Post 2 Delving into Dada 23/2/2021

I could write this whole 3500-word devblog only on the joy I get from the Dadaist Art movement. Dada was an anarchistic, complex and oftentimes completely absurd Art movement that originated in Zurich in Switzerland in the early 1920s. The movement at the time was very anti-war, anti-authoritarian and anti-art, and went about purposefully rebelling against the status-quo and breaking down societal systems. Dada meant that art could be anything and that people should be questioning the conventions they were living by, and as such, there was a lot of public backlash against it. 

My research into Dada in the first semester secured the fact that I wanted to make a game with the same rebellious (and absurdist) feel as the movement. I wanted something that said something about the sort of society we’re living in, disregarding the fact that it would probably raise some eyebrows. Arlo was going to be very on the nose, I’m not the sort of person who is good at subtlety, and that thought was a doubt I had to get past when I first started developing Arlo.  

After what can only be explained as the longest game of Pandemic I’ve ever taken part in, and the fact that I’ve been at Art College throughout it, it’s safe to say that I wouldn’t be coming home from university right-wing. It has been a shit-show, so I chose to make a game surrounding that shit-show. I’m not going to pretend I’m intelligent enough to analyze all the minutia of modern society and what impact something like free housing would have on it, but what I can do is be angry and shout into a void, and that’s what Arlo excels at.