Janne Schimmel and Vinzenz Build Remote-Work Console Game

Those shiny objects we hold in our hands and stuff beneath under media consoles are deceptively smooth. So smooth, there's a cottage industry of case covers to keep clumsy cats like me from breaking their phones when they're juggling too many things in the kitchen.

Artist Janne Schimmel and game maker Vinzenz see the deception of those shiny surfaces and have responded with Friendly Secrecy System, a game and sculpture built as a fictional remote-work console. Vinzenz tackled the game system, while Schimmel made the sculpture, which players operate through two custom input wheels. The pair posted photos and a play clip on Oct. 14. Watch the clip below.

According to the post, the project took off as a discussion about how input systems fail us and are often underrepresented in games. (Although the folks at Wonderville would certainly like a word.) Wheels, for example, as the Playdate demonstrates, are rarer than they should be and allow wider gradations of movement than the finality of the keyboard or click. The title borrows a concept from media theorist Friedrich Kittler, which the pair describe as the way technological interfaces "present a smooth, 'friendly' surface while concealing the complex running of the machine."

The software asks "how both video games and work demand obedience and compliance and how we can secretly sneak past the guardrails." Sickhouse, the digital art space in Enschede, Netherlands, that runs The Overkill Festival, and Stimuleringsfonds, the Dutch Creative Industries Fund, supported the work. Photos are by Silvia Cappellari.

Schimmel, born in 1993 in Arnhem, lives and works between Antwerp and Arnhem. Earlier projects include Remember Mii, a homebrew Wii game made with Rein van der Woerd, and a run of computer case mods, per Schimmel's site.

For more reading, see Abandoned Miis come back in a homebrew Wii game, Janne Schimmel's portfolio and Graceless Games.