I rememberreading about The Granniesa while back. They’re a group of game devs based in Melbourne who formed a gang (the titular Grannies) of older people in Rockstars rootin', tootin' cowboyRPGRed Dead Redemption 2- specificallyRed Dead Online. In the pursuit of fun, The Grannies, using a glitch known to a lot of the community, broke through the invisible walls in the game’s wild west and into another, wilder west - a landscape nobody was really meant to see.
It’s fifteen minutes well spent. The Grannies featured in the film are Goldie Bartlett, Andrew Brophy, Ian MacLarty, and Kalonica Quigley, though I believe when they play Red Dead Online The Grannies gang includes other friends too. The way they talk about their experience is dreamy, almost reverential (one even describes it as “a spiritual experience”), and when you see the footage and screenshots used in the film you can see why. Outside the map The Grannies found more boundaries, where a landscape of low res gravel stops suddenly and everything beyond it becomes a blurry dessert. They found rocks they called “the pyramids” - big, jagged triangular things sticking out of the ground. Floating trees and rocks. They crab walk into the sky, and swim in 2D water.
The website presentation is a nice way to view it outside of an installation specifically for it, too. You scroll down through a landscape until you sort of fall through it, so it feels like you’ve gone a little bit out of bounds yourself. There are two angled, virtual screes that show complimentary things, so you have to focus on it. It’s a moment of quiet. I found it very calming.
For disclosure’s sake, Buckenham and Foulston are both pals of Alice0 inThe Wild Rumpus. I think I met each of them exactly once about a decade ago.
