retro ’80s graph­ics are sen­ti­men­tal fluff for mod­ern adults who grew up in front of 1980s game-con­sole machines. Eight-bit graph­ics are pret­ty easy to carve out of sty­ro­foam. There’s a low bar­ri­er-to-entry in mak­ing sculp­ture from 8‑bit, so that you can “rup­ture the inter­face between the dig­i­tal and the phys­i­cal.” How­ev­er 8‑bit sculp­tures are a cute, back­ward-look­ing rupture.

An Essay on the New Aes­thet­ic | Beyond The Beyond | Wired.com

Which is also what I find so tire­some about much of indie game aes­thet­ics today.

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Kars Alfrink

Kars is a designer, researcher and educator focused on emerging technologies, social progress and the built environment.