Garstion tomorrow, 29/06
crystallise the voice of an entire generation. Crypt Worlds: Your Darkest Desire is such an artist. Her work comes from a deep wellspring of feeling and images that are sure to remind you of things that have happened in your life, as well. For example much of the experience takes place in rooms, and I have been in a room before. Perhaps you feel the same. If so, you have a new friend in Crypt Worlds: Your Darkest Desire.\par I met up with CW on her ranch in Maine, where she was wrangling horses in preparation for the county fair. I was impressed with her handling of these beautiful yet large animals. Perhaps the skills involved in gamemaking are not dissimilar? Her eyes - violet - sparkle with genuine warmth at the suggestion as she gently pulls my mouth open to inspect my teeth.\par "Imagine a world without sides or borders, a world where it's possible to - literally - do or go anywhere you could possibly desire" CW explains over a fine white pasta in one of New York's hottest new boutiques. She frowns. "Understand - you would not be living in this world. You would be imagining the condition of its existence." The distinction is emphasised by placing me in an inescapable headlock. I understand. In this world, communication is so rare.\par What is Crypt World: Your Deepest Desire?\par "What most people like to think of as "videogames" aren't videogames at all. Understand I'm not dismissing these experiences as inferior. I'm saying they don't exist. They never happened. Crypt Girls: Your Darkest Visions is the only videogame ever produced, ever." Apropos nothing, she adds "The music SMOKES."\par And may it be a worthy one, I dare to say. Crypt Worlds laughs raucously at this before attempting to screw my head completely around in case it contains a prize. It's an optimism that stands in stark contrast to the simplistic negativism of the so-called art world who won't return my phone calls or make eye contact with me in the street.\par At 10.40am I'm in the Mojave Desert. There is no water or shelter for several hundred miles around. I am all alone here. The desert nomads speak of a silence capable of levelling the petty aspirations of man. I remove my shoes and begin to walk. After two days I have died of dehydration and there are scorpion nesting in my mouth.\par Am I playing Crypt Worlds? Or is Crypt Worlds playing me?\par I get back to my apartment, still heavy from going round-for-round at Boston's happiest crab fishery with, I am now convinced, the foremost and only game developer of the 21st century, cue up some ambient techno on the monitor and check my emails. I'm not surprised to find a message there from Cicada Industries (or am I?). "A1, apologies for the snakebite. You must have smelled wrong to him and I suspect moral failings. The beta release version Crypt Worlds is attached." There is no attachment. Or am I writing the attachment right now?\par You hold in your hands the first specimen of its type recorded in all the annals of man. Some parts may frighten you; others, it will terrify. There will also be some people who spill coffee on the disk and wreck it. The tragedy of man is the inability to truly face our own desires without laughing or throwing up. Crypt Worlds has opened a door. It's up to you to walk through it. Your darkest desires are about to come through.\par I'll see you on the other side. XOXOXO\par