clyde

50 Short Games by thecatamites (Game Club)

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Cool, just out of curiosity are these games in chronological order?

 

This game was interesting, it seemed like it was totally random as to whether a particular item of clothing was going to raise or reduce your fashion bar thing. 

 

The text was just inane enough to remind me of internet quiz writing, which was amusing.

 

The game refuses from saying anything negative about your performance. Because there is no possibility of doing badly, nothing that you're doing matters.

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I used to love watching Project Runway. Fashion World diverges pretty harshly from Project Runway though because Project Runway is all about designing clothes for a client whereas Fashion World seems more like picking out a combination to wear yourself from the clothes drapped on items throughout your room, the not-clean-enough-to-put-back-in-the-drawer-but-not-dirty-enough-to-throw-into-the-hamper pile. So I read this game as finding some humor and enthusiasm in picking out what to put on from the usual selection, by using the voice and perspective of a professional fashion-writer. 

 

This game was interesting, it seemed like it was totally random as to whether a particular item of clothing was going to raise or reduce your fashion bar thing. 

 

I thought of this aspect as being a representation of the apparent fickleness of subjective, passionate taste in fashion. In those dress-up montages in romantic comedies, there is always a dualism; either there is a chaebol (wisely) shaking his head as he watches the many possibilities of dressing up his (naive) shrew, or the fashionista is (naively) pleased when looking at  the clothing on the rack but discards it (wisely) whenever they see what it actually looks like on them. In the case of Fashion World, the dualism is between the naivety of we the players and the untranslatable wisdom of the scoring-system. 

 

I love how the ending messages treat your self-appointed score as inarguable truth. I think there were a lot of opportunities for cooler-than-thou cynicism in this game, and they were never taken. I think that the design decision to maintain a certain sincerity throughout the entire game is what really allows it to be a satisfying experience for me. Picking a '1' for my score gave me a great message that I would usually interpret as pandering, but because the voice that internalizes the subjective values of others throughout the game is the one that says it, I found it endearing.

 

 

Cool, just out of curiosity are these games in chronological order?

 

I'm not sure if they are chronological or not. I'm posting them in the order they are presented in the 50 Short Game bundle

 

 

The game refuses from saying anything negative about your performance. Because there is no possibility of doing badly, nothing that you're doing matters.

 

I think that the expectations and motivations of the player can be a medium for significance in itself, but I do think that such a significance would be more accessible if the was some in-game support of consequence. Most of the time, I don't have feature requests for games in this collection, but it kills me that I don't get to see my avatar walking down the street whilst covered in socks at the end of my game where I collected nothing but them. I think if that was the case, it would be harder to argue that nothing you are doing matters.

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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.

 

WE MADE IT TO PAGE 2 OF THE COLLECTION !

 

At some point, we should probably take the time to analyze the background images of each page of 50SG hub world.

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 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! 

 

I get the impression that the author cares more about the passion for fashion more than fashionable clothing itself; the reason being that everything in Fashion World plays up the intensity and importance of subjective taste and ritual iof fashion, yet the actual clothing from which to choose is not interesting enough to evidence any personal taste. The most interesting thing about the clothing in Fashion World was the possibilty of mixing dark and light-colored

 

 

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.

 
Fashion is a lot like accents, everyone has one but it's typically invisible to them. I think that one way to look at the art of fashion is that people want both of the things you just described. They want to wear something that helps them blend in with the crowd with which they want to assimilate, but stick out (or just make in impression) to certain individuals. It's not always about finding a mate either. When I lived in New Orleans, my clothing tended towards rips and assymetrical paint stains; cargo pocket pants with the knees ripped out so much that I had to tie them up with loose thread so I wouldn't trip. It became a way to signal that I was an artist, I rejected my wealth, and that I was willing to look like a fool. It sounds silly and maybe even irrelevant outside of its context, but this was not only a way to attract certain people, but also a safety measure to look less like a mark. Fashion. 

 

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. 

 

I think this is one of the strengths of having a collection of short games. I have the time to play through enough to get all the obvious endings. This gives me a chance to see it as a system. In fact, I often don't enjoy them the first time through.

 

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.

 

I like the idea of a game that is mechanically about presenting yourself as something. Something deeper than requiring the player to wear nice clothes in order to be admitted to a dinner party in an Elder Scrolls game would be really interesting if the player had a lot of significant iterative choices and feedback. Someone should make the Mark of the Ninja of fashion-games.

 

 

At some point, we should probably take the time to analyze the background images of each page of 50SG hub world.

 

Sure, whatever you have in mind. Images on this forum has to be hosted by another site (like imgur). Then you click the little tree in the posting tool-bar and put the image url in there. If you need help, just say. 

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This is the most impenetrable of Thecatamites' games I've played. The fact that it doesn't close to desktop once the game is seemingly over makes me feel like I'm not ever finishing it. It took me atleast ten tries before I realised that there is player input (cicking on the three buttons in the right-hand corner). I've been trying to figure it out for days. In my desperation, I went into the notes provided in the bundle. They are not helpful. I may not understand how to play the game, but I'm already opinionated enough about what it represents.

 

This strikes me as a game you find on the road. Sometimes when I am forced out into the broader world, 10 miles or more from my house, I find computer-games that are placed in gaming-deserts. I might find a Deer Hunter machine at a truck-stop or a touch-screen hidden-picture game at a bar. I've run into a few machines that Klogg's KrapSack reminds me of; they are slightly heavier and they sometimes have built-in ash trays full of ashes and candy-wrappers.

 

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This type of thing, but older.

 

I've never actually played one, but I've always imagined that they are less interesting versions of Klogg's KrapSack. I'm pretty sure that the three icons arranged horizontally are digital-slots and the pac-man ghosts fit the theme well, since Pac-man or Ms. Pac-man is a game I would expect to see right beside it. 

 

That's all I've managed to get from the game, but it's only Friday.

 

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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.)

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I played a bit more. This is a really fun game to consider because its design compacts the player's tools of interpretation so tightly. Here is a fullish account of the context as I play it:

-I want to figure it out. This is the twelfth game in the collection and let's just go ahead and say it, Thecatamites has already given me reason to expect something that will impress me. In most cases I try to avoid ad hominem, but fuck it; I'm a fan.

-The game is designed to be difficult to circumscribe. The biggest factor in this is that it is timed. Skulls tally at the top of the screen, going as far as to even obscure one of the game's many authoritative titles. I find that Krogg's Kramble starts  to intrigue me as I list it in detail. Let's list the titles:

 

Edit: ha, I accidentally posted and see that gamesthatexist posted. Now I can read their impressions before continuing.

Moments later: I'm a bit flustered by how much gamesthatexist's perspectives bolster how I see my own experience of playing through these games. Onward...

 

gamesthatexist already listed the titles:

When I choose which game to play, I choose Klogg's Krapsak.

The title screen declares Kragg's Karp Umbulator.

In Windows, the window is titled KrokPotsKramPit.

While in game, I'm playing Kroc's Kramble.

 

I don't find meaning in these particular choices, I find meaning in the vague consistency of titles. It's as if the game exists outside of the author's mind and they are trying to recall it, but settling on whatever sounds right each time. That form of naming-compromise denotes a specific, de facto honorific. The general alliteration and the 'Kr..' are memorable aspects, substitutes are acceptable for anything more. Gosh, how often do I get an opportunity to appreciate that tier of reverance? These games are so wonderful. 

 

So we have a limited amount of time to figure out what the win-condition is and how the calculator-buttons are going to get us there. In the notes, Thecatamites mentions how they were experimenting with combinations of assymetrical commands being tied to the inputs. I assume that the diesire was to extrapolate from the insecure experience of finding out if the directional-pad does something in this game and whether or not an inverted Y-axis is the initial configuration. There is that ritual in digital games where you are just pressing the buttons to figure out what they do; but in Krogg's Kramble, you will only reach the cusp of acknowledging your ignorance of what-does-what by the time your first quarter is spent. I've had this experience with peripherial coin-ops; in some cases I've decided they aren't worth my time and in others I was intrigued with their conniving design. Here is a situation where I can try it as many times as I like and always be reminded that I can always walk away....

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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!

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That was one of my favorites. It reminds me of how I had a fly problem once, and eventually I realized that I could cope with them more easily if I thought of them as pets rather than pests. This eventually led to me pretending that all flies in the world were the same fly who I would run into occasionally and catch up with. Of course I never verbalized this to anyone, because it seems insane, so it was purely a game that I played in my head.

 

This game also suggests some type of coping with poverty. Your apartment is totally empty and filled with mice, but the mice are treated like friendly co-inhabitants rather than invaders. Maybe this is some sort of psychological distancing mechanism for the protagonist.

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It was almost exactly a year ago that I first played this game, and I just found its ZIP file from that day still residing in my neglected downloads folder. At the time, I naively declared it the "greatest mouse-based game of all time" and believed myself. However, other mouse-based games have been released since, such as Guitar Mouse X, along with thecatamites' own Mouse Corp. and the previously mentioned Saint Basil. In light of this, does GREAT! Mouse Friends still stack up? To that I say, yes! I believe that Saint Basil is the only one to exceed it in terms of cuteness (the attribute I value most in my assessment of any media), but I am unable to look past Saint Basil's use of scene repetition (as opposed to containing an ending, or even enough original material to fill the entire length of the song). For this reason I would still bestow this compliment upon GREAT! Mouse Friends above all others, but only if pressured by a third party to choose a single recipient. 8.7/10.

 

The eye icon is one of my favourite things in the game (aside from the obvious first choice of mouse tickling). I love the way you have to walk into it to examine the room, it seems so hacked together and is probably the most abstracted form of a Video game verb/convention that I can think of. I also like how the icon parallels the protagonist's own giant singular eye, as revealed in the RPG battle spoof screen you get upon bumping into a mouse.

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That was one of my favorites. It reminds me of how I had a fly problem once, and eventually I realized that I could cope with them more easily if I thought of them as pets rather than pests. This eventually led to me pretending that all flies in the world were the same fly who I would run into occasionally and catch up with. Of course I never verbalized this to anyone, because it seems insane, so it was purely a game that I played in my head.

 

This game also suggests some type of coping with poverty. Your apartment is totally empty and filled with mice, but the mice are treated like friendly co-inhabitants rather than invaders. Maybe this is some sort of psychological distancing mechanism for the protagonist.

 

I really enjoyed it too for similar reasons. A few years back I started wondering why I treat flies like pests rather than as wildlife. If I had deer walking up to me and licking the salt of my sweat off my hand, I would think it was magical. Turns out that it really is just  a matter of perspective because years later I get excited about attention from flies and pentatomidea. Everyone I work with looks like an R.Crumb character to me when they reel back a roll of newspaper and get excited about smashing a living creature much smaller than them who is just trying to do their own thing. It's frustrating, but I eat cheese so.. ya know we all have to fight our own battles. 

The change in perspective isn't all sunshine and rainbows though. Just like treating an infestation as a festival of strange creatures can be a method for creating a psychological distancing from poverty, treating little creatures as bubble-wrap nusainces can be a psychological distancing from the suffering in the world around us and our inevitable death. Now that I view little creatures as if they were fairies and elves, I get quite upset when I hit one with my windshield at 60mph; I get even more upset that I never consider not driving because of the inevitablity. When all life gains value, it's hard not to see myself as a monstorous clumsy predator, crushing villages on my way to build and use machines more uncaring than even I. And every time I see a pentatomidea crushed in a door-crevice, I think "That could have been me." The worst is when you get an actual infestation of something and then you have to apply neurotoxic clouds to entire societies in order to stay healthy or get your deposit back; it's a horrible feeling. 

I wouldn't go back though. I think that accepting these realities is really important in the development of a sincere value-system. I'm wiser for it and everything around me becomes a simultaneous juxtaposition of urgency and triviality (how existential). I think this sensibility is referenced in the title screen with the promise of "adventure".

 

 

 

I'm actually  working on a game right now that is very similar in concpet to GREAT! Mouse Friends. In the game, insects will land on your hand and you have the choice of whether or not you want to crush them or talk to them. I'm heavily incentivizing talking to them with additional capacity for discovery. I'm designing the crushing-action to be boringly unsatisfying. 

 

 

YAY! sergiocornaga! It's great to see you here!

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I'm actually  working on a game right now that is very similar in concpet to GREAT! Mouse Friends. In the game, insects will land on your hand and you have the choice of whether or not you want to crush them or talk to them. I'm heavily incentivizing talking to them with additional capacity for discovery. I'm designing the crushing-action to be boringly unsatisfying. 

 

This actually reminds me more of Octopus Decision, but I imagine that's more the way you've described it and less how it will actually be executed.

 

Hi clyde (and everyone)! This will likely be the only thread here I end up posting in or not.

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This actually reminds me more of Octopus Decision, but I imagine that's more the way you've described it and less how it will actually be executed.

 

I think I started working on the game within a few days of playing Octopus Decision, so you are probably very much correct.

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Maybe this is some sort of psychological distancing mechanism for the protagonist.

 

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).  

 

The eye icon is one of my favourite things in the game (aside from the obvious first choice of mouse tickling). I love the way you have to walk into it to examine the room, it seems so hacked together and is probably the most abstracted form of a video game verb/convention that I can think of.

 

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.

 

I also like how the icon parallels the protagonist's own giant singular eye, as revealed in the RPG battle spoof screen you get upon bumping into a mouse.

 

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. 

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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.

 

I agree that it's confusing. I recall being surprised by the result of walking into it the first time I played. I do have a theory about it, though. As you basically pointed out, the game is comprised of setpieces from other game genres (Zelda main room, JRPG mouse encounter screen, and mouse interactions in the style of Pong, Tamagotchi & dress up games). The eye icon could be derived from the 'look at' cursor/action common to adventure games and interactive fiction, especially given thecatamites' past use of AGS. I think the little description of the room you get after walking into the eye supports this reading.

 

If this is the case, the implementation is a lot stranger and clumsier than the rest of the game, which is part of the reason I like it. I could easily imagine thecatamites drew the eye and bottle icons on paper without a specific implementation in mind, and then just went for the fastest/easiest approach when actually putting the game together.

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I don't have much to say about Bogey's Report, but I would love to have a discussion about the concepts in there. I've heard that the first, foundational, chakra affirms that limitation is necessary for manifestation; most of the aspects of top-down RPGs enumerated upon in Bogey's Report seem to stem from this concept. Bogey is telling us about his appreciation for the way the limits of top-down RPGs manifest both clarity and exponentially more, through the flexibility of minimal player-interaction. As he explains, I'm reminded of an introduction to a book of haiku. It's an unintuitive concept, that you can do so much because you can do so little. 

I also enjoy how linear RPGs are placed with every other artform in human history. RPGs are just another way for us to preserve our experiences in little consumable modules and like all other semi-permanent icons of our existence, when the lighting is right they reveal themselves as memento mori. 

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This is the most overtly political game by TheCatamites I've played, it even has (what appears to be) American flags in it.

I read Happy Astronaut City as a combination of two headlines, maybe two common opinions presented in the mass-media: prisoners shouldn't get to have playstations, and that N.A.S.A. is a waste of money. The walled-out mechanic which is the most prevalent rhetoric in the game in combination with its theme induce a creation-myth in my mind. I like to think that the author conceptualized a game in which the player was walled-out from all the interesting bits that compel proximity interactions while Fox News was ranting about prisoners getting playstations. The cultural associations of prison are so biased towards avoidance though (rightly so, loss of freedom is nothing to be taken lightly) that the imagery needed something more garden-like to appear in the unreachable plots, something like happy astronauts. When I see the two of these allocation-complaints exquisitely corpsed, it brings the things they share into the light. Taxes in a consumer society trick us into thinking that someone cares about our opinion even when our civil experiences are completely unattached from the political expenditures which rule of law and the economy of science require. We think that since we see dollars move from our pockets to these social programs, someone has to care about our two-cents. Our distance from the actuality of those programs gives us a sense of authority on it.

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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.

 

Bogey is telling us about his appreciation for the way the limits of top-down RPGs manifest both clarity and exponentially more, through the flexibility of minimal player-interaction

 

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.

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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. 

 

This is a good example of how bundling all these games together gives us benefits that playing some of them in an asunder fashion would not. I really get a lot out of 50 Short Games being put together as a whole. I think that a lot of small, short games could benefit from this template.

 

 

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.

 

That Stephen Murphy article in Arcade Review #3 was so interesting. I really enjoyed finding out that there was a subculture loading hobbyist JRPGs into an editor and just playing the interesting bits. 

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