Gameplay Journal Entry #5

A glitch is when you take a game, its mechanics and code and you manipulate it to break the game and get a result that is unexpected. Dark souls has good examples of this where you can skip and kill bosses by having them fall through the map. You can skip ornstein and smough by killing smough and fighting ornstein in the second phase. You can manipulate his movement by having him grab you by a wall and after you are thrown he will take a step forward and walk through the wall falling and dying instantly. You manipulate the mechanics of the fight to get a result that is not supposed to happen.

As stated by Goriunova and Shulgin “A glitch is an unpredictable change in the system’s behavior” (110). This means that glitches are something that is changed within the behavior that can result to unpredictable results such as ornstein going through a wall and falling to his death. The systems behavior is altered when he takes a step forward after the grab and he he collides with a wall that is not supposed to be in his way. The unpredictable change is that he goes through the wall and falls off the game world. This glitch can cause players to completely avoid the boss that otherwise is quite difficult.

Goriunova, Olga, and Alexei Shulgin. “Glitch.” Software Studies: a Lexicon, by Matthew Fuller, MIT, 2008.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7mdbZdKsTg&ab_channel=LittleBoss61