Mojiferous Industries, art, and all that jazz

 The other day I had a conversation with one of my coworkers about Mojiferous Industries, my programs, and what the hell I did in my spare time. He had been poking around the website and downloaded a few of my programs and was generally confounded about what the hell they were supposed to do, supposed to be, and why I had even bothered to make something as inane as Zoltan. I have insisted for a while that some of my work is "art" in some form and King Thor has even written a couple of interesting articles claiming as much, but I have never actually explained why or how I would consider any of my output to have artistic merit or what my rationale is behind said crap.
Over the last few years I have tried to realize each project I have undertaken with a sense for the aesthetic, building something that, to my eye at least, is beautiful or at least aesthetically pleasing. Whether it is the odd black and white vintage TV appearance of Heatstroke or the vintage-etching look of Simoebic Dysentery, I have tried to create my programs with concrete themes and visuals. Each project is also filled with my sense of humor and outlook on life, through touches of the surreal and the absurd. Blended together as concrete little blocks of code, most of the Mojiferous Industries output actually seems like a Dadaist manifesto for the 21st century: anti-war, anti-bourgeois, chaotic, nonsensical at times, and usually unappealing to the mainstream art world.
It would be rash to say I have any expertise in art, as I have no formal schooling in it whatsoever. However, I have been a muralist and graffiti artist for quite some time, painting, sometimes for money, in an effort to express myself visually (mind you, most of my painting was done legally on public “free walls” or privately-owned graffiti-friendly walls. I am not the type to needlessly destroy property for the illogical territorial pissing contests most people associate with graffiti, nor do I want to start that argument, that is for a different forum.) This was a cathartic experience, allowing me to manifest my emotions more freely, knowing that what I had painted would be gone within a week or two. I had no need to try to paint for anybody but myself – not gallery owners, buyers, nor the public. Everything I laid down on those walls is gone, erased forever, and my art became a messy, paint-splattered visit to the psychiatrist. Occasionally I would paint something more permanent on canvas or board, laying out scenes of man-eating factories and weird people with wrenches sprouting from their heads, and these would inevitably end up in a gallery show.
It was the galleries that I hated the most – sure, some people bought pieces from me and I enjoyed free wine and booze, but dealing with some people in the art scene was a pain in the ass. The best way to get ahead in the art world is apparently to be as self-centered and self-serving as possible, to glad hand and pimp yourself, because the movers and shakers are more concerned with the artist as a person than they are with what that person can do.
So I got tired of all this BS and started to get back into programming, in hopes of someday supporting myself, and slowly I realized that I really enjoyed it and opportunities for expressing myself to the masses that I wasn’t going to get through the traditional art world were opening up for me. Soon enough I had started up Mojiferous.com and began filling it with my absurd little worthless programs, effectively setting up a gallery for my underappreciated art form. Does this mean that any of this shit is actually art? That’s all relative, but I think with a little more insight into my process and thoughts behind each of my programs, maybe it’ll be a little clearer. So here it goes:

Atomic Combat:
Is definitely just a game. I may have toiled over the artwork for many days and may have poured my all into the damn thing, but my goal was to make something playable (which is open to debate). There is an overwhelming pacifist statement in the game, since there is no technical way that you can ever truly win (you can survive and not be a loser, but forcing the surrender of your enemies without a single death is nigh impossible). Would I call it art? Hell no, but it is one of my best-realized games.

Desktop Cigarette:
I guess you could claim that Desktop Cigarette is some kind of a meditation on health and fitness, but the truth is that I am a smoker, I enjoy smoking, and although I would like to quit, it has not happened yet... No, instead Desktop Cigarette is a study in absurdity, a gadget with no function, a digital representation of a physical item that has no business being digitized. It was made as an aesthetic object and a curiosity.

Heatstroke:
Is just a poorly made, poorly realized game built around a horrible idea. There is nothing to see here, move along.

Lobster Petting:
Lobster Petting is another endeavor in absurdity, and nothing is more surreal and absurd than lobster petting. Unlike many of its peers, (like fart games or virtual staplers), there are a few things that I think distinguish Lobster Petting from a simple work of stupidity:
1) There is no real world equivalent, or at least there are no petting zoos with lobsters that I am aware of (however you could probably have the same experience at a supermarket lobster tank).
2) It is not cute. There is a good reason no one lets children pet lobsters: they are ugly little things, all slimy claws and eyestalks.
3) It is not funny at all. Strange, yes. Funny? No. At least not funny in a traditional jokey kind of way, nor in a stand-up, observational, snarky kind of way. Lobster Petting is funny to me because it is so serious, because it can't really be serious, and because it is so far from serious. Does any of that make sense?
4) No one in their right mind would ever make another, or so I thought until someone I didn't know ported Lobster Petting. However, no one is rushing out to make Tarantula Slapping or Antelope Mangling, because that would be absurd. I suppose even Lobster Petting's existence is absurd. And now I'm talking myself in circles.
So there you have it -- absurdity, in the form of a lightly fondled lobster.

Motor Pants:
The concept here may seem like another attempt at the absurd, but really, this was a failed attempt to make a real game that happened to be salted with my own flavor of strangeness and obsession with pants. In a rush to release the game, I skimped on the game play and logic instead of taking my time and it ended being a confusing mess of unplayable hoohah (the general unplayability probably also tends to make one think that I may have had artistic intentions, but in actuality I was simply being lazy). I recently started Motor Pants up to refresh my memory as to what it was all about, and I had no idea what the hell I was doing. I was confounded by my own game. Because of this, I'm spending my sweet ass time on Wholesale Hero, which in some ways is the successor to Motor Pants but better designed and infinitely more playable.

Simoebic Dysentery:
Nothing arty here, just a game about an amoeba and the body it lives in… Since this was a joint project of myself and King Thor, from concept to execution, I feel that it is also the most straight forward and least peppered with my weirdness.

Zoltan:
Ah, Zoltan. I believe Zoltan is the pinnacle of my artistic endeavors in the digital medium thus far. At first glance, you may believe that he is merely an appeal to primitivism, or a simplistic caricature of Neolithic religion. However, in my eyes Zoltan is so much more: an appeal to the rational, against the mysteries of religion, and all the absurdity that it embodies. He is all-knowing, at least when it comes to the weather, a feat accomplished through human ingenuity and technology, not through smoke and mirrors or the hokum of faith. He requires a sacrifice to function, sometimes money – my own nod to the business of modern religion – and sometimes a fish – a subtle take on the symbolism of religion without getting bogged down in trying to represent every faith equally. Of course there is also a priest present, to allow you easier contact with Zoltan, but he really doesn’t do much, and there is a book on the mysteries of Zoltan, a reference my own personal thoughts on some zealots’ ludicrous literal readings of religious texts. Even the all-seeing eye pyramid thing from the dollar bill makes an appearance. All of this is wrapped up in a serious layer of absurdity: grass that needs to be trimmed, a beard that also needs looking after, a drunken moon, a help file that is far from helpful… And finally the fact that the program does nothing at all, but is merely meant to sit there, look good and do its thing, and I think you’ve got a good argument for a piece of digital art. Or a worthless pile of dung.

There are others, of course – Wholesale Hero promises to be a rip-roaring anti-capitalist good time, no one outside of my friend P. Brown has even seen Modern Worker 2 (which mostly involves a malfunctioning copier and endless filing), and I have half-baked plans for things like Poaching Hero and Litigation! which should bring my sense of the absurd together with a more coherent philosophical standing.
I hope that this has made things a little clearer, because it took me hours to shape this into the semi-coherent mess you’ve just read and I don’t really want to do it again. Conclusion: Mojiferous Crap ≈ art.

Sending off Simoebic Dysentery, preparing Wholesale Hero

That's right, King Thor and I have kind of half-assedly assembled Simoebic Dysentery in preparation for a run at the GameStop Indie Game Challenge, which is by far the most mysterious contest boasting a $100,000 prize I've ever seen. The rules range from inane to nonexistent; for example they define an age range for contestants but never mention how far into beta/production they want this damned game, and they provide special rules for iPhone games yet not for any other platform... I hate to be a curmudgeon, but designing a complete working game for iPhone is a much different process than designing for something like the Wii -- how the hell are they going to judge one next to the other without categories? And how will they select which is better? Originality? Something that may have an original interface for a platform but has been compiled for PC (another rule that applies to everything but the iPhone) may seem hackish and boring compared to the same game running with the controls for which it was designed (have you ever tried to play Super Mario Bros. with a keyboard? What a pain in the ass. No one would have put money behind something so frustrating... But with a carpal-tunnel inducing controller? Amazing.)
Long story short - I just sent these jokers 100 moist simoleans of my own hard-earned cash so that they can gaze long and hard at the hopefully-seizure-causing, horribly-edited monstrosity of a video that I sent to them in hopes of "them" playing, enjoying and voting for our still-far-from-finished game thing. We don't even know who "they" are, and for all we know the judging will consist of someone installing our game on a virus-ridden 486 running OS2, attaching a monochrome 80-column screen and throwing the whole fucking thing in a gorilla cage with everyone else's terrible virtual LARPing, antelope racing, and zombie hentai games to see which one gets shat on first. Wish us luck!

In other news, Wholesale Hero continues to develop -- I've got a ton of new features, including live updating to the Mojiferous Industries website, multiple different game options, and some added bonus blocks for both the manufacturing and shipping phases. There is still a whole lot of work to be done, but maybe, just maybe, I'll run the damn thing for some other contest coming up... However, I do need beta testers for the damned thing -- so anyone willing to spend a little time with what amounts to Motor Pants Double-Plus Size, just shoot me a line.

--Admiral Mojiferous J. Colossus

Wholesale Hero videos, more work on Simoebic Dysentery

King Thor and I continue to slave away on the latest version of Simoebic Dysentery, and I must say that I am confident that the newest beta build will be better, stronger and faster. I have changed the inner workings so that levels are procedurally generated, which gives us the ability to have an ever-expanding game without the headache of building every damned level (which is just too much work for a couple of guys busy with school, work and antelope wrangling.) We will also soon be filming an informational video for the game which is planned to involve jungles, witch doctors and hopefully evil robots.

In other news, I made some rather surreal little commercials for Wholesale Hero... Watch them here:
http://www.youtube.com/mojiferous483

First Wholesale Hero screenshots!

 That's right... I've been hard at work building the first working parts and pieces of Wholesale Hero, details of which are still murky and being figured out, so I can't say much about all the hows and whats quite yet, but I do have these rather lovely looking shots of the game in action. Nothing is necessarily set in stone quite yet, but don't worry -- soon enough I'll have something more meaningful to tell everyone.

Updates, or the story of what Mojiferous is wasting his time on...

 There isn't much going on here at Mojiferous Industries, just the slow trudging drudgery of work while I yearn to be outside enjoying the summertime. King Thor and I still have yet to really finalize any kind of evil plan regarding Simoebic Dysentery, but I'm still confident that eventually we'll get organized and finish something.

I've been busy with a few projects that are more like actual programming work and haven't been able to focus as much precious time to making incredibly pointless games, but rest assured there are still evil projects coming down the pipeline.

First amongst those may be the LAMP Motor Pants, which is still early in development, but the puzzle portion is entirely playable and I'm still trying to decide if it needs anything more than that or if I want to devote the time and resources to make it multiplayer aware, or if I should just finish the thing off for now, make it a Facebook app and then maybe decide where to go...

I've also begun work on another puzzle game concept called "Wholesale Hero", which is kind of a Motor Pants offshoot- more puzzly, less confusing racing BS. I have a working engine and some great concepts, but scheduling time to work on it has been harder than I thought (July seems to be full of birthdays, tiresome holidays, and days spent outside and away from my coding lair.) Eventually I will post some pictures and more information, but for now this tiny blurb (and probably a mention on the forum) will have to do.

--Mojiferous

FontUtensil released...

 Lo and behold! That's right, there's a new piece of Mojiferous Industries software, and it isn't a finished version of Simoebic Dysentery (quite yet)! I have just built an early beta of my latest um... "thing," which I have taken to calling FontUtensil.

What is it and why, you may ask?
FontUtensil started as an educational project and quickly turned into something that I could see myself using fairly often, because I'm too cheap (and not a graphic artist) too pay more than nothing for a font utility. I had a particular need that none of the current font utilities filled, namely the ability to quickly decide on a font for a project without endlessly scrolling through a billion menus only to forget what the name of the font was that I wanted to use… Let's be clear here though- I am not a graphic designer, nor do I claim to be, and FontUtensil is not designed with the designer in mind- it doesn't do font repair (yet), it doesn't give you tons of info about the fonts (yet), and it probably will be laughed at by the typographers in the audience, but I didn't design it for them…

I built in some features/future bugs that I don't exist (at least to my knowledge) in a free font utility program:
Firstly, being a game designer, I don't always use "safe" fonts that would satisfy the editorial staff at the New Yorker… No, instead I sometimes need a medieval typeface, or something that conveys "wacky", or a single word in three different sizes and 5 different colors. So I gave FontUtensil the ability to "lock" a piece of formatted text into place- Now I can compare and match an "ojiferous" against different M's.

Secondly, I may be good at visualizing something, but black text on a white background doesn't always give me a good feel for what I'm doing (which has been the main drawback of using something like Font Book,) so I built in the ability to load a background picture, set a type origin, and compare my ever-expanding font catalogue against the image that I'm actually working with.

Thirdly, I plan on keeping this project free, so that cheapskates like me can benefit from a (hopefully) useful utility program for the Mac- there's never enough freeware or Open Source software!

That being said, everyone should download the damned thing, try it out and let me know what you like and dislike, what crashes (I tested fairly thoroughly, but you never know) and what I should add as FontUtensil progresses on towards a viable program!

--Mojiferous

Download it here , or go directly to Mojiferous Industries and get it there

The website is finally updated!

That's right, she's up and ready to go... New look, all pretty and fresh, check it out and let me know what you think!