for our new year’s party we blew up lots of balloons, drew on them, and then, at midnight, popped them all with our hands, our feet, with weapons, with tenderness. i watched my rainbow-colored slut disappear into a pile of bright balloons, returning – at least for a moment – to her people. we played a game that merritt had made so that she could at least be at the party in spirit. it made me miss her less and then more. and everyone watched as i played through stephen lavelle’s new game, slave of god.

it’s a game about clubbing, but it’s not about clubs so much as it’s about an experience. it’s about bacchanalia, about losing yourself, about drifting unfettered on the crest of an experience, about getting high and not just in the obvious sense. i liked the scene on the dance floor: finding a partner, connecting, getting in tune, gradually losing awareness of everyone else, and ultimately having to extract oneself with a not-insignificant amount of effort. without words, it expressed these ideas.

it’s brilliant to look at. sometimes i can’t post a screenshot of a game because a still picture could never adequately communicate anything about the game. that’s the case here. with my friends watching, i was curator as well as player. i would point the camera at things, find interesting perspectives, focus now on this object, now on that, allow things to undulate for a while. it was hypnotic. the player has no body: my friends, sometimes, couldn’t be sure if i was moving the camera or if the colors themselves were moving toward us.