

Glitches are amazing.

Yes, we complain about
them, and with good reason.

A game with a lot of glitches

is often a sign of rushed and
shoddy design, usually when the
developers want to throw a game
out in time for a holiday rush
without caring about actually

finishing the damn thing (I’m
looking at you, Sonic Boom). But
even the best of games can fall
prey to the dreaded glitch.

Clipping, half-rendered
environments, and broken if-then
sequences resulting in disrupted
game play are generally the last
thing you want when you set
down your wallet and shell out
$80 on a new game. The sudden
departure from realistic physics
can really jolt you out of the
story, and in the case of PC games
translated to console, a lot of
quality can be lost to these snags
in the software. Still, I say the
common glitch can and should
be celebrated as an art-form in
and of itself, independent of the
developer’s intentions.

The best example of this
would probably be the “Geddan”
meme of the late 2000s. Starting
in 2007, a bunch of video game
enthusiasts in Japan noticed a
glitch in the Nintendo 64 game

The thrill of a life on stage

> Allan Lysell talks theatre

Adam Tatelman
Arts Editor

 

lan Lysell, the chair of

Douglas’ theatre program,
has spent his life on the stage,
following a passion that
began in high school after the
Vancouver Playhouse visited
his school to present a selection
of Shakespeare scenes. “The
energy and excitement of
watching these live performers
thrilled me,” Lysell said of the
performers. “It was all about
the thrill of live performance,
and it still is for me. You don’t
know what’s going to happen.”

Inspired by the Vancouver
Playhouse’s performance, Lysell
tested the waters of acting at his
high school, and found some
success. This led him to UBC,

    

Image via ourconference.ca

where he learned the craft and
became more focused. “I started
to discover the things that I was
really interested in were the
studio productions, black box,

revolutionary stuff” Lysell said
of his time at the university.
His experience gained from
UBC resulted in an opportunity
to work with the Vancouver
Playhouse, which took him
on a formative tour across the
province. “I learned more about
acting in those three months—
not to mention things about
myself and my colleagues—
than I'd ever learned before.”
After his time with the
Playhouse, Lysell founded his
own theatre company, making
his first forays into the world
of directing. “The very best
early times in my career were
always fraught with fundraising,
always challenged,” he said when
questioned on the difficulties
of attracting an audience to
alternative theatre venues. “I
think that the spontaneity is a

 

GoldenEye. If the cartridge

was not inserted correctly, the
characters in the game would all
begin to flail spastically. It’s not
really a glitch if you're tampering
with the equipment to make it
happen, in my opinion, but I
digress.

Videos of these glitches got
paired up with the 1997 J-pop
song “Promise,” and the meme
spread worldwide. People started
making videos of themselves
imitating the glitches through
dance. The “dance” required
the subject of the video to take
hundreds of photos of themselves
and animate them ina stop-
motion fashion, in order to
replicate the glitch in the game.
Nearly 10 years later, iterations of
“Geddan” are still being made and
uploaded to the Internet.

Popular gaming sites and
channels now make video
compilations dedicated to
glitches, because glitches have

huge factor for audiences to be
intrigued and attracted, but the
storytelling has to be excellent.”
Lysell found theatre to be
more fulfilling than his film
work: “Film is 99.9 per cent
‘what you see is what you get’
It’s only the people on the A-List
who are being challenged. The
rest of the actors in any given
production are human pieces of
furniture. I was very lucky, having
my own theatre company, so I
could cast myself in roles that I
felt like doing. But I always felt
more intrigued by what other
directors would see me as.”
When Lysell’s family
expanded to include two sons,
he transitioned into teaching
high school students for
financial reasons, but found
working with the younger
students debilitating. “When

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entertainment value in and of
themselves. Whether the NPCs
are floating in mid-air or being
slowly absorbed into the ground,
whether a cutscene is interrupted
by the sudden appearance of a
dragon or disappearance of one of
the speaking characters, glitches
contribute to the fun of modern
video games. I can guarantee
glitches in Pong weren’t nearly

as hilarious as the glitches we see
today.

So why not appreciate the
glitches while we have them,
before the technology advances
to a point where they’ll all but
disappear, if such a thing is
even possible? All I know is
that without my personal Hail
Mary glitch, I'd probably still be
stuck in that courtyard, getting
smashed into elven pulp bya
giant who clearly just wanted his
chance to fly.

I managed to move into the
college level, where the students
wanted to be in the program—
that was uber-satisfying.”

“If you desire it, do it,” Lysell
said, but had a warning for those
who enter the profession with
pretentions of fame and fortune.
“The world will throw sufficient
obstacles in your way to disabuse
you of the notion that you’re
going to bea star” Due to the
amount of work involved and the
fact that there are many actors
vying for the same opportunities,
Lysell asserted that theatre and
film are only for the extremely
motivated. “It is essential that
you become entrepreneurial...
being a standalone actor
waiting for the phone to
ring is a lonely existence.”