gamesthatexist

Thank you for this link and thank you for saying hi. Please tell your friend and anyone else that they are welcome to join discussion in this here forum. I wish I could read German. Since I can't, I ran this seemingly excellent piece of German criticsm through the notoriously inaccurate Google translate and got some real gems: And here: And this one's good: And my favorite: Glorious. Beautiful.

Also, just in case anyone wants to take a crack at it, the author's note for this game offers a parenthetical discussion question, free of charge. Though I guess including it here could be construed as an act of discussion question piracy. (?)

It occurs to me after playing Cigar Afficionado that many of these games are about glamorization. Perhaps glamorization and alienation (the other thing these games are about) are two sides of the same coin. Maybe this is why many of these games could be read as advertisements for abstract, intangible placeholders for human desire. The Buster animation is incredible.

Not only playing, but stealing! That was my favorite part. It is (or was?) a culture that exists to keep reproducing and iterating. A culture that is entirely about creating, rather than consuming, even though everyone feels this inexplicable sense of guilt that they actually should be consuming tedious long-form RPGs, but instead they just wanna steal some good monster graphics and make their own. On a semi-related note, I just played an RPGM game called Dooms 2 that is deeply strange in a very elaborate, RPGMaker way.

I didn’t read Happy Astronaut City with the same political bent when I played, but I’m definitely seeing some of that now. The prison comparison is interesting. There is definitely something strange going on with the perspective here. I think, in my initial experience of the game, I separated the narrator's voice from the visual rendition of the nauts, the cheery drawings and animations. Since we can’t trust the narrator (you’re right, it sounds very Fox News), then we can’t necessarily trust our visual perceptions of the astronaut city. There’s a little too much insisting, both verbal and visual, that the astronauts are happy. I guess I didn’t note the politics too much at first because it feels like satire of such a widespread generally hateful sentiment. Suspicion of paying people, especially when they’re not producing something that can be sold somewhere. Suspicion that other people are more happy than they have any right to be. Grass is greener, except we would prefer to poison their grass rather than move there. Suspicion of wasting money on anyone's comfort who doesn't "deserve" it, or by paying for something to exist that provides a distant rather than immediate gratification. A moral justification for something to exist, rather than a corporate justification of the same. Just general resentment at the government spending money on anything, really. This game feels very storybook to me. Wandering around in the margins, between the pictures, creeping over the text. I love the sense of separation from the walled off spaces. It makes the environment feel bigger and more mysterious than if you were allowed to explore it. We might look at the never-ending, impersonal terrain in Cowboy Living as a point of contrast. I can’t really figure out the cursor/avatar. It seems to be alternating between a sign and an igloo? The text mentions ex-nauts like the astronauts are retired—like they are simply allowed to enjoy themselves in a retirement community after working as real astronauts, and this is what pisses the narrator off the most. But then you learn that this place is a sort of theme park. A simulacrum of space filled with smiley spacemen. Kind of like Disney World or something? Or maybe a more generous analogy would be a museum. I’m sort of perplexing myself a little in thinking about this.

I find Bogey's Report interesting for two reasons: 1) It is a piece of art that seems to exist as an effort to explain itself 2) The author doesn’t like it (The author's notes call Bogey's Report "a bad one"). If you think about the relationship between these two things, they are kind of irreconcilable. If you make something and its sole purpose is to explain why it is supposed to exist, you’re bound to get tied up in its shortcomings. But then again, you could argue that all art is simply an effort to explain why Art, or why anything else for that matter, should exist in the first place. I think BR is an essential part of this compilation because it helped me understand the appeal and sensibility of the other games. While perhaps not as strong as a standalone piece, I think it works snapped together with all the other component parts. In other words, it appeals to its audience in the same way JRPGs (they are the muse here) appeal to the author. Not necessarily as a holistic coherent whole, but as small, perhaps idealized, pieces of a larger implied memory. I think this is true, and it's interesting to juxtapose this idea of minimalism with the ostensible goal of this kind of game, to cram as much experience as possible (in terms of time spent) into a limited framework. While we're on the subject, I have this suspicion that no one has ever actually enjoyed an RPG in its execution, yet RPG mechanics are the types that seem to inspire the most profound feelings of longing in those who have some prolonged experience with video games. We only enjoy the idea of RPGs, and once we start playing them, we realize that their purpose is not to be enjoyed because tedium is such an essential part of this fantasy of existing somewhere else where you feel at first very small and then later very large. The more things you have to clean up, exterminate, or collect, the better. In this sense, BR kind of wears its tedium on its sleeve. I mean, it’s a piece of games criticism that you read while walking around bumping into little pieces of pencil art. Unlike an RPG, an esoteric piece of games criticism doesn't pretend to be “fun.” But maybe it could. Maybe that's actually at the heart of the appeal of these games. But I’m sort of writing myself into a wall here because tedium is not something the author claims to enjoy about RPGs. He celebrates the JRPG in fragments: the cadence of irrelevant dialogue, the little towns where you don’t do anything, where time is static. Perhaps the implied tedium that comes with these little fragments (the inevitable level-grinding adventure) is irrelevant. Or perhaps it is completely necessary. Either way, it’s kind of nice to see a universe try to explain itself.

I like this! This one seems like a tamagotchi dungeon crawler. Well, it's not really a dungeon crawler at all, I just thought it looked kinda like Zelda or something at first (closed off room with disinterested creatures pacing). I like it too, but this part was kinda confusing to me! It seems like you walk up to an eye ball, and then you look through the eye ball into your own “apartment room,” which is filled with mice. What is with this shift in perspective? At first, I thought the avatar was looking through to another room. But it seems like he’s looking in on the room he’s in (hence the mice). So it’s like you walk up to this eyeball and then switch to a top-down perspective. Weird. I wonder what's going on there. First, I realized I was supposed to be taking care of the lil creatures by interacting with them. But next I realized that I was wrong, and I wasn’t supposed to be taking care of them, like a tamagotchi, but simply existing alongside them (tickle, play, dance, etc.). It’s like having a virtual pet without tedium or guilt complex that result from inevitable neglect. I remember at some point in elementary school everybody had tamagotchis in class. The teachers had to ban them! Even though some of them said they liked that we were playing with them at first because they thought digital pets might teach us responsibility. Imagine! I mean, I guess they were teaching us responsibility in the same way that, say, Facebook notifications teach us responsibility. Now, teachers have to ban smart phones. Yes!! I like that your interaction with the mice looks kinda like a JRPG battle screen. My favorite interaction is 'play', which brings up this pong clone, but the mouse doesn't move or anything, and you really have to work at it to bounce the ball off of the mouse. This feels like one of those little dioramas that you can just exist in for a few seconds—doesn't demand much, an excuse to look at the cute art. Speaking of the art, the drawing of your avatar which you see when you interact with the mice is interesting, a gormless figure with a single eyeball. The author seems drawn to this style of player avatar—either some caricatured shape (hard-boiled detective) or just cute little blob of whatever, like Mogey. This lends well to projection, I think. It seems like the big budget games are always wondering whether it’s good to have a silent protagonist,a cipher, or whether it’s better to try to develop a character that you play as. It seems more fashionable now to try to fashion some kind of 'character development' out of a bunch of gruff barks between gunshots. When you develop the character in the cut-scenes or audio journals or whatever, the player just murders everyone or jumps off the screen, and it ends up pretty goofy. Anyway, I think the author said something about this art style being inspired by certain comics, though I don’t remember which ones. I think I also stole the word gormless from one of the author’s notes. Had never seen it before. Great word.

Right so I guess there isn’t a ton to work with here aside from crocodile drawings and impenetrable buttons with arithmetic symbols attached. You click on things and the effect is either moving the foreground (croc & ghosts) or background (a kind of slot machine). You can move ghosts! You can move crocodile. The two seem vaguely related to each other, but only to the extent that they are in any video game, just related enough so that you feel alienated and confused about what you’re supposed to doing or celebrating. A side note, I was talking with a friend this weekend about how little sense you can make of the relationships between chants and mascots and names of college football teams in the south. Alabama is called the Crimson Tide, but their mascot is an elephant. MS State is called the Bulldogs, but the fans ring cowbells. Auburn is called the Tigers, but their fans chant “War Eagle.” So basically, you’re just not supposed to think too much about the relationships between these things. Mascots, avatars, lines to be recited, these are all interchangeable, stand-ins for the impenetrable and illogical fears and dreams of sports enthusiasts. Alienation & wonder is a pretty charming cocktail of attitudes to have (especially for someone who has decided to create in this space) towards video games, whose mission is often to over-stimulate you out of having human emotions. The experience of being alienated by a machine is a very human one to have. Another side note, in going through and analyzing each of these here fifty short games, I sort of feel a sense of solidarity with the author who describes in the notes of this very game trying to avoid getting stuck in a rut of rehashing the same mechanical inputs over and over. I feel a similar impulse to avoid rehashing the same inputs in my critiques of these game. I feel as if I am simply revisiting the same themes and sensibilities over and over again, and this might be a boring thing for a reader, though it’s not for me really. And it’s not how I experience the games either. I don’t feel as if these games are one-note. I feel as if they are hitting many related notes along the same scale. Or even perhaps they are playing notes on one of those jazz scales that don’t really exist. The nice thing about writing in a forum (if you manage to find a congenial one where u feel comfortable) is that it lends to a particular kind of audience that is pretty forgiving. There’s a range of effort put into the writing/responses, so that everyone is a writer that gets benefit of the doubt. Maybe the author of said forum post poured over the words, edited, curated the thoughts as if for publication, or the writer simply vomited them out, and it seems like both would be equally appropriate. These games are nice in a similar way. They prove that both modes of production can be equally interesting, which reveals the fallacy that things of polish are those things that are most worthy of studious attention. Perfectionism is good for developing taste but bad for creative production. I think it’s interesting how you’re struggling with/for interpretation here. I had a similar sensation, but reading your post helped me just click around and play with my reaction to whatever’s there. Interpretation is one of those things I think the games deliberately play with consistently, probably bc the author can’t help but be highly attuned to the artificial, yet somehow mysterious, structures of these things. The idea that there is an interpretation rather than simply an experience of something. This is how poetry is generally taught in schools. There has to be some kind of method and payoff. So you identify the subject, then the speaker, and then the speaker’s attitude towards the subject, which allows you to detect the essentials of irony and tone. Identify these three things, and you will have the correct reaction to a poem. It’s fun to play this game with Klogg’s KrapSack or KrokPots KramPit or Kragg’s Karpumbulator or whatever absurd madlib this game calls itself. So in Klogg’s KrapSack, the speaker is you the player, who is playing some archaic video game toy thing (I like your idea that this is someone’s vague interpretation of one of those arcade cabinets that no one ever touches. Like, why did Deerhunter survive in bars instead of Pacman?! It doesn’t make any sense!!). Ok, so the speaker is the player, and you the player are viewing this other player through the lens of your experience of playing through the medium of the screen. Wait, maybe the speaker is the camera? Anyway, the subject is what the author calls this “garish chattering toy that mixed straightforward game rules." So the subject would be Klogg the Croc and his ghost friends and whatever they get up to inside their modest slot machine home. The speaker’s attitude towards the subject would be alienation, but not in the traditional high modernist sense of the word. This is a kind of amused alienation. A flailing about in the waters of alienation with a kind of deranged joy. A kind of, ‘wow look how intriguing this machine is, this cultural artifact long discarded by its parent culture!’ Garbage, how intriguing! Delicious! So the tone would be bemused, or something, and the irony would be 315%. We know this is a poem because there are lines instead of sentences, and stanzas instead of paragraphs. We know this is a video game because there are ghosts instead of people, and crocodiles instead of chess pieces. (Also, I like the mysterious accumulating skulls (or squids?) at the top of the screen. A steady, purposeless pulsing that seems unrelated to anything you are actually doing in-game. Like the yelping frog symbols in Goblet’s Grotto, or at least that’s the way they seem at first.)

I was sort of perplexed by this one at first. Not in the sense that I wasn't sure what it was trying to do, but I wasn’t really sure if I had any reaction to it at all (we've discussed before how response is sometimes difficult because often the games already seems to be simulating a response for you). I got more reactions after a few playthroughs. I think maybe I was perplexed because I was subconsciously trying to identify some kind of coherent genesis for this game. Like, with thecatamites’ work, I generally feel like I can see where the games are coming from. Well, not in the sense that they are straightforward, but I can start to imagine a kind of entry point where the idea for the game might have started to form. These games have a strong, often consistent sensibility about them, and that is definitely here, but still I'm not sure. I find myself wondering why it's about fashion. What's weird is this speculation sort of assumes that the game doesn't come from the perspective of someone who regularly thinks about fashion. And that is quite an assumption! I mean, there are a lot of different ways to think about fashion, and who am I to assume thecatamites doesn’t think about fashion! But I dunno, the game does speak to my sense of not really identifying with clothes. It’s not that I don’t pay attention to clothes, everyone does, but that I don’t really know what to do with them. I don’t know how to use them to signal to another human the self that I want to project. I mean everyone has figured this out to some extent, but I think I dress in a way that aspires to shift attention elsewhere, away from me and the clothes. Blending in. I feel like I got a sense of that from this game (as y'all have pointed out, the fashion bar is fickle and eventually rendered irrelevant by the game's ending anyway), but it is just as likely that I am projecting which is something I enjoy doing with these games. I like the idea that the author enjoys the enthusiasm of fashion, but without the implied critique of things that aren't fashionable. Like Clyde, I too enjoy the game's sincerity. I often get the sense that these games might have started out with the idea of poking fun of something, but then just allow themselves to relish in whatever it is. The notes say something like “my only regret is that you have to play this game five times to see all of the endings,” and I find that charming but I really did have to play this game more than once to get something out of it! Like I do with a lot of these games. Well I don't have to play them multiple times to get something out of them, necessarily, but I do in order to be able to articulate what I got out of them. The actual structure of this game, the mechanical inputs and feedback, what actually happens, seem almost entirely irrelevant to the project at hand. Here you're moving a little laundry basket around trying to catch socks, but you could just as easily be shooting at the fashion police, the key is that success and failure are randomized, and your method of experiencing the game is correct. I keep coming back to the idea of fashion in an abstract sense, the idea of attempting to project identity outwards towards other people through these material signifiers. This is a game that is sort of inseparable from the player because it entirely relies on the player’s subjective interpretation of what “fashion” is, and it goes on to encourage that subjective interpretation as correct. And I think the game actually does this in a way that is pretty coherent. Not just through the text, but also through the randomized mechanics and “progress” or “high score” bar along the side. Plus the pumping catwalk tunes. At some point, we should probably take the time to analyze the background images of each page of 50SG hub world.

This is spot on. I think most of my time with this game was spent on the first screen, struggling with the arrow keys (though not in a frantic or unpleasant way), trying to get it to focus just so I could read the text in full.

Interesting controls in this one. Vaguely impenetrable, confused perspective of 3D space. I love the description of the waking world's transformation into "tomb dimensions." It makes me think of "day/night" cycles in games. The idea that the mere addition of a feature like this is supposed to completely transform the way the world operates. The switch in screen transition from mouse click to moving off the edge of the screen makes you hesitate long enough to appreciate what's there, mess around by drawing the cursor over the spiders. I like these waking dream bits, especially the way they tend to fixate on bugs as this interconnecting force between dark reality and dreamworld. I like how the dream is described as "unbearable," and also that it's not really supposed to mean anything. Or is it?

yay Also, I found your comment quite insightful; it filled in all of the plot holes.

Octopus Decision: Pretty straightforward parody of CHOICE IN GAMES, I guess? I like how the friendly octopus version has everything the octopus enemy version has except a "shoot" button----movement & collision detection. The only real difference is perspective, what you feel the game is supposed to be. I like the bouncy collisions in friendly mode, of course, and the way it feels like this sleepy endlessly looping space like Minus World in Super Mario Bros. Contrast this with the angry combative version, which has a kind of approximated victory condition, and then it gets way meta and either simply makes fun of itself or sort of briefly reflects on the kinds of communities fostered by antagonistic design. I caught up!

Voyages of Mogey: For some reason, text grafted onto landscape of simulacrum of imagined enemy-less JRPG microuniverse never gets old for me in this series. It speaks to such a specific, peculiar combination of bemusement and genuine longing. My favorite part of this is how the game doesn't attempt to differentiate between the different stock NPCs that are supposed to populate the stock JRPG castle (soldiers, knights, children, w/e). They're all just identical bubbles bouncing around identical rooms. The glib responses of Mogey, your avatar, play up this inevitable lack of distinction. Paradoxically, this actually makes the world feel charming and alive. Also.......don't you dare neglect to unlock all of the mysterious ALTERNATE ENDINGS. Yeah, it's pretty difficult to get anything out of these games when coming at them from a usability standpoint. The author literally made one of them per day after getting off work at a day job (way more fast and dirty than Space Funeral, for example). I find that if I sort of accept whatever they left out as an inevitable part of the experience of playing them and try to pay attention to what the games choose to focus on instead (at the expense of say other resolutions or controls), I often get a lot more out of them than I would a game that is more 'playable' in the traditional sense of the word. It takes some getting used to, but I think it's good that these games kind of force us into this mode of experiencing them!

Some Bee Ess: There are a lot of things I like here. I think I am discovering that one of the things I appreciate about these works is their ability to make a churned out idea that probably sounded kind of dopey even to the author (GAMES ABOUT MY DREAMZ) work. So one of the reasons this idea works in execution is careful curation. Often, people describe their dreams to you as if they're interesting but they're not. These dreams are genuinely interesting. The game avoids the pitfalls of perhaps overly heady or subtle abstract representation by describing the dreams in clean, lucid prose so the player can simply judge these descriptions against the limited representations of the colors and drawings. There's an honesty to this method, and at the same time the two forms of representation are allowed to compliment one another. Consistently, one of my most favorite things about these games is their use of prose. Wisely, the author only bothers to interpret one of the dreams, the one that is most eery (hell in an internet cafe, my parents' living room), and each dream genre is clearly distinct (1. pleasant 2. nightmarish 3. incoherent). Agreed. One of my favorite descriptions was "the pervasive sense of ownership" that is so present for unfamiliar customers in small cliquish coffee shops. This "ownership" is often ambiguous, having nothing to do with the actual "owner" of the business.

On Glory Days of the Free Press: This game really is great. The sound loop is more shimmery than usual. The one-two animations match up with it perfectly. And the game really nails the tone of self-importance which a lot of these games aspire to. The idea that the characters in this world view what they are doing as the most important possible thing, as clyde puts it "like a bunch of friends making a zine, but with a scope of historical importance." This tone can go a lot of different directions, and I think this self-importance is portrayed in a more negative light in the previous game. Most of these games are at least somewhat facetious, but they all at the same time seem to realize that it's pretty curmudgeonly to make fun of traits like passion and enthusiasm so the player probably ends up admiring these characters to an extent. The mad-lib style headline creation is great for a meditation on pre-internet click bait, and the passage at the end half-jokingly points out that reality is subservient to the narratives we constantly construct in order to determine what reality is anyway. This is key, I think. The idea that the motivating factor for "news" is the very process of creating narrative, of generating content.

Also, this isn't particularly insightful, but I guess Criticism Roundup is the first game we've encountered that relies on forced failure.

On Criticism Roundup: I think at first, I thought this was about not much, but now it's touching on something sort of specific for me. There is definitely disconnect or dissonance here, but I didn't find it unusual as I consider all of these games pretty dissonant. Dissonance as tone. Now, I'm finding this one to be about how there has always been a certain strand of games criticism that imagines itself as "saving the medium" or doing something completely new, even though it is really embedded in centuries old rhetorical modes, only without the benefit of historical hindsight. At the same time, this criticism imagines itself as immensely important and swimming against the tides of history, steeped in ignorance. This can be extended out to any kind of criticism really. The rhetorical mode of literary criticism, and, by extension, also capita-L Literature is that of learning to structurally position your ideas as "new." In fact, this is how we teach students to write in basic composition courses. It's not necessarily a matter of actually having original ideas, but of learning to rhetorically position yourself as overthrowing a more ignorant, naive version of yourself and others. I like these musings as response to this game. I would only add that our tendency to view things like teaching high school as a failure state is one of the most insidious parts of American culture in particular. I really kind of hate the old "carpe diem" truism because it sets up these kinds of binaries, between "really living" and "settling," binaries that are also grounded in the idea that hoarding capital (i.e. having a successful career) = identity formation, realizing self-worth. I think this breeds contempt for education, the arts, or anything else that should be promoted both for its own sake and for like, sorry but I don't care I'm gonna say it, the betterment of humanity. I like this idea too! The idea that eminent Triple-A lead designer and eminent games critic are sort of hopelessly connected by the idea of what "eminent" means in this culture. Sorry I've been MIA.

Nice thread. The game that introduced me to alternative channels was Cart Life around 2012. It's sort of famous now, but this was before it had been covered by any major sites besides RPS, before it had won the IGF, before it was on Steam, so it felt really mysterious and strange. I saw Cart Life on a post on Electron Dance. The post and the game inspired me to look for similar smaller freeware games and blog about them. I have since realized that Cart Life was actually pretty elaborate in its construction. This was before Free Indie Games even, so sites like auntiepixelante and Play This Thing (which doesn't seem to be online anymore) helped me find stuff. So yeah...I recommend Cart Life as a nice entry point to video games that offer alternative experiences. I also want to recommend La La Land. It's a free series of five short games with recurring themes and a consistent protagonist. Of the La La Land series, Anna Anthropy has written,

This is interesting. What are these shows attempting to simulate for their audience? The suburbs? The experience of being adult? I mean I get that PWP is more absurd and surreal, but what puts it on a different level from Mr. Rogers? I really like the idea that Cowboy Living is the highest, most perfectly realized stage of Video game simulation. It reveals how absurd any attempt at hyperreal simulation is in the first place.

Thank you for sharing this album. I had never heard of it. I think it is an apt comparison. It is really weird and good. There is a place on the internet somewhere, either A1 Reviews, or Mystery Zone, or the author's notes these games come with, where thecatamites talks about growing up in Dublin and being simultaneously removed from and fascinated with a lot of American culture. This is relevant to what SuperBiasedMan was saying about growing up in Ireland as well. I'm butchering this - I can't find the passage right now, but it describes this sense of being geographically removed from all of these seemingly ubiquitous pop and pulp tropes, but also experiencing them through a delay because they would get to Ireland later. This sense of delay and distance from the cultures being replicated very much inform these games, I think, and also inform the way they view video games in general. I also really like the Modest Mouse comparison - frenetic, sometimes fragmented, combination of alienation and energetic enthusiasm. I grew up and live in the American south. I think I find these games fascinating because of the sense of vaguely familiar generic tropes being repackaged and sent back from a distant land. Welcome to 50SG club ihavefivehat and dosed! Thanks for writing. Great posts! Yeahhhhhhhhhhhhh!!

COWBOY LIVING The gun is pretty mysterious at first. You don’t need it until later but it’s available to drag around the entire time, which I did a lot. Like some horrible “gamer” or caricatured train villain I tried to shoot the cowboy as soon as he began initiating the tutorial, then tried to shoot the first five or six things that appeared onscreen to no avail. Because of the way they are constructed, these games consistently provide these kinds of nonsensical, yet inexplicably transcendent, moments for me. The representation of movement here is so elegantly simple, the bare minimum in terms of both perspective and control. The scenery’s scrolling cacti and avatar’s jerky vertical motion. “Just like the tumbleweed I tumble on...Bop bop bop...Oh! I forgot about you. I’d better teach you the cowboy code.” Perfectly emblematic of how these games often affect an air of forgetting the player as we are left to look in on some bare ecosystem that clearly enjoys existing without us. The entire game is sort of cast as a tutorial, even though you’re not learning anything that directly corresponds to mechanical inputs and outputs after the initial “Push up arrow to move.” I find it really charming to have a pointless tutorial with a narrator who isn’t really interested in the player. Most tutorials are insufferable because of their dogmatic agendas of simultaneously coddling and obstructing the player, demanding undistracted focus, confining the initial curiosity and playfulness that are so essential to enjoying a new game. As the cowboy begins to teach you about “Enthusiasm” and “Respecting your parents,” it becomes clear that another form this game draws from is edutainment, as does another thecatamites work Pleasuredromes of Kubla Khan (I actually wasn’t aware of the Gene Autry cowboy rules before clyde shared). You even get cameo appearances (had to look up Elisha Cooke Jr. to discover that he was a late seventeenth-century physician and politician). It just assumes you know who this person is! Who is the assumed audience for a reference like this? I think that's part of the point. All great edutainment is terrible. And even though most edutainment is usually insufferable, this game and others in thecatamites’ oeuvre reveal that there is something endearing in it as well. All of that hyperbolic enthusiasm mixed with inevitable failure to actually teach anyone anything, like an old professor shouting about cosmic beauty of mathematical equations. There’s something here in the mediation of the extra screen as well, so it’s almost like you’re watching someone else play this cowboy edutainment software. This is a common trope in 50SG as well, meta-stages, screens, breaking of fourth wall, self-reflexive attention to form which becomes funny when considered in light of how minimalist the formal elements often are. Love that the game doesn’t end but gives you endless looping terrain, an advertisement for how much extra “content” there is, and refers to a “main menu” that doesn’t exist filled with subquests that don’t exist.

Anxiety World offers a blatant, direct title, so my inclination was to obnoxiously read against it in some way. But then it really is anxiety world. And the game seems to be simulating a very physical experience of anxiety rather than a brooding contemplative anxiety. It's fleeting and rapid-fire, to be experienced in its immediacy then quickly dismissed as some half-awake farce, except with the recognition that this farce will reappear the following day. It’s interesting that the text progresses as you let by the lightning bolts (it isn't entirely clear how many lighting bolts you have to let by before the text shifts, though). Feels kind of like Space Invaders. There is real challenge here, in finding that happy medium between catching all lightning bolts and letting all of them go through. You have to realize this in-between space to read and process all of the text, but I think the text is most effective when you first see it as a garbled, fragmented mess. Can any biology experts on here explain why it feels like your heart is beating way too fast when you wake up in the middle of the night or from a nap? This game really spoke to that experience for me. Of the animal-antagonistic intensity of your body telling you not to be awake, to the point where you almost feel outside of your body. As opposed to melodrama or kitsch, this appears to be more of an autobiographical snapshot of microexperience. I was trying to think of other stuff that attempts to communicate this sensation (not that of the ubiquitous surreal dreamlike state, but that of the physical, immediate intensity of being abruptly awoken), and I’m not really coming up with anything. I enjoyed reading about the points and pigeon experiments. I think there is something to that here in these games. The trappings of mechanical progression being invoked only so that we may cast them as arbitrary. Sort of like Shakespeare's plays-within-plays. Everybody is trying to teach everyone else how to act, except no one really knows. If I were to fill the walls of a room with all of the snapshots of video games that I have managed to retain in my head over the years, there would probably be very little evidence of points or numbers. Memory documents the fragmented nature of experience by ignoring a lot of the formal structures we set up to organize experience. I guess that's how the modernists saw things. I also think the experiment you've described speaks to some buried emotion that people who play (have always played) games have but don't often use to talk about games. This sense that the entire experience of playing a game is just inherently strange. Like there is this veil pulled over the whole thing that dulls what is actually happening. Like the sort of game that you play for dozens of hours is one that cradles your brain in such a way that you forget what you are doing and why but you don't care. There is an insecurity, a doubt, a hidden sense that you are pursuing the wrong objective. Perhaps not really experiencing or interpreting this thing in the correct way. That the game is actually playing itself but only making you feel as if you are making things happen. What clyde calls "fabricating an operational hypothesis of agency." One interesting thing about 50SG is that many of them seem to expedite this process by simulating the fabrication for us, so we are then left to decide what to do afterwards. .... I am terrible at math, so all I will say is this equation looks perfectly excellent. Thanks for giving the piece such a generous reading. I was looking back at it the other day and thinking wow this is pretty tedious at points. I should have thought more about things like "organization" and "word count." Oh well, onward!

I think melodrama is a good point of reference. And I like your point that Space Mouse and Magnificent Planet use similar formal techniques to produce different effects. I think melodrama and surrealism are two sides of the same coin. My most rewarding experiences with melodrama has been stuff like Twin Peaks, particularly this song in which thinnest possible voice is combined with most melancholy possible reverb. When I wrote about some of these games for issue 1 of the Arcade Review, reading about camp sensibility and pulp fiction helped me appreciate them more, especially Susan Sontag's Notes on Camp. Both camp and pulp are terms claimed by what traditionalists would refer to as "low culture." Unless I'm remembering incorrectly, camp is more like super exaggerated performances of pop culture conventions. Pulp is more like lurid horror or detective fiction, meant to be consumed and produced quickly.

I agree that cheese cave is part of the point. I was being overly flippant there. For sure, it is not automatically great to work at a place just because you get free pastries or whatever. As for what the author intended, I actually think this is a pretty interesting question in this case, though I'm not usually interested in questions of intent. video games, throughout their history, have overwhelmingly trained us to look for what is supposed to be there. (Is this "correct" or is this game simply “broken”?) This is even more true today since we have open alpha games where developers essentially crowd source to figure out what people don’t like and what they are supposed to fix. They’re not just imagining an ideal player for their game - they are tracing that ideal via metrics. Authorial intent has already been problematized a lot in literary criticism by Barthes and whoever else. I mean, if you write a novel that no one ever reads, then sure, a theoretically "correct" interpretation of the author’s intentions exists, but it's not an interpretation that means anything to anyone. Interpretation is a thing that an audience actively pursues and creates. A lot of it is outside of the author's control. It is true that the author can manipulate interpretation in one way or the other, but the exact consequences are pretty difficult to predict. Often in the case of video games, intent becomes way too complicated to trace in any reliably coherent fashion. With big budget commercial games, you have a million different people working on them with different teams in different areas of a buildings, and these teams are sometimes only allowed to communicate with each other indirectly via creative management intermediaries. Even in the case of small homebrew games created by a singular author, the work in question is still a Video game, which usually means that it is all of these different sense experiences (audio, video, text, gamefeel, etc.) cobbled together with varying levels of emphasis. video games are pretty much always on an accelerated production schedule, from the most expensive ones to the smaller ones, and as consumers of video games we look for the cracks where accelerated production led to some mistake or gap in the implied perfect fantasy immersion experience. I believe that 50 Short Games are actually pretty interested in the context of all of that stuff. They are interested simply in the experience of being characterized as video games. In the case of Space Mouse, where the collision detection is only partly functional, yes I think this is a result of tools and timeframe and it's pretty safe to say that "realistic" or "smooth" collision detection were not traits that were prioritized in its construction. Most of these games were created in the author's spare time after work. They were made using a program called Multimedia Fusion 2, which is basically an upgrade of Klick N Play, a tool designed in the 90s to help kids learn to make games in school. These games aren't being programmed from scratch, but arranged around the constraints of a particular program that is conducive to a quick work flow. It's not really a question of skill, but of toolset and mentality involved. But to me this isn't what is most interesting about the games. The games seem very interested in the question of intent in the sense that they spend a lot of time evading any identifiable intent, moral, or message. They want to dismantle the idea of "intent" to the point that our experience cannot be governed by it. But at the same time, they seem to be implying some reaction that we can never really grasp or keep up with. Often the games do this through use of exaggerated horror or pulp crimes tropes. Even in Space Mouse, the whole idea of work alienation is presented as this simple trope that is exaggerated to the point of absurdity. (Mouse smoking cigarette, crunchy nearly unlistenable melody, everything is black and white). I think we'll see more of this as we go along, but some of the games are clearly more interested in "gamefeel" than others. A lot of the time in 50SG, interaction is the most cursory thing about the work. But, just as an example outside of this series, in the music game "Saint Basil" released with thecatamites' latest collection, the way the game feels is essential to what makes it work. On some screens the arrow keys don't seem to do much, but on others movement is tweaked in such a way that you can't help but move around in rhythm to the song. All this to say, I think our expectation for closure and "intent" is one of the primary things being deflected here. Any idea of "ideal game experience" for "particular imagined player" that we might come up with is simply an illusion that is only hinted at and then discarded.