gamesthatexist

Great description. Thanks for posting! Before reading yours and clyde's posts about this one, I think I really underestimated how different doug.zip feels in tone from the other games. I agree with you about this being less on the simulated kitsch side. I would also place Work Drinks in this category I think? Though doug.zip probably has a category all its own. It's such a terse little experience only extended by the potential stasis of perpetually entering & exiting your house in anticipation of this vaguely ominous trip to the hospital. The idea that doug.zip is this stark sputter of sincerity surrounded by oscillating kitsch is an interesting one, though I'm not sure I experienced it in this way since I found it so deliberately opaque (though in a very different way than the other ones). Your reading of this game is sort of how I usually see the other marker games, but on a more micro level - waves of pulpy simulacra with stranded little blips of sincerity mixed in.

Wow that is some performance, weird combination of saccharine and sinister(?). I'll never look at moths the same again. These are both really good suggestions. I like the idea of freeindiegam.es because as mentioned it has a distinct voice (well, multiple voices) and is low maintenance (clyde, you could continue moderating/curating, and all you would have to do would be hit the "random" button and post the results). And yeah, it seems like freeware has already moved on to something else, or maybe just disseminated even further. It's important to document/appreciate lenses like FIG because they have wide ripple effects even as they seem to come and go quickly. Increpare's catalog would be great too because there's such an impressive body of work there. It seems like Slave of God got significant coverage, but that's the only one I know of that people payed much attention to? I loved Rara Racer. Only drawback of FIG approach is we wouldn't run across any of those games (though we would definitely get a sense of the curatorial voice since increpare was a contributor). I am leaning towards FIG because based on previous discussion it seems like the method people would be more into. Which ones are in the break-up series???

Yeah I agree, short and free is a good baseline. If you don't mind my asking, what kinds of games do you like? Also, it might be worth pointing out that you could literally just write one sentence per week about each game if you want to participate, but don't like the idea of feeling obligated to spend much time on it. There are no rules or anything about how many thoughts you need to write down.

Yeah, I was more interested in the idea of controlling context than the idea of controlling perception of the work itself (though I guess adjusting context is indirect way of controlling audience perception. I mean, context matters so much! Way too much, probably!). I think there's a lot of obsession with controlling experiential context both in mass consumer culture and in more niche artistic communities. W/r/t the former, I'm thinking of big budget game companies that roll out the red carpet for certain people to preview and eventually review their game, using this IRL preferential treatment as a compliment to the in-game mechanics that reinforce the reviewer's sense of self-importance. W/r/t the art world, I'm thinking of debates over gallery spaces. Should a work be the only thing on a blank wall, so viewer can focus on one artwork at a time? Or should a wall be covered in art so viewer gets more 'realistic' sense of its context among other works? Should gallery try to avoid overwhelming the viewer, or should viewer just dip in and out and not expect to see/experience everything? Then there's of Jeff Tweedy scolding some people in his audience for talking too much. First time I watched that I thought, man, what is Tweedy's problem? Then later I played a house show where I experienced every single one of those feelings across the spectrum (didn't say the shit out loud, but definitely felt all of it and cut off the set early). This is what's interesting about the internet as context for experiencing art. It's not impossible to build community there (lots of various curatorial channels, etc.), but in some ways it's like throwing your art into a black hole. One thing that's interesting about the fantasy of the "IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCE" is that it threatens to dominate context; it promises that this fake, digital context will usurp your actual physical presence in the world around you. I think your reading of the artist's fantasy of humility/satisfaction is an interesting one. Humility is real struggle for anyone in capitalist society that preaches fantasies of meritocracy, rugged individualism, self-importance, etc. over community. This article in the Atlantic is pretty ok: it talks some about how "the artist" doesn't exist in the same way because we have a lot of apprentice creators. Yeah, that's interesting. In that light, fantasy of becoming pop culture phenomenon is on some level a disempowerment fantasy.

to me these aren't two separate things. jokes containing truth and all that wait...who in here enjoys literary criticism SHOW YOURSELF

obviously i am interested in another game club. the way I see it, we could approach it a few different ways. 1) Pick a specific developer and go through their entire catalog of short form/freeware/homebrew work. This method has benefit of really getting to know the sensibilities, interests, methods, etc. of a specific person. That's what has been nice about this club. Potential drawback I guess is people might feel more like they need to catch up if they get behind with this kind of arrangement, which leads to people dropping off. 2) Go through a random collection of trainwreck games--maybe use a launcher like one of the Pirate Karts. Or could just pick random games on the website week by week. this has benefit of getting feel for the culture and context that produces these kinds of games without placing as much stock in specific developer's sensibilities, which might lead to folks feeling less compulsion to catch up on stuff they missed (at the same time, i guess this could lead to less consistent posting). 3) Like clyde mentioned, a group could pick games week to week or individuals could take turns suggesting games. Only potential drawback is more organizational effort and posting, which might lead to less consistency or more reluctance to participate in first place.

well, here I am again, just realizing that I accidentally stole my grandiose new year's eve ideas from the treacherous Mystery Zone bog itself. here's a passage on a couple of obscure RPGMaker games, Bat Castle and Ghosts of Aliens: back to the drawing board.......

there’s something uncomfortable about the dig-a-hole-and-live-in-it vibe of my last post, so i want to revisit the topic of cultural production. also, we’re about halfway through now, and i’m using the new year as an opportunity to reflect on this process. over the course of our conversation about these games, i’ve started to think about them more as lenses, filters for looking at culture, than as alternate frameworks in themselves (the latter is the way I think we tend to approach small experimental games). think of how doug.zip (sorry for skipping ahead a little) is so aggressively mysterious, with its wrinkled paper background and a sound loop that multiplies as you enter and exit the shapeless house, your avatar no more than a glob that curls up into itself when it moves, a title that’s either about someone or made by someone you will never know, a vague, haunted, "found-art" tone which we might be tempted to reduce to obscurantism because the effect pretty much boils down to “what the hell is this?” but there is also a sense that something so ephemeral and unassuming as doug.zip, and its position in a larger collection of similar games, makes us (re)consider how we tend to look at art instead of just looking at what’s there. the view we get through these marker games is both refracted and slowed down, like looking at a film frame by frame. which is curious because the designer of these games worked from a place of rapid production, probably envisioning them as oddities the player could easily pick up and put down via random sampling, dipping in and out, or by plowing straight through in a blur. they are whimsical, but in a way they’re also no-nonsense, all the fat trimmed off so all that’s left is a thin phantom experience representing whatever the designer originally found interesting about games in the first place. our reception of these games has been taking the opposite approach of their production, the way we’re taking them week by week over the course of a year, receiving them more slowly than they were produced, picking at every detail. i think this shows us something else about them. it’s something like realizing for the first time that your perception is mediated through an extra screen; we can see what’s in this scratchware, but also what else it’s a part of. i don’t mean to try and make these games sound grander than they are. it’s possible that i am just projecting, but i think it’s more like instead of playing these things and waiting for an experience to happen to us, we are slowly developing ideas about what the work means piece by piece, giving it time to affect and change us. it’s a contrived, but meaningful, way of experiencing culture not unlike how vesper.5, already a wispy little thing in its own right, stretches itself out over days, weeks, months, content to allow you to forget about it then come back later if you want. decompressed like this, the rote movements inside the game are relieved of the pressure of making meaningful statements, which positions them in a less antagonistic relationship to the player so that player and game can work together to make meaning. if all of that sounds cloying or precious, i might point out that the experience of playing even the most expensive shoot game is already sort of like this because despite all of the futuristic advertising rhetoric it always ends up as just another clumsy pile of fragments. the main difference is the sprawling, uncanny environments (because technological arms race & military industrial complex), but more crucially there is so much shit that you have to do and collect and annihilate; meanwhile there is this grand compulsion to get it all over with; either you keep revisiting this world over several sittings or you begin, as many do, to neglect basic human needs. there’s something very slow, plodding, tedious about how you squirm across this kind of world, and that’s to say nothing of the inevitable accidents, glitches, and interruptions papered over in crunch time (see this essay for some theorizing about how all this works). BUT IT IS TRUE that if you plod through some 50-hour odyssey of stumbling, rote exercise then you are bound to notice something interesting, at least subconsciously, about the world along the way and how it affects you. except at this point you wish you hadn’t spent all that time doing whatever the hell else you were doing, like obtaining the wisdom that comes with reaching the end of a long life only to wish you had worked less. i guess i’m trying to get at how experiencing stuff like 50 short games in the way we have on this forum can tell us something about how to look at games and, more generally, culture in a more interesting way, without this sense of lurking obligation that is an inevitable side effect (or perhaps the whole point) of media conventions designed to both imitate and extract labor. if we think about small trainwreck games as lenses, then maybe we don’t fall into the trap of insular self-involvement, i.e. digging a hole in the desert and waiting for someone else to show up. maybe these things can help filter out some of the grit and show us the churning, underlying energy we were looking for in the wider culture, so media doesn’t have to feel so much like wading through slop. i know this sounds incoherent, and like i’m reaching, but there’s something intangible + inspiring here that i’m trying to articulate. i don’t mean to betray 50 short games to the tyranny of “usefulness” or question their value of existing in their own right, just trying to explain what i like about them and what i’m getting out of them. happy new year :]

ok I am embarrassed that I fell into the trap of spending more words on this game than any of the previous ten I’ve written about. this is exactly what they wanted! humiliating! i find that sometimes it is helpful to point out obvious things. there is a lot of audience manipulation here. the game quickly puts the audience in a position where they have to defend themselves, reversing the traditional interpretive relationship where a work has to defend/justify its value to its audience not only explicitly but subtlety. “En guarde,” says the Nothing Much scholar. usually when there is some interpretation or exegesis happening, thecatamites will step into some dubious character, a distancing act of extra mediation, like another screen. the best part about Nothing Much scholar's character is that they never succeed in constructing an argument. it’s all confused notes, hopeless flailing, wondering at what the point of any of it is. this game is funny for the way it steps back and considers what and who these games are for, if there is any audience and if so what they might want to do with them, what the stakes are, and what’s in it for them? i mean there’s only so many things you can look at/talk about, only so many different self-serving approaches you can take! does any1 who pays attention to this kind of stuff actually enjoy it for its own sake, or is everyone, consciously or not, out to pursue whatever interpretive agenda has been nailed into their skulls by whatever cultural institution they prefer? predicting audience response, and using audience as excuse to pursue particular interpretive threads (how many RTs can I get if I go with this line of thinking?), sounds crude, but I know I’m guilty of this! and besides, reading is never an apolitical act, it’s always performance even if you’re just sittin’ alone in your room with a bourbon. always an imagined audience soaking up yr thought bubbles. there is no escape...... another funny thing about this is the way the game is packaged, how the order of items on the menu screen facetiously dictates the correct sequence you must punch in in order to interpret something, and this will probably succeed in tricking you into poring over every detail even if you immediately know what's going on. if you bother to read the notes, then you’ll probably go back and check each scene, walk around at the bus stop and see if anything happens if you walk off screen in each direction. this game is considering the kinds of stories that are written with the knowledge that no one will read them, or at least written in a mode that is PRETENDING that no one will ever read them (author seems to have some experience with both now). it brings to the surface the idea that interpretation traditionally is both an act of aggression and self-defense, argument must be air-tight full of meticulously cataloged examples so no alternatives can slip through. Nasty plays with this idea to the extent that it kind of doubles in on itself. perhaps thecatamites knows that at this point (of making the trainwreck games), there is a modest collection at least of people who will play whatever the hell thecatamites puts out there, so this is trying to see what that audience will put up with, or perhaps more accurately deflect having to worry about what the audience will put up with through accelerated production and esoteric fragment worlds. this game is pretty self-conscious & self-deprecating, but it’s not really sneering or wallowing; it's having fun with itself and its audience. i mean clearly it's a joke, but for a certain type of audience maybe it’s a joke that’s a lil’ bit cutting. but at the same time, if you look at the author’s note, again clearly a joke (btw any idea what the George reference is about? maybe a beckett play or something?), but i think it’s also genuinely wondering what it would be like if, as author, you could actually control your audience? if you could put them in an ideal, quiet context (calm, sunny room with nice foliage) to where even the most disingenuous player might consider beauty of fragmented things instead of wondering why the gfx aren’t more polished. but then, of course, control would defeat the whole purpose right? art has to deal with the culture that produces it, not the ideal culture for it, which raises questions about institutionalized high culture, gallery spaces, and such. it also makes me think of how i kind of fruitlessly try to "keep up" with this stuff, how many times something well-crafted has been shared online but its craft didn't really matter nor did the person who shared it. i just wasn't in the right mental, physical, or emotional space to appreciate it at the time. perhaps this game also functions as warning against getting over-enthusiastic about importance of curation and criticism, but I don’t wanna say it’s that preachy or curmudgeonly. i think it’s sort of reflecting and poking fun at the way culture gets produced more than it’s condemning. i think it’s important to point out that there is a genuine love of note-taking and documenting, the idea that preserving and talking about culture, even perhaps one that is totally contrived, can be fulfilling and meaningful in its own right (for an example look no further than the author’s notes that come packaged with the launcher). i mean obviously there’s a lot of analysis and interpretation out there that is very hegemonic, formulaic, obnoxious, etc. but that isn’t a particularly interesting thing to point out. like any other game this is its own lil’ microuniverse that constantly refers to itself, speaks and reinforces its own vernacular. part of the fun of playing a game is the fleeting sense of learning a meaningless new vocabulary. we’ve talked before about how these games seem content to exist without the player’s intrusion, and this game is a further extension of that idea. it positions itself as an object of study, fabricates a fake discourse around itself instead of waiting for an equally dubious discourse (such as the one now taking place in this very forum) to arise on its own. i was wading through the old bog over at Mystery Zone last night, and this passage struck a chord: the idea being grasped at here is so difficult to articulate because it lives in this very narrow space between cynicism and hope. between narcissism and desire to connect with other humans. it’s a scary place to think about. most people end up wanting to express ideas in the first place in order to make some kind of dent in the glacier, and that usually doesn’t work so maybe all you can do is burrow into the ground and take it one sublime accidental human encounter at a time. but then what about the glacier? does this mean we just gave up? were we just not cut out to live on a glacier? i think these passages are useful as points of contrast to the “Nasty” game but also as connective tissue. there is a sense in this game and in the rest of 50SG, in their means of production and in their execution, of trying to escape the Chinese Finger Trap, of trying to outpace both frivolous adolescent interests and seductive technological conventions, of trying to stop letting them dictate creative output but without leaving that stuff behind entirely. there’s a genuine sense of trying to change, but also trying to stay grounded in some way so you don't just float away. vidyogame as insular, onanistic, recursive black hole that eventually collapses in on itself, hopefully leaving something redemptive in its wake. p.s. does it really get to anyone else when “myriad” is used as noun? doesn’t it always sound better in adjective form? e.g. “myriad readings” rather than “a myriad of readings.” Nothing Much scholar needs to sharpen that proze. oh well no one's perfect, i'm tryin to cut down on my articles and pronouns. NASTY (NOTMUCHANDEXEGESIS): AT RISK OF DAMAGING MY INTEGRITY I WILL REVISE EARLIER SCORE AND AWARD A TENTATIVE +1000 STARS

wow great job catchin up and welcome!

NASTY: negative 1000 stars

Yeah, how am I supposed to know if the graphix are good.

When I was writing my first piece for Arcade Review and going through everything in thecatamites' catalogue (incl. the trainwreck games as they were being made day-to-day), I somehow missed this one, and I'm almost kinda glad.

I feel like this one is already making fun of us before we even start.

SEA OF LOVE: Liking the dreamy haze of this one, the pink waves and beaches accompanied by whining lower register synth loop (significant bc usually the audio loops are shrill, slightly grating) cradling a lonely house. I think my favorite part might be the sluggish, lapping water. The labyrinthine cave mixed with the trial-and-error jrpg battles are cute and unobtrusive, but they feel fairly aimless, and this particular ecosystem maybe doesn’t need more than one monster type (it might actually be more poignant if it was just you and one other in this lonesome little world). But at the same time it’s relaxing walking up to each different monster just to see what each one looks like (you can easily avoid ones you’ve already visited), and see what each one likes, as opposed to the way battles function in most games as a kind of rote mechanized labor. The reward screen is effectively mysterious, a sharp little jingle, a cube with an eyeball. There is some differentiation of the awards for each monster, but I can't recall them clearly. This feels not quite fully realized, but in a nice way. Video game as half-expressed sigh, sleepy, suspended. I don't think it's always helpful to include author's notes, but here I think they are warranted:

OPERATIVE ASSAILANTS: Clyde’s right, the problem with these operatives is totally on a management level, and I’ve got some questions that need answering. Why did management neglect to train workers in the proper utilization of Grav-O-Boot’s in zero-G field? Why didn’t someone realize that UFO was stationed too far away to notice anything useful? I’ll admit it was a good move sending Robo into a base where it is very hard to distinguish robots from background environment, but why send Robo into shooter game where Robo is sure to be destroyed? Whose decision was it to name Car-Car twice? Who dropped Pete’s key behind those spikes? Why are we wasting time with a Mogey cameo appearance? This is an important mission! Why do we expect assemblages of disparate forms to make coherent statements? Why did we ever subscribe to auteur theory? Is it possible to work outside of artistic conventions developed for purposes of commodification? Can act of interpretation be separated from rhetorical performance of making overbearing arguments aspiring to a singularity of meaning? Why doesn’t Socratic method work in schoolz? “Brainlord, we need your brains to infiltrate the base! Understood.” Note the repetition in this dialogue that mirrors the absurd redundancy of someone named “Brainlord” receiving instructions from management. Brainlord is clearly unsatisfied with workplace environment. The Synderblok plan was brilliant. I have no complaints. Synderblok’s greatest obstacle was fate. There’s this vague sense of collective agenda without any sense of what anyone should actually be doing to work towards that agenda. I like how the commander is too insecure to lead, and how the hub world/menu is the most promising and overwhelming part of the game. Once you get into each character you only have a few seconds to anticipate the dead end. Video game as bloated task force committee, as entrenched obstacle course of incompetence contrived on the bureaucratic level.

This is really interesting, and I think it also speaks to an important point about 50SG and the trainwreck culture in which it participates. At risk of stating the obvious, there's an overbearing sense in game review culture that a single video game is supposed to contain a world. Advertising copy suggests that this world should be exhausting and inexhaustible, a sufficient alternative to living your own life. A game should contain its own discourse and vocabulary--you start playing and learn its vocabulary, but that's not enough. The expectation is that you'll spend at least ten or twenty or so more hours (and many more for the big rpgs) reinforcing your fluency to the point where you can set yourself apart from the uninitiated. Of course, even big triple-A games exist within larger discourses, genres rigidly defined by particular formal conventions (shoot man in head, jump towards platform), but there's always some twist, some new thing that is supposed to sell the game as containing a discourse that is entirely its own. The trainwreck games, chopped up and pasted together, reproduce this process at a rapid pace in a way that both trivializes all of the reference points involved but also brings the fragments to the surface and highlights them as interesting in their own right, rejecting the premise that discourse mastery should be an involved, emotionally rigorous process of losing yourself in some twitchy hyperreal universe. Instead, discourse and vocabulary should be rapidly fluctuating, accessible but changing faster than any one person could keep up with, churning out references at such a rapid pace as to render them almost empty but at the same time eerily evocative of something outside their origins, something that can't be contained in any individual cultural object.

I know we’re here to talk about 50SG (and am aware that I’m a couple behind as usual), but I want to interrupt and drop in some hopefully relevant close reading. I’ve been working on a new piece for Arcade Review and re-reading the A1 Reviews archive for inspiration (A1 is a sort of fictional character written by thecatamites doomed to write game reviews) and reeling over how exquisite the prose is. This is the kind of writing that is way too good, but it somehow makes me want to write more instead of making me never want to write again. I don’t mean to be hyperbolic when I say that these lil' micro-reviews keep blowing my mind (plz excuse my noxious triple-A phraseology) every time I look back over them. There is something ineffable about the A1 character - this writer that seems to have been swallowed up by traditional game review consumer culture. Here the qualities of reviews you might find at hardcoregaming101 are exaggerated to the point of absurdity, but that’s not the whole shtick. The character slips in and out of these sublime theoretical tangents that tend to zoom out and give you a bird’s eye view of games as ridiculous, horrible cultural assemblages, and the writing itself seems to be an elaborate performance of this culture. Let me try to find a good example. How bout the first one? See how A1 uses the premise of a game review to talk not about the specific game alluded to in the title but about something else entirely that the ominous premise of Game Review brings to the surface? How the looping, swerving sentences ignore a lot of conventional wisdom about writing style and in doing so manage to mirror the mental process involved in teasing out an abstract idea? How the wild simile is tucked away inside a deceptively modest parenthetical? These sentences don’t just make you need to read them again, they make you want to read them again. The A1 character is highly attentive to its role as a fictional construct: The character seems deeply troubled by this inexplicable overbearing obligation to spend so many hours getting through video games in order to review them, and often gets distracted from them in order to project neurotic obsession to detail and mysterious urge to sound like advertisements onto other outlets: The joke points to the paradoxical consumer demand that game reviews be written in an 'unbiased' tone, even as the game review apparatus largely functions as advertising copy for a couple of monolithic companies. You must sell me the human hand, but you may not do this by explicitly telling me that you like the human hand. Instead, you must do so subtly, by detailing the number of curves, digits, wrinkles, and creases in said hand so that I may make an informed but not unduly influenced decision on the matter. Man, is this what it takes to make theory fun to read? Surely not, or people wouldn’t still be talkin’ about all the top theorists. But still, I think there’s something in this character that is attuned to the anti-intellectualism that can be a part of internet cultures, as if playing this character allows the writing to go in directions it wouldn’t otherwise for fear of seeming smug or self-serving. This must be part of why I like the character so much, for the way it captures and deflects the insecurities of seeming pretentious. There are moments when A1 hits on this sublime theorizing thread only to pull back and retreat to the relative safety of a kind of pulpy slapstick: The meaningless arbitrary number of stars at the end of each review caps off the transition from genuinely grappling with meaning to descending back into nonsensical rubrics of 'objective' game review speak. Sometimes it moves in the opposite direction, starting with uncanny advertising copy and using this mode as a shovel to dig down to the deeper stuff: Undeniably this performance makes the thoughts more fun to read, but how much is it a necessary part of the entire effect? And for how many readers does this actually work well? The imagined audience that I picture for this website is some ghost floating through the internet ether, stumbling over wires of broken hyperlinks. There is an attention to language here that makes me think of someone who is willing to read not just good but bad sentences twenty times over and relish both types equally. Take a look at this careful, bittersweet explication of some writer that I’ve never heard of: !!!!! holy shit. The writing also betrays a consistent fondness for metaphor and simile, and with these techniques I don’t get the same sense of the writer pulling back as I get with the theory stuff. These moments somehow seem less self-conscious and recursive. The above “like a stream through boulders” and "like on a hook" are good examples, but also: Part of what makes these reviews work is this vast sense of distance, the way they’re all piled up as a txt. file in some dusty archive with no extra formatting to make them look good. The words do all the work. It looks like the abandoned website of some 90s teen who was really into modernist literature. I think a lot of these prose ticks come from the modernists, but it’s hard to say because the writing does such a job of mingling loquacious style (marathon clause tangents and liberal usage of commas and dashes) with a pulp sensibility (hyperbolic characterizations, self-deprecation, and equal reverence for ‘bad’ and ‘good’ writing). Well, that’s about it. Thank you, and I’m sorry. A1 REVIEWS: 88 STARS

From the author's notes:

YardDoggz is a simple little diorama where you play fetch with your dog. The most striking thing about it is the fall foliage. All brown, squiggly, but has a nice depth & variety, trees with leaves hanging on, bare limbs, brush, bushes, dead leaves, dirty ground, brown grass. I like how you can throw the ball and then sort of wander away from your dog as it tries to catch you. I like how you can, simultaneously, absentmindedly entertain the dog while you're exploring the world (in that very brief window where you haven't seen everything yet, my favorite part of the game, which lasts about ten seconds). This is the strength of a lot of these games. How they figure out how to juxtapose some mundane activity with the act of exploration in a way that elevates both, in a way that is often poetic, sometimes profound. YardDoggz is quiet, despite the blurting horns. Wrath of the Serpent and Tales of Terror share a similar aesthetic that is unlike YardDoggz. YardDoggz looks like a colored pencil on otherwise blank canvas. The latter two look more like DOS games filled with MS Paint drawings, black backdrop with some garish colors on top, Carmen Sandiego-style environments. Wrath of the Serpent is striking for its limited sense of both control and perspective. At first you think the snake represents the outer limits of your vision, and you control something inside it. Then you realize you're actually moving the serpent around, and can only see through the serpent; it is your telescope. Then, you realize you're controlling both the limits of your perspective and also what's inside of it. What is inside of it? A garbled conversation of sorts. Representations of frustrated miscommunication. An angry-looking cartoon who is on the phone with someone he clearly does not want to be talking to. The sense of this character's frustration that stems from not being able to communicate successfully mirrors your own experience of looking in on these little fragments of meaning, brushing the serpent over the environment like a clumsy detective lookin for cluez. It feels something like asynchronous communication, except no it doesn't, it feels more like live communication over a distance, like Skypeing on slow internet. Tales of Terror is the most campy of this trio. YardDoggz isn't campy at all, kind of quiet and poetic, and Serpent is somewhere in between. In Tales of Terror you drive a fearsome vehicle up to a terrible castle and you delight in the screams of whoever they are in the castle. Your character looks like the infamous Murder Dog. Of the aforementioned three games, this one is the most aimless in the sense of what it's trying to do. The driving section serves as a great buildup and introduction to the castle, but then the castle interior is some half-hearted platforming, then a purgatory room at the end decorated only with a glib, white "thanks." YardDoggz and Serpent feel confident and self-contained. This one ran out of steam about half-way through. Just goes to show that it depends on the day, right?

Just want to point to this as a good example of working yourself up into an interesting thought. And it's cool to be able to see this cognitive process play out on the page. Thanks for indulging the rules of the game.

I really like this idea! These games seem hyperaware of themselves as potentially arbitrary (?) containers for fun marker drawings, consistent sensibility, and an always elusive author's perspective. And I think what the author probably finds most interesting about games in general is a sense of them as arbitrary containers rather than holistic, coherent, intentional, or fully realized forms. Cheating is allowed and probably even encouraged in this forum. Great post, thanks for writing!

This discussion question is hopelessly flawed. Of course, choice only matters as it relates to perspective. It doesn’t matter whether or not choices have “real” consequences. The only thing that matters is how the player/audience perceives the choice. It doesn’t matter how the player experiences consequences. What matters is how the player experiences the choice itself. All you need is a small window, where the player can wonder “what would this have been like otherwise, if I chose differently.” In a game of this scope, this window is very small because what we’ll end up doing is simply play through the game a few times and explore every branch for the purposes of discussing it in this here forum. Nevertheless, you get that small window of wonder, where you’re like “I wonder what’s going on in that other room?” So it’s about both choice and perspective, but choice only matters as it relates to player perspective. Everything is set up like a stage or diorama. It’s as if you + your double detective avatars + are like an audience, but the unwelcome kind. Every room contains some kind of performance, but it’s as if you have stumbled back stage and are intruding on the closed off dress rehearsals rehearsals rehearsals rehearsals rehearsals rehearsals rehearsals I forget how this works exactly, but in the Walking Dead game you make choices that don’t have real consequences beyond text that appears on screen such as “She will remember that you said that.” This is basically all the player requires to be convinced that choices are meaningful. Just some indication that the machine recognizes the choice as such. This is enough to manipulate player perspective, and what’s under the hood in the Walking Dead game is hidden so deftly that the player never really questions that text on the screen. Of course they’ll remember, I said that. Why wouldn’t they. I’m either running out of things to say or I’ve gotten so scattered I forgot where I was going with this. I guess I should consider what the game’s thesis is, since that’s part of the question. I think the game is trying to present a space that is stripped down to these two essential elements (perspective & choice) and the actual contents of these containers are meaningless, like a Beckett play or something. There’s no narrative progression or development of characters, it’s all shifting player perspective, both manipulated by the player and evaded by the game. The game must acknowledge the presence of the player because it is the player’s perspective that governs it, but here the game acts as if we are intruding. This is how we are acknowledged, so our choices always feel like a combination of meaningless and wrong.

Ok, so for Which Way, I'm gonna try starting us off with a discussion question, a prompt of sorts. In thecatamites's Which Way, which do you think is more crucial to the game's thesis: 1) the element of choice OR 2) the player's sense of perspective? You have ten minutes. You may not stop typing for anything. If you can't think of what to type next, then you have to type "I can't think of it" over and over. Or you can type the last word you just typed over and over again until you think of something to say. Start now. Or whenever.

Garlo's Gambit (belated): Had to look up "gambit" again, which I'm pretty sure I've had to do each time I've played this game. Gambit is an X-men, and also an opening chess move, and also a way to start a conversation. Garlo's Gambit is another nonsense alliterative video game character name (My guess is this is how thecatamites arrived at the subject matter of the game--a kind of video game avatar madlib. Whoops, actually I just checked the notes, and I was wrong.). For the first time, we play as a garbage truck. Outstanding. Love the garrish city, but those are the most confusing looking garbage bags ever. Actually, those are your avatars (both of them). Those are the most confusing looking avatars ever. I like the balance of prose and exploration in this one. In terms of volume, the writing feels more restrained, deliberate, well-placed. Edit: Clyde, your thoughts helped me appreciate the sinister element here. I think this is probably the most interesting aspect of the tone, and it's pretty subtle. Like a parable with a twinge of darkness.