So I played Gorogoa and like everyone else who’s played it I don’t really know how to describe it. Beautiful artwork! Unique gameplay! Very very short!
What’s it about?
Uh… religion. Worshipping a rainbow dragon fish thing. Except it all goes wrong because you were seeking the wrong thing and now you have to spend your whole life figuring out what to do with that.
I’ve finished the game and I’m still very confused. The storytelling is nonlinear and also entirely image based so that doesn’t help. Like there’s something really interesting going on with punishment and atonement and the loss and return of faith. And grief obviously plays a big role thematically. But I don’t know how to unpack it.
I need to play it again, like, immediately.
Spoilers beneath the cut:
If my god literally, physically cast me down and broke all the bones in my body because my belief was too naive— well, actually, at that point it’d be pretty hard to say god doesn’t exist, but I sure as hell wouldn’t go back to worshipping them. So props to the main character? Maybe? Depending on your views on religion?
I also don’t think he had to atone because he did anything wrong, but that atonement was an important part of his religious journey. It’s sort of like the bargaining phase of grieving, I guess?
The lack of text and the lack of any sort of instructions despite the totally unique mechanics is definitely also metaphorically resonant. It’s about struggling through life and faith without instructions. It’s about confusion and trying and getting things wrong.
The nonlinear structure is really interesting. You spend 90% of the game doing the wrong thing and then at the end you look back and put all the pieces together and become redeemed.
In Plagiarism and You(Tube), Hbomb says "If you consider something so obscure you can get away with stealing it, you do not respect it." Save that line for the next time someone tries to tell you that Roy Lichtenstein brought respect to comics as art.
It's since been pointed out that while Lichtenstein did copy one of Russ Heath's drawings of an airplane getting hit, the painting depicted above was actually copied off Irv Norvick, because Lichtenstein did this so many times to so many comic artists.
In Lichtenstein's defense, he was doing this in a time when comic artists frequently weren't even credited in the issues themselves. In his condemnation, he never even tried to check, nor has he made any move to pay or credit any of the comic artists who recognized their own work later on. Rather than elevating the "low art" of comics, he was widening the gap of financial success and respect even further.
The Hbomberguy of this story is art historian David Barsalou, who has now spent decades tracking down the original art and the names of the original artists used in Lichtenstein's most famous output. Here's the full flickr gallery for the Deconstructing Roy Lichtenstein project. Frequently copied were Tony Abruzzo, Ted Galindo, Mike Sekowsky, Joe Kubert, Jerry Grandenetti, and dozens more Golden Age artists who aren't very well known in comics circles, let alone art history books. Many of them died in poverty. That's something that the Hero Initiative, mentioned in Russ Heath's comic above, aims to prevent.
Also, Lichtenstein didn't even paint Ben-Day dots. That's a specific thing.
i'm so obsessed with this guy who just makes weird hand-stitched footballs. this video has millions of views on ig and tiktok but w/e look at this reference orange immortalized forever through the medium of Ball
(source. jonpaulsballs on instagram / tiktok / youtube / website)