DISCODOOM

DISCODOOM  is an intervention on the Doom engine (id Software, 1993), built on FreeDoom and GZDoom. The first level (MAP01) is entirely stripped of its original iconography: walls are black; floors and ceilings are replaced by fluorescent color fields assigned according to ceiling height; surfaces pulse slowly between their color and black, breathing at roughly 1.4-second intervals. The player's weapon sprite is replaced by an abstract cross, alternating between + and × forms. There are no monsters, no keys, no exit.

You walk through a space that was designed for combat, emptied of its purpose, reduced to pure geometry and color.

DISCODOOM is part of an ongoing series of experiments conducted for the research-creation thesis Abstraction. An Aesthetics of Failure? (UQAM, Montréal). Each experiment takes an existing game engine as a substrate and applies operations of reduction, misuse, and drift, until the game becomes something else.