Gameplay Journal #4: Taking a look at Total Refusal’s “Featherfall”

What’s the best way to fall in a video game? By glitching through the map, of course! For this week’s Gameplay Journal, I’m taking a look at an interesting mod called Featherfall made by Austrian collective Total Refusal. The mod is an artistic expression of the relationship between playing a game and dreaming. It focuses on the archetypal nightmare of falling, which in games is “exacerbated by a recurring programming error otherwise known as a glitch which causes the player’s alter ego to suddenly disappear beneath the surface, plummeting into a void” (GameScenes.org).

This type of glitch is most well-known in open world games such as Grand Theft Auto V. It’s happened to me before in other games like Horizon: Zero Dawn when I was to trying to climb (but really glitching) my way up a mountain Skyrim-style. It’s honestly quite the sight to behold. To see how the game world looks from below, a way to see the world that is not supposed to be viewed. The video by Total Refusal got me thinking: mods are not just adding in new characters and weapons, but to also create art. I’ve had plenty of dreams where I dreamt about falling and watching this mod at work encapsulates those feelings I have, but in a video game. These kinds of mods, I feel, aren’t as mainstream compared to a “Thomas the Tank Engine” Skyrim mod that is super popular on YouTube. I feel like an average Joe or a game developer at Rockstar who would watch Featherfall wouldn’t appreciate the work as much because those kinds of mods “…tend to conflict violently with the mainstream gaming industry’s expectations for how games should be designed” (Galloway, page 108).

For this week’s Lets Play video, I chose one of the games represented in the Featherfall video: Mafia III

Works Cited

Bittanti, Matteo. “EVENT: VRAL #18_TOTAL REFUSAL (JANUARY 29 — FEBRUARY 11 2021).” GameScenes, www.gamescenes.org/2021/01/event-vral-18_total-refusal-january-29-february-11-2021.html Accessed 9 February 2021.

Galloway, Alexander. “Countergaming” n.d. PDF file.