Please Adjust Your Set for Live Disasters

October 11, 2018 10:54 AM

Live Disasters is not just a video game. It is a surreal, dizzying piece of art comprised of a nightmare collage of hallucinated blasts of cable news coverage, disaster fetishism, and staticky, between channel weirdness from American multimedia artist (mefi's own) Andrew Vennell. You play as a perpetually-crashing airliner that is on fire. You can fly around, collecting power-ups, avoiding obstacles, and ejecting passengers with the space bar. Or not!

Description from the artist's website:

Live Disasters
Animation, Collage, New Media, Website, 2010

"LiveDisasters.com is a video game in the form of a tv news broadcast. An interactive collage of news footage, theoretical texts and propaganda, glitches and static, safety videos, advertising and elements from popular video games, Live Disasters performs a televised crisis that is always unfolding, never resolved, and forces the viewer into active participation with uncertain (and frequently undermined) control over the events. As a video game, it is not much fun. Begun in May of 2001, version 2.0 was released in September 2010. Additional levels are added as the events of history demand it."

posted by Krazor (17 comments total)

Dow is up, win-win-win!
posted by Meatbomb at 11:16 AM on October 11, 2018

Twitter: The Video Game
posted by bondcliff at 11:38 AM on October 11, 2018

Are there any snakes on the plane?
posted by Termite at 11:58 AM on October 11, 2018

No, but at one point, you turn into a sub sandwich that drops meatball bombs, so...
posted by Krazor at 12:04 PM on October 11, 2018 [3 favorites]

Requires Flash.
posted by ardgedee at 2:05 PM on October 11, 2018

“the uncanny collisions of meaning submerged in narratives of advertising and politics“
Sure, Jan.
posted by Ideefixe at 2:08 PM on October 11, 2018 [2 favorites]

Go up, young MeFite. Go up.
posted by grumpybear69 at 3:08 PM on October 11, 2018

I am assuming that the plane is yet another victim of the Horrible Goose.
posted by delfin at 3:18 PM on October 11, 2018

Determined or not, that Flash game is 17 years old, hang in there baby
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 10:43 PM on October 11, 2018

I love the end screen that plays when you crash the plane. That's some quality there.
posted by LegallyBread at 7:07 AM on October 12, 2018

Oh hey, it still works. It had "always" been my intention to convert this to some more future-proof technology, but time marches ever onward.
posted by AndNeverWell at 10:45 AM on October 12, 2018 [3 favorites]

oh hey i'm a cloud!
posted by numaner at 11:43 PM on October 12, 2018

i got to be a hot dog too!
posted by numaner at 12:01 AM on October 13, 2018

so you just keep rotating through the stages, but the one i haven't gotten past yet is the one inside the volcano, where there's less room to maneuver
posted by numaner at 12:02 AM on October 13, 2018

ok past the volcano is.... this
posted by numaner at 12:14 AM on October 13, 2018

oh after that it's back to the first stage. yay i'm done!
posted by numaner at 12:19 AM on October 13, 2018

NOTE: lots of irritating flashing lights; do not play if you have trouble with that kind of thing
posted by queen anne's remorse at 2:19 PM on October 14, 2018