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ways of establishing relationships with reality through media necessarily entail a
balance between the increase in acuity of certain cognitive functions and the
desensitization of others (McLuhan 1994 ).
4.4
Gua-Le-Ni; or, the Horrendous Parade
The fourth and the fi fth sections of this text will focus on the praxis of designing
virtual worlds and virtual experiences with philosophical scopes and themes. In the
pages that follow, I will illustrate and dissect the design of two philosophical
videogames:
￿
Gua-Le-Ni; or the Horrendous Parade ( Gua-Le-Ni from now on) - a commer-
cially released, action-puzzle videogame that I designed and developed in col-
laboration with the Italian developers Double Jungle S.a.s. for the Apple iPad
and iPhone platforms between 2011 and 2012
￿
Necessary Evil - a free, self-refl exive videogame that was developed as a contri-
bution to the panel 'G|A|M|E on Games: the Meta-panel' at the 2013 DiGRA
conference in Atlanta, Georgia (USA)
In terms of narrative, the world of Gua-Le-Ni takes place somewhere in Great
Britain during a fi ctional reinterpretation of the 'age of discovery'. In Gua-Le-Ni ,
the player is given the role of an aspiring scholar who is instructed by an old, befud-
dled British zoologist on the fi ner points of combinatorial taxonomy. On top of a
dark, wooden desk lays a fantastic topic: a bestiary populated by bizarre, fi nely
drawn paper creatures that allegedly inhabit the 'New World' (see Fig. 4.1 ). Similar
to the combinatorial monsters of head-body-tail topics that we might have playfully
explored in our childhood and to the creatures described in legends and mythical
recounts, the paper beasts of Gua-Le-Ni are chimaeras: impossible assemblages of
real animal parts. For example, the specimen shown in the next page is a CA-BIT-
DOR-STER: a four-module creature with the head of a camel, one body part of a
rabbit followed by the midsection a condor and concluded by a lobster's tail.
The combinatorial paper creatures of Gua-Le-Ni hectically walk across the illus-
trations of the bestiary from the right to the left margin of its pages. From the point
of view of the player, the main goal of the game is that of recognizing the compo-
nents of the fantastic creatures and their relative order before the creature manages
to completely traverse an illustration and fl ee from the topic (which constitutes the
'game over' condition). Encouraged by the unwieldy mentor, the player pursues this
purpose by quickly rotating, moving and spinning toy cubes with pictures of animal
parts printed on each face of the cubes. A paper beast is correctly recognized - and
thus prevented from escaping the old topic it belongs to - when the player manages
to match the illustrations on the top faces of the taxonomic cubes with the paper
beast currently in play.
Gua-Le-Ni is a single-player videogame consisting of only one fundamental
player-oriented game mechanic (a matching mechanic that is accessed by the players
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