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thecatamites Writes Game Reviews Now

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Perhaps you've heard of thecatamites (or alternatively this website?), either from the various mentions on Rock Paper Shotgun, Venus Patrol's story, or one of thecatamite's unforgettable games, like Murder Dog IV: The Trial of Murder Dog (

). Or maybe you have no idea who the fuck thecatamites is.

Who cares! What's important is that now we have game reviews from thecatamites popping up on this tumblr (although the latest post is Auguste Blanqui's "Eternity Through the Stars" for some reason). And the reviews are amazing. But don't take my word for it! Game development superstar and Double Fine Amnesia Fortnight Team Leader JP "The Breton" LeBreton says that "Game reviews by thecatamites are the most important thing to happen to games writing in the past 5 years. Not kidding." while linking to this gem. I'm inclined to agree, and I was pushed to make this post and evangelize in the style of JP after having just read this peerless work of art.

I've been on a kick of reading games writing recently for a few reasons, and it's so incredibly refreshing to read something that's not a hastily "researched" copy and paste job shoved under a provocative headline designed to get people angry or confused enough to read the article to a sufficient degree that they might click the flash ad next to it. I want thecatamites to review all games, forever.

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Thanks for this. You're right, it's very refreshing material. Love that he occasionally reviews things that aren't games. Threw me for a second.

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What is a game? Professor M. Mouse of Texas, America claims that the word game denotes "the historical process by which the term game has been characterised and understood".

Easy for you to say, Professor!!

Those of us with a more down-home approach to codifying the various aspects of a nebulous and unbearable human condition prefer to go by a simpler definition, thus.

A game is some combination of the following indivisable elements:

- skeleton

- red key

- score thing

- magic door

If you see something that looks like a Video game but isn't, you should notify the Police.

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Thank you for bumping this, I'd forgotten he was writing again.

 

A game is some combination of the following indivisable elements:
- skeleton
- red key
- score thing
- magic door

 

Michael Brough put all of those in Corrypt  :). This happened just after Proteus was released too. And then there's this, the sentiment of which I think is at the heart of the current formalist/zinester row, but need to think about more.

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And then there's this, the sentiment of which I think is at the heart of the current formalist/zinester row, but need to think about more.

Would it be valuable to start a new thread on Koster's recent essay response to Leigh Alexander's tweets, or get it going here, as it falls within the realm of criticism and such?

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This is pretty much where I've ended up with it:

http://twitter.com/infinite_ammo/status/324784218695680000

 

Edit: Or at least, the other thoughts I've had on it are nothing to do with what games are and instead about what we do with them.

I haven't read Koster's Theory of Fun nor Aunte Pixelante's Rise of the Zinesters, so anyone correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the latter's complaint  would be that they're being ghettoized into a non-game category. (Apologies if I'm characterizing this argument incorrectly.)

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I haven't read Koster's Theory of Fun nor Aunte Pixelante's Rise of the Zinesters, so anyone correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the latter's complaint  would be that they're being ghettoized into a non-game category. (Apologies if I'm characterizing this argument incorrectly.)

To an extent, I think it's about that for some people. Many designers just don't give a fuck about that at all though. I think some of it is also about game development culture rather than what games are, i.e. entire classes of people struggle to have a voice through games, and defining their output as non-games can be seen as another way of marginalising them.

That's the case outside development too; I think Robert Fearon nailed it when he said the "No thanks" button on Greenlight is more of a "GET OFF MY LAWN!" button.

I'm not saying all of the above is the case, and definitely not that it's a deliberate, conscious attempt by those labelling themselves as formalists to exclude others, but it's definitely very complicated and about more than what games are. In the midst of that, a bunch of people have decided to just carry on making interesting stuff and not worry about it.

I think to an extent this is people arguing over the term "game" because it's the juiciest one, somewhat like academics who study emotion competing over that word and not wanting their field or what they specifically study labelled with "affect", "feeling", "mood" etc., because they're less juicy and immediately understandable terms.

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To an extent, I think it's about that for some people. Many designers just don't give a fuck about that at all though.

This seems to be the 'Zinester' postion. The essays juv3nal linked to by Robert Yang and Mattie Brice seem totally find with not defining 'game' and letting people explore it in new ways and from new ways. The problem seems to be that Formalists want to give hard definitions- like Tadhg Kelly here- and marginalize those fringe experiments even more.

 

On that note:

 

 

So, I think, starting May, I'm going to do as much as possible to never use the word 'game' ever again. There.- Mattie Brice

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Last Year at Marienbad is the Citizen Kane of video game/movie industry standard analogies.

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Related (?): Darius Kazemi has the best response to the formalist vs zinester debate http://tinysubversions.com/game/formalism/

Yeah, this is pretty good.

 

At the risk of staying on the thread's topic, it seems like the A1 Reviews tumblr has been destroyed. All the links to it here are broken and it has disappeared from my feed.

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When a tumblr changes its username (which is trivially easy to do) it breaks all the links so I hope that this is what happened and not like, some sort of disappearance. Do you see any unfamiliar tumblrs on your feed?

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No unfamiliar ones. There's only a handful that I follow and it seems to have straight up disappeared. :(

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