What do you do when the information page of the game you are about to play tells you that there are no winners and losers, no high scores, no monsters, no time limit and no fights? The idea with this game is that you start playing and then just see what happens. A lot then depends on the attractions of your voyage of discovery and the entertainment value of the quest for a possible meaning. This meaning is nowhere hinted at by the game's devisers, and the same applies to the other five contributions on '../karoushi.' It is a CD-Rom without a beginning or end, made, it appears, as promotional material for six artists, designers who are particularly reluctant to give an unambiguous meaning to their work. Every imaginable meaning is suggested and you as the user are left entirely to your fate. This is no problem, for it can actually be very nice to step into an environment where you can interpret the content entirely to suit yourself even though the form has been preset. The interface used to get to the contributions is like a radar scanner which emits brief sound clips from the various pieces. This makes it all the more clear that the user is entirely reliant upon his own sense of things. "The beat will be your guide from now. No one will explain anything really… The sound changes, the visions change and then you are all into exploring how the things react to each other." With the aid of a sliding button you can either speed up or slow down this or that sentence as it slides past to the accompaniment of broken beats and sound effects. Skot, it seems , wants to let the user to feel the text rather than understand it. The website created by Maia, one of the participants, opens with the pronouncement "Design sells". It's a provocative statement within a medium that is beginning slowly but surely to approach technical maturity. By withholding any suggestion of unambiguous meaning and avoiding the seductions of the (unfeasible) technical tour de force '../karoushi' remains continually diverting. Just play, click, listen and watch.
– Miklós Beyer
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Live and work in Vienna (Austria)
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