50 Short Games by thecatamites (Game Club)

[clyde]

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. 

 

After reading your description, I'm reminded of another experience of waking. Sometimes when I'm very worried about something, I'll go to sleep only to be hit with a recollection of all the stuff I was worried upon waking up. These concerns are usually from something like an emotional fight, financial calamities or an urgent medical condition. It's like they pour back into my RAM as soon as I become conscious, with a speed similar to that depicted in this game. I think I didn't associate Anxiety World with this type of experience because of the banal worries that I could manage to read. 

 

 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.

 

The only examples I can think of are the games where you suddenly wake up from a nightmare-sequence, but those are depicting overwhelming fears in dreams, not the concerns of reality. 

[SuperBiasedMan]

Having checked thoroughly, I found out that the mechanics do the exact opposite of what you said clyde.

When the lines hit the eyes, they disappear and there is no progression. If the lines reach the bottom of the screen then they contribute to progressing the sequence of lines at the bottom, as gamesthat exist said.

I guess I brought that feeling of mechanics doing nothing to it because the game was so disorienting and confusing I couldn't feel as if my actions were achieving anything.

I also much prefer my playthroughs where it was a confused mess, since when I was testing to figure out how it worked I was far too effective at halting the progression and made the experience much more lacking.

 

I found You Have to Do Everything good for comparison, but overall I didn't think it did nearly as good a job of it. The tone and visual style seem so much more relaxed in comparison. The music had the discord in it but so little moved on screen I didn't get a sense of panic. It was also not as overwhelming as I expected and it ended with me feeling pretty comfortable with it. I think because it was designed to be 'beatable' as a game it loses a lot of the real anxiety in Anxiety World.

 

 

 

Also I think when we've gone through the whole set, we should link this thread to thecatamites. Just because I know if it were me I'd be very curious about this kind of deep analysis of things I made.

[clyde]

Having checked thoroughly, I found out that the mechanics do the exact opposite of what you said clyde.

When the lines hit the eyes, they disappear and there is no progression. If the lines reach the bottom of the screen then they contribute to progressing the sequence of lines at the bottom, as gamesthat exist said.

I guess I brought that feeling of mechanics doing nothing to it because the game was so disorienting and confusing I couldn't feel as if my actions were achieving anything.

I also much prefer my playthroughs where it was a confused mess, since when I was testing to figure out how it worked I was far too effective at halting the progression and made the experience much more lacking.

 

You should work at one of those game-tips hotlines. Thanks for telling me, now I can actually read what all of the lines say! I agree with your assessment though. Now that I am leet at Anxiety World, it's not nearly as effective in evoking the anxiety and exhibiting the interpretation I was enjoying.

[clyde]

For the week of August 11th, 2014 we will be playing:

 

Cowboy Living by thecatamites

 

You can download the single game from here for free 

Or you can buy the entire collection of 50 games from here. 

[clyde]

Here is The Cowboy Code according  to Gene Autry for reference:

 

1. The Cowboy must never shoot first, hit a smaller man, or take unfair advantage.
2. He must never go back on his word, or a trust confided in him.
3. He must always tell the truth.
4. He must be gentle with children, the elderly, and animals.
5. He must not advocate or possess racially or religiously intolerant ideas.
6. He must help people in distress.
7. He must be a good worker.
8. He must keep himself clean in thought, speech, action, and personal habits.
9. He must respect women, parents, and his nation's laws.
10. The Cowboy is a patriot.

 

Here is the cowboy-code ala 2014:

 

[gamesthatexist]

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.

[ihavefivehat]

I'm doing these late... I really liked the mysterious planet! It reminded me of this album for it's goofy sci-fi weirdness.

 

[clyde]

BETTER LATE THAN NEVER!!! yAY!!

[clyde]

 “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. 

 

I think this is an astute specification of one of my favorite aspects of Cowboy Living. I also think that edutainment is a clear source of inspiration. I'm not sure why, but I think that Cowboy Living shares more with Pee-Wee's Playhouse than it does Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood (the two shows in my personal history that I associate most with the game even though I imagine Thecatamites has their own personal association). I think this is because in Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood, the framework (Mr. Rogers himself) is an example of Baudrillard's 1st stage of the sign-order while Pee-Wee is closer to the 2nd (in reference to the edutainment shows of the 1950's or whatever).

 

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation

 

"Simulacra and Simulation" breaks the sign-order into 4 stages:

1. The first stage is a faithful image/copy, where we believe, and it may even be correct, that a sign is a "reflection of a profound reality" (pg 6), this is a good appearance, in what Baudrillard called "the sacramental order"
2. The second stage is perversion of reality, this is where we come to believe the sign to be an unfaithful copy, which "masks and denatures" reality as an "evil appearance—it is of the order of maleficence". Here, signs and images do not faithfully reveal reality to us, but can hint at the existence of an obscure reality which the sign itself is incapable of encapsulating.
3. The third stage masks the absence of a profound reality, where the simulacrum pretends to be a faithful copy, but it is a copy with no original. Signs and images claim to represent something real, but no representation is taking place and arbitrary images are merely suggested as things which they have no relationship to. Baudrillard calls this the "order of sorcery", a regime of semantic algebra where all human meaning is conjured artificially to appear as a reference to the (increasingly) hermetic truth.
4. The fourth stage is pure simulation, in which the simulacrum has no relationship to any reality whatsoever. Here, signs merely reflect other signs and any claim to reality on the part of images or signs is only of the order of other such claims. This is a regime of total equivalency, where cultural products need no longer even pretend to be real in a naïve sense, because the experiences of consumers' lives are so predominantly artificial that even claims to reality are expected to be phrased in artificial, "hyperreal" terms. Any naïve pretension to reality as such is perceived as bereft of critical self-awareness, and thus as oversentimental.

 

I would say that Cowboy Living is closer to the 4th stage (in reference to cowboys, not in edutainment). I'll diagram my perspective on this. 

 

0. An actual cowboy, living in the 19th century.

1. Historical accounts of cowboy-living.

2. The fantasy of that image in movies and books

3. Performers such as Gene Autry and maybe Howdy-Dowdy. 

4. Cowboy Living by thecatamites.

 

I know that is super loose, but the general idea is that Cowboy Living is a flawed representation of a flawed representation. I think that the tone and humor largely depends on the assumption that the audience can see this as a flawed representation. I doubt Thecatamites intended all of this with conscious precision, but I suspect that they had a sensibility for this hyperreal-aspect. 

 

I think that the charm of Cowboy Living doesn't rest entirely on the idea of making fun of a flawed representation of a flawed representation. An important ingredient is a certain amount of reverance for the material at each stage. When playing Cowboy Living, I want to be a cowboy in pulp-media and a host of a kid's show in a cowboy get-up with all the faux enthusiasm that comes with it. This is a sense I get in a lot of Thecatamites games; there is a love of fantasies that are known to be unrealistic. Thecatamites seems to know that the fantasy of the heroic cowboy is an inconsiderate fiction (note the lack of antagonistic Native Americans in the game), but yet he craves that fantasy, finding some value in it while keeping it at a responsible distance. This maintenance of a socially responsible distance from an attractive fantasy in which one desires participation is emphasized with the cowboy's sprite being a simultaneous viewer and host of the tv-show (By overlapping the television-console frame but clearly being the center of action)*. I can easily identify with this. 

 

*I suppose the interpretation could variate if the narrator is viewed as a disembodied entity while the player is the sprite and pupil. I saw the narrator as the cowboy sprite.

[Dosed]

I just played Cowboy Living for 5 minutes, which I'm sure is all you need. Like gamesthatexist said I love the fact that the game almost pretends you're not there, like the player isn't the one controlling the game and that the narrator is just happy to exist without us. The minimal input in the game sort of reflects that because you're literally just holding the up key and moving the mouse around at your own leisure. Did anyone else have problems with moving the gun? Or is that the point? If so I thought it was pretty funny. It fits well with the idea the author is having enough fun without you, it's almost like he didn't want to give you full control of the gun because he wanted to play. The game struck me as pretty adorable and funny with stuff like the quest menu and sub-quest menu joke. If that is a joke. I'm not sure. Maybe I just suck at these sorts of games. Initially, I didn't even notice the gun was a moveable object because I thought it was part of the scenery or logo or something. 

 

Thematically it's interesting to me because being an Englishman born in the 90's I don't really have any sort of cultural attachment or interest in cowboys. I get the idea behind them, but there's not much in our culture (that I can think of) that reflects the old style of free living that cowboys seem to represent. I've been to a rodeo, and worked on a cattle ranch in Arizona for a month but this game seemed way too placid to illicit any sort of memories from my time there. The colours reminded me of Woody's Round-Up from Toy Story 2, cheerful but sort of faded and worn out. It really actually reminded me more of Modest Mouse's album The Lonesome Crowded West, especially the song 

(for obvious reasons), and while that song is aggressive, the character of Dan has a sort of wistfulness and regret for what's been lost to the growth of major cities etc., all the while ignoring (I realise that's the songwriter's intent) the fact that the very existence of America was prefaced by the genocide of an entire culture. 

 

While there's clearly no menace or malice in this game it's just interesting to me to look at two different perspectives of the cowboy lifestyle; the longing for a simpler time and the realisation of what that actually entailed for the original occupiers of the land. I guess that's far from what The catamites were thinking of when they made the game, but reading your guys' posts made feel pretty stupid so I just had to lean on my favourite band for support. 

[clyde]

It really actually reminded me more of Modest Mouse's album The Lonesome Crowded West, especially the song Cowboy Dan (for obvious reasons), and while that song is aggressive, the character of Dan has a sort of wistfulness and regret for what's been lost to the growth of major cities etc., all the while ignoring (I realise that's the songwriter's intent) the fact that the very existence of America was prefaced by the genocide of an entire culture.

While there's clearly no menace or malice in this game it's just interesting to me to look at two different perspectives of the cowboy lifestyle; the longing for a simpler time and the realisation of what that actually entailed for the original occupiers of the land.

I think that this is part of the appeal in distancing the fantasy further and further from the reality by making many generations of flawed copies. Not only do the boring parts get sifted out but also the moral ambiguity. It's kind of funny that Cowboy Living manages to glamorize the monotony of traveling over large open plains while making the possibility to do it yourself seem like a fool's errand. Maybe someone should hack the file open and see if you eventually find Chicago or something after pressing "up" for a month.

There is a game coming up soon called The Glory Days of the Free Press. I think that it's another example of showing a reverance for life-styles that are morally obsolete, and maintaining morality by making the fantasy playful and somewhat absurd.

[SuperBiasedMan]

Thematically it's interesting to me because being an Englishman born in the 90's I don't really have any sort of cultural attachment or interest in cowboys. I get the idea behind them, but there's not much in our culture (that I can think of) that reflects the old style of free living that cowboys seem to represent.

Likewise, as an Irishman, my country is too small for a lot of what cowboys seem to represent  and I haven't even watched western films really, let alone going to rodeos or having any physical experience of the cowboy phenomenon.

I feel like the experience of the game was a bit lessened for me because of this. Reading what Clyde said about the simulacra stage the game exists in, I think I'm missing the links that the earlier stages are meant to have instilled in me.

 

I did enjoy the limited mechanics and voyeuristic nature of this game, where it takes the idea of a tutorial process and instead makes the cowboy disinterested in having to show the ropes to yet another player of the game. It also fits with the idea of a cowboy lifestyle (as I am reading it to be in this thread at least) where it's laid back, free and relaxed even if it's slower

[clyde]

When and where I grew up, the cowboy aesthetic was a fiction similar to something like Buck Rogers or Dick Tracy. Those characters reached their popularity before my time, but the residue-effect a generation (or two) later was that I was aware that these were my mom and dad's, my grandfather and grandmother's mutant-superheroes and action-heroes. Their childish love of the cowboys-and-indians mythology was how they identified with my Saturday-morning cartoons. This context was juxtaposed with western-themed shows and movies being the only alternative to day-time soap-operas (for those of us without cable).

Later on movies like City Slickers and Dancing with Wolves subverted the pop-culture paradigm, making me think that it was fairly wide-spread.

[SuperBiasedMan]

I do have a vague understanding of cowboys, but I think only from their brief appearances within other works, like a Simpsons episode that decided to have an old cowboy actor. Things where cowboys were not the focus or the main point. Likewise Buck Rogers, Dick Tracy, City Slickers and Dances with Wolves? I have no first hand experience of any of those, they're names I know and I've seen cultural references but not the things themselves. I may have been unclear before though that I don't think being irish inherently means I'm not familiar with these things, it's probably more just me personally not having the exposure to cowboys in fiction. But I think not being from the massive expanse that is America, there aren't the same lingering concepts that the cowboys embodied in our society that might make the cowboy stuff tied to something even if I hadn't seen cowboys in fiction.

[gamesthatexist]

I'm doing these late... I really liked the mysterious planet! It reminded me of this album for it's goofy sci-fi weirdness.

 

 

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.

 

Thematically it's interesting to me because being an Englishman born in the 90's I don't really have any sort of cultural attachment or interest in cowboys. I get the idea behind them, but there's not much in our culture (that I can think of) that reflects the old style of free living that cowboys seem to represent. I've been to a rodeo, and worked on a cattle ranch in Arizona for a month but this game seemed way too placid to illicit any sort of memories from my time there.

 

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!!

[Dosed]

Yeah, it's kind of weird to think of British culture as not having any sort of longing for the lifestyle of yesteryear. I mean people a generation before me mention how it was "safer" back then because you could leave your doors unlocked etc., but It's not like they want to be back in Dickensian London or Tudor England. I mean it's definitely a prevalent and influential presence in my/our culture, unless you're R.O.I Super, but they never really get lauded as being "better" or a "freer" lifestyle. Although, even if you are Northern Irish I'm sure you barely relate to Dickens etc.

 

In English/British works they're always pointing out how backwards or dangerous a time to be a live whatever time period they happen to be covering, like This is England or Downtown Abbey in terms of gender/racial politics. Their seems to be a focus on how difficult the past was at different periods of history, I don't feel like there was a carefree period of British history where any piece of land was up for the taking. I guess that's because that never was actually the case, and America seems to be founded on that idea.

 

edit: posted this before I'd seen gamesthatexist's post. That's kind of funny to think of them being Irish and me talking about how our cultures never seem to have a nostalgic quality. It's strange that they can replicate that nostalgic quality for a period in American history. I can't possibly imagine what period in history people would most like to go back to in Britain/the Republic of Ireland history. English history has always had this sickly and dirty feeling to it to me, so I doubt I'd go back to anywhere in the past given the option. I also realise how reductive it is to assume that the cowboy culture was and is such an influential force on every American alive today, and to suggest that English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish cultures aren't vastly different. 

[gamesthatexist]

 I'm not sure why, but I think that Cowboy Living shares more with Pee-Wee's Playhouse than it does Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood (the two shows in my personal history that I associate most with the game even though I imagine Thecatamites has their own personal association). I think this is because in Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood, the framework (Mr. Rogers himself) is an example of Baudrillard's 1st stage of the sign-order while Pee-Wee is closer to the 2nd (in reference to the edutainment shows of the 1950's or whatever).

 

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.

[clyde]

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.

 

I was thinking that Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood is attempting to simulate adult life while Pee-Wee Herman's Playhouse is attempting to simulate kid's shows like Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood (more specifically Howdy Dowdy).

[SuperBiasedMan]

 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.

 

Oh wow! I had no idea of that, it's a fascinating lens to view the experience through. Your paraphrasing makes perfect sense to me though, I grew up watching enough TV that sometimes people hearing me talk think I'm from America. I definitely had the feeling of being served American culture second hand. Still today, TV and films will refer to American geography I don't full understand but the media treats it as assumed knowledge. I'm generally more savvy know, though not always, but as a child this stuff would just wash over me and there'd be broken links where there's some concepts that I just never got fully fleshed out from the media.

 

It's also kind of funny to hear this because it is then possible that I've met thecatamites before, I've been to a few game jams and stuff. I can't find a twitter handle though on the page, and I'm not sure if it'd be better to wait to get in contact when the full set has been played.

 

Yeah, it's kind of weird to think of British culture as not having any sort of longing for the lifestyle of yesteryear. I mean people a generation before me mention how it was "safer" back then because you could leave your doors unlocked etc., but It's not like they want to be back in Dickensian London or Tudor England. I mean it's definitely a prevalent and influential presence in my/our culture, unless you're R.O.I Super, but they never really get lauded as being "better" or a "freer" lifestyle. Although, even if you are Northern Irish I'm sure you barely relate to Dickens etc.

 

In English/British works they're always pointing out how backwards or dangerous a time to be a live whatever time period they happen to be covering, like This is England or Downtown Abbey in terms of gender/racial politics. Their seems to be a focus on how difficult the past was at different periods of history, I don't feel like there was a carefree period of British history where any piece of land was up for the taking. I guess that's because that never was actually the case, and America seems to be founded on that idea.

 

edit: posted this before I'd seen gamesthatexist's post. That's kind of funny to think of them being Irish and me talking about how our cultures never seem to have a nostalgic quality. It's strange that they can replicate that nostalgic quality for a period in American history. I can't possibly imagine what period in history people would most like to go back to in Britain/the Republic of Ireland history. English history has always had this sickly and dirty feeling to it to me, so I doubt I'd go back to anywhere in the past given the option. I also realise how reductive it is to assume that the cowboy culture was and is such an influential force on every American alive today, and to suggest that English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish cultures aren't vastly different.

Yeah I'm from the Republic, and we don't have this idea of older times being freer really. But there is nostalgia for the good old simpler times, less technology, more outdoorsy and stuff like that. It's not the same kind of thing that cowboys ellicit. Irish people settled into cosy farms and created communities (yup, it is that exact stereotype), we didn't really roam through untamed lands.

Our media frequently does portray cities and big towns of the past as having health problems and fraught with issues but the general feel of older countryside or village settings is that it was much nicer even if it was harder. The rose tinted glasses are on for there because I suppose the vast majority of people are now city dwellers and they still see some of the issues of what living in a city entails (though not as much as before, obviously) and they forget how much living in the country really means. I also think a bit of the negative nostalgia is focused on the English occupation, which wasn't really felt in remote countryside farms.

[clyde]

For the week of August 18th, 2014 we will be playing:

 

Criticism Roundup 2013 by thecatamites

 

You can download the single game from here for free 

Or you can buy the entire collection of 50 games from here. 

[clyde]

I find Critcism Roundup 2013 to be one of 50 Short Games more challenging titles to enjoy. The ingredients seem to be there, but I leave the experience without having involuntarily associated the two sections of the game. I suppose I should just accept that disconnect as a vital part of the experience. 

I've had formative/traumatic experiences that have reprioritized the way I view the world and how I view my role in it. These high-water marks of stress have a tendency to simultaneously make me feel a I've-seen-worse kind of confidence and have made me feel isolated. That's what this game reminds me of once I give it a few play-throughs and put some faith in it. 

The more I think about the game the more I like it. Putting the blaze-of-glory at the beginning of the game and having academia as a fail-state properly reflects a lot of the opinions I've heard about adulthood and the eventual inevitability of career-paths: the cop who walks the beat, gets shot, is then assigned to the desk making bureacratic decisions weighed heavily by the most traumatic of experiences; the biologist who travels the world to breed sea-turtles, meets someone, settles down and becomes a highschool teacher; the graffiti artist who breaks a leg when falling from a scaffolding, gets the fear of death in her and then does pieces in a studio to be sold at gallery. All of these pairings are largely defined by the duality in the actor's understanding, between the real experience where they found their limits and the fake experience where they have negotiated for an ambassadorship and struggle with how no one in their peer-group knows the actuality of their formative experience.

[clyde]

I suspect that if I play this game again a few days later, it will evoke drastically different perspectives for me due to coincidental recent discussions.

[SuperBiasedMan]

 I similarly had difficulty really finding thoughts to verbalise about Criticism Roundup 2013. I thought that I wasn't getting the full picture, but after a lot of thought I'm left concluding that I actually did get the whole picture, it's just more simple than others have been. I didn't read it as the same person being the cop and the person on stage, I actually thought that the first section was just a game, a shamelessly gamey AAA style game and the person on stage is an ex designer, ruminating on their work.

 

Wait... ok maybe that is what you were saying now. I may have gotten mixed up.

 

Anyway! I enjoyed the idea that the designer turned critic is revealing the deep down truth of the games industry cabal. And that the 'hell' they find themself in was inescapable as a designer and as a critic, so instead they take solace in the fact that everyone in that room is trapped there with them, perpetuating their own hell (GDC 20XX could mean this state of the industry goes on for a long time). I think it's an overly pessimistic view, specifically because it's meant to be the pessimistic view of the protagonist(?).

 

I think I am bringing a lot of my personal feeling into this, so I may be reading too deeply but as I said, this was a difficult one to really parse so I decided to rely on my fairly early read of it.

[clyde]

For the week of August 25th, 2014 we will be playing:

 

Glory Days of the Free Press by thecatamites

 

You can download the single game from here for free 

Or you can buy the entire collection of 50 games from here. 

[clyde]

I know it's lazy to just say "This game is great", but I really want to just take a moment to talk about how much I enjoy Glory Days of the Free Press. Thus far, this is my favorite game by Thecatamites and my inability to find any discussion about it is why I wanted to start this club. Why do I like it so much?

I fantasize about stuff a lot. One of the things I've noticed is that fantasies that are deeply developed by having their own genre (like the Old West and Astronaut Adventures) have certain advantages, having a buffet of established tropes allows me to play pretend much more easily. Glory Days of the Free Press genericizes a fantasy I've always had that I have never seen essentialized into the things I like about it. The fantasy of being an editor at a newspaper in their symbolic role as a person who presents The News to the populous of a city is particularly grand. I love having a game that makes me feel like the go-to director of the printing-press who can do no wrong. We have to get the paper out or there will be no paper! I love that the motives of the inaccurate and unreliable sources of content presented in the game's narrative aren't bribes, political agendas, or predjudices; you just need to get a paper out everyday and news is slow.

 

Pressman 1: "I don't have a story sir."

Me: "Then MAKE IT UP DAG BLAMMIT!"

Pressman 1: "Yes sir."

[i walk into the next office and slam the door] 

Me: "Fire Johnson!"

Assistant: "He's got the day off sir."

Me: "Oh well who was I just talking to?"

Assistant: "That was Clark, he works the fifth district."

Me: "Fire Clark!"

Assistant: "Yes sir, who should we put on his beat?"

Me: "The shoe-shine boy did a good job this morning, go grab him and give him a press-hat."

Assistant: "Yes sir"

Me: "Oh and Daniels, ..."

Assistant: "Yes sir?"

Me: "Fire Johnson when he gets back, no need to delay the inevitable."

 

----

Being able to walk between stations to check-up on everyone allows for me to enjoy the novelty of all sorts of make-it-up-as-you-go-along processes that are both humorous and kind of exciting in a newspaper-printing scenario. It's like a bunch of friends making a zine, but with a scope of historical importance. For comparison, just being a single journalist and being given a mad-lib or submitting stream-of-consciousness wouldn't give the player the sense of power and scope that Glory days of the Free Press gives. I feel like Andy Warhol walking around The Factory, I'm surrounded by creatives who just need me to give them a final say, or one piece of input. That piece of input makes it mine. The fantasy is incredibly vainglorious, but it is one of the most fun power-fantasies I've had in a game. I think it may be a consequence of my interests outside of it. I've wanted to have the wit and poltical momentum of H.L Menkchen. I'd love to answer some Dear Abby questions without having to deal with the guilt of them possibly taking the advice. I want to hang out in an apartment with Burroughs and Gysin while we try to come to a conclusion of whether or not the newspaper-stand burned down due to our cut-up audio-recording witch-craft*. But I don't want to deal with the realities and irresponsibilities of any of these power-fantasies, I want them in computer-games. I want to hurt some non-player character's feelings by firing them for insubordination and yell at Parker to get me those goddamn photos!

 

 

*This additional example probably requires more explaination. I have an appreciation for the Burroughs/Gysin mythology for its obsession with trying to circumscribe the potency of mass-media through superstition and paranoia. From a distance, I can really enjoy their gnarled logics and psuedo-science they crafted. I view it as a colorful,surreal, folktalish vernacular that attempts to make sense of the exciting changes mass-media was producing in their time. The set-up in Glory Days of the Free Press seems like it could almost exist in their magical-reality. With a little more of a conspiratorial lean, the characters in Glory Days of the Free Press could be who Burroughs and Gysin were battling. This is probably way too fucking obscure, I thought I'd try though.