Lucas Lugarinho Shows Ghost Rococó at the Rijksakademie
Players control a stray bullet drifting through a dream with no mission or target.
Lucas Lugarinho showed Ghost Rococó on September 18 at [untitled games event] at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, where the organizers said the game returned by popular demand. Lugarinho also gave a talk at the event, continuing one begun in June.
In the game, the player is the Lost Bullet, a stray round flying through a dream. Lugarinho has said that no "mission" or "target" is clearly defined in it. The player is the projectile rather than the shooter, and there is nothing to hit.
Lugarinho describes the work as an exploration of how anti-capitalist game design can betray the medium's pull toward fantasies of justice and of punishment alike.
Born in Rio de Janeiro, Lugarinho is a resident at the Rijksakademie and works across videogames and painting. Upstream Gallery describes both strands as sampling disparate media ecosystems into counter-colonial narratives. Lugarinho has had a solo show at Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil in Mexico City and received the Cisneros Foundation's award for emerging artists.
For more reading, see a game about the Haitian Revolution with no bullets, the history of the bullet hell shooter and Lugarinho's gallery page.
Games made in art residencies and galleries rarely get covered as games. Radar, the free Killscreen newsletter, finds them twice a week.
