Enjoy some Ryanair Boeing 737 Safety Manual terms from Johnson A Plane Man

Ekphrasis is a concept from the ancient Greeks (they loved a good concept) that describes the act of creative writing inspired by a work of art. Is Ryanair’s Boeing 737 safety manual an art? Well, Johnson Airplane Man sheds some light on this, so I say yes. This is a short browser tickle game that chronicles the life and times of a man named Johnson, his love of yellow life jackets, his existential sense of confinement (despite the abundance of easy-to-find exits), and the sense of just The joy of liberation can be found in the yellow slide.
“It has always been a dream of mine to be able to create interactive works purely using the phone in my pocket, and I think this game is very fulfilling for me,” said developer Breogán Hackett (aka Hyphinett). Kat Brewster has previously written some lovely words about Hyphinett’s game Vitreous and other Bitsy horror games in this article , about how the engine is so well-suited to lo-fi ghosts. You can find Heifenet’s collective work here.
There may be some noble things to say about finding inspiration in mass-produced utilitarian images to express the zeitgeist, but I think Hackett was mostly just trying to do something fun on a long plane trip. I mostly spent a lot of time recording the increasingly angry facial expressions of people who kept bringing me free gin and tonics, so that seemed more productive.
But I’m very interested in how the mind naturally jumps to narrating inanimate or other prescriptive images, and how the playful joy of subverting symbolism feels like a very old and very instinctive game. A small example of this is the “No fucking horn, man” sign. It also reminds me of Joe Richardson’s adventure games using Renaissance art, like Four Last Things. There’s also The Pedestrian – a puzzle game that lets you play as a public sign silhouette.