50 Short Games by thecatamites (Game Club)

[gamesthatexist]

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

[clyde]

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

Yeah, I'm probably going to spend a week figuring out how to convince everyone that I'm not doing the thing that is highlighted in this game. . . and failing.

[gamesthatexist]

Yeah, I'm probably going to spend a week figuring out how to convince everyone that I'm not doing the thing that is highlighted in this game. . . and failing.

 

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

[clyde]

Maybe we should make a new rule where we skip any games that don't have screenshots.

You know... because they don't have screenshots.

[gamesthatexist]

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

[clyde]

Don't bother playing this one. The graphics suck so much that they didn't upload a screenshot so that you wouldn't see how much the graphics suck.

[gamesthatexist]

NASTY: negative 1000 stars

[Maxtion]

Hello all,

I found this thread through a link from thecatamites' Twitter and oh my gosh I would like to get in on this.  I'd like to comment on a few of the older games/posts about the older games, which I will now do in a spoiler, so that reading my tardy ideas feels a little more voluntary.

Magnificent planet
Oh my goodness so this is the last game I played out of the bunch and I think it is probably the most coherent game of them all.  Absolutely glorious, and I especially enjoy snake jail and the protagonist's evolving opinions on snakes.  I also appreciate that said protagonist had developed thoughts about snakes in the first place.

Voyages of Mogey
 

I also enjoyed how a tour of a fantasy world by a townie is conflated with meeting someone in the physical world with who you have thus far only met online.

This greatly enhanced my enjoyment of the game, thank you for this, Clyde c:

Octopus Decision
I wonder if making the choices in a different order would influence one's impression of the game; I really enjoyed being a friend of octopuses and thinking it was just a silly goal-less game.  I expected a similar experience from being anti-octopus, so I enjoyed seeing it as a 'classic' game with goals and enemies and whatnot.  Also I feel like a jerk for killing octopi now.

Krax Kremblac
I am fascinated by thecatamites' interactions with video games; from skimming through an interview with him, it is strange to see how he finds games to be strange, malevolent places and does not really play very many of them, but he is so familiar with the components of a game and has thought so much about designing them.  Keiko Katamari strikes me exactly how I expect a Tamagotchi would strike my tech-illiterate grandfather: "What the hell is this beepy thing OH MY GOD WHY DID I HIT A BUTTON EVERYTHING IS EVEN WORSE THAN IT WAS."  Kris Kardashian is certainly an experience.

GREAT! Mouse Friends
Thank you all for the excellent discussion had about this game and how it may demonstrate coping mechanisms to help somebody separate themselves from the shames of poverty or poor hygiene.  Also, the discussion on the choice to view an animal as a pest or a pet made me think about the omnivore's dilemma (Editor's note: I have not actually read the book), the conflict between The Golden Rule and the necessity to sacrifice others for survival/a chance to flourish.  Eating other lives to gain sustenance, trying to outshine your peers to land a great job, asking your parents for money that you are not sure you can ever truly give back to them, that sort of thing.  Being alive is not always easy.

Bogey's Report
The line about having to put out cigarettes on his thighs to stop him from starting a new save of Secret of Mana really resonated with me and further illuminates thecatamites' complicated interaction with video games, as discussed above for Krap Konundrum.

Happy Astronaut City
A happy little accident happened while I played this one: if you stand your protagonist against a wall and hold the direction against said wall, the rate that the sprite changes slows down.  While this is surely a limitation of the software, I really want to think of this as a metaphor for the protagonist scrutinizing their own conception of the city and it causing them to slow down in their diatribe against it.  Perhaps a feeling of unease as they recognize they are dismissing a concept they know very little of?

Cigar Afficionado
I am surprised that the conversation about this one didn't delve too far into the idea that Busters are this wonderful, sacred, exclusive item even though the impact they have on people is absolutely godawful.  I think it could really be a good allegory for any of the addictive vices (tobacco, alcohol, coffee) that people develop that are absolutely awful at first; sure, a nice whiskey or wine tastes wonderful when you've developed a palette, but most people who drink could barely stomach a strong mixed drink at first.  The ~subtle hints of raspberry~ or ~combination of oak and honey tones with an aroma of vanilla~ that people might praise in a premium wine or spirit, but that drink is only tasty after you have suffered through many worse beverages and adjusted to the godawful flavors they categorically share.  In summary, I am sure a buster does not taste very good to smoke unless you have acclimated to them, it is interesting the things we will suffer through to appear classy or get a chemical high.

Garlo's Gambit
I am fixated on the choice to represent Garlo as an empty wiggling shirt.  I am even more fixated on the choice to put some empty wiggling pants in the scenery; do these represent other people?  Do they represent spots that Garlo stood at for a while?  Like, are the pants the equivalent of a footprint from our disembodied shirt man?  I don't know why I keep thinking about this.

Which Way
Here is a crappy 10-minute rant about Earthbound and defiance:

In thecatamites's Which Way, which do you think is more crucial to the game's thesis: 1) the element of choice OR 2) the player's sense of perspective? You have ten minutes. You may not stop typing for anything. If you can't think of what to type next, then you have to type "I can't think of it" over and over. Or you can type the last word you just typed over and over again until you think of something to say.

I have a shitty answer to this pretty decent question; the player's sense of perspective is going to trump any other purpose for ANY game, since the point of playing these games is to attain some new perspective on something.  I can't think of it I can't think of it I can't think of it I can't think of it I can't think of it I can't think of it I suppose that the element of choice is crucial to how this game is informing my perspective on the game itself, and the most interesting thing about the game to me was figuring out what the 'purpose' or 'goal' was.  The content of the game (having an arrow indicate which direction to go) reminds me of a dungeon in Earthbound, where a sign indicates that players tend to go right first when they come to a fork; in that dungeon, which was a deconstruction of dungeons and dungeon tropes, if you go to the left, you find a place to heal and save your game.  I went left first after reading the sign that says players tend to go right: there is some desire to deviate whenever a person or piece of media indicates which action you are expected to perform.  If a game says, "Go right for treasure," or, "RIGHT: NEXT TOWN YOU NEED TO VISIT," one is inclined to go in that direction because they are merely given an objective description of what is to the right, but it is still one's decision whether to head towards the goal/treasure/town and one feels FREE to make that decision.  When one is told, "I am sure you will go to the right now," I think it evokes in oneself a sense of rebellion, a defiance, a reason to strive for individuality.  Ultimately, I'm sure most people who played Earthbound and most people who played Which Way picked the 'wrong' or 'uncommon' direction first; I don't know if this means the game has psychologically triumphed over us, or even if the game designers cared about what direction the player heads off in.  Back to Which Way; I was surprised that my choice was not important.  In other games by thecatamites, choice has usually been trivially influential, but still does change the flow of the game.  Octopus Decision (or whatever it was called) led to two mutually exclusive game areas, and one could not move from one to the other without resetting the game.  The looping narrative of Which Way I can't think of it I can't think of it I can't think of it made it feel a bit more free, knowing that you were not going to hit the 'end' of a tunnel in a maze or whatever.

I would like to address "the player's sense of perspective" more literally now; I don't know what I think the significance of the narrators vantage is, or the parts in which the angle on the diorama flipped, or when mirrors appeared.  If it was supposed to make one reflect on how they would respond to a game changing angles on them, I guess I probably missed the point.

I think the length of the two short paragraphs I wrote clearly indicate that, taking the question as intended, the element of choice was more crucial to my experience of the game.  I do not know what intention thecatamites had when making the game, or whether he had any conscious intent, but the idea of choices and how I interact with the guidance given when I make a choice is interesting to me.

YardDoggz
I didn't love this one, but it struck me that the way I played the game made me feel like a jerk.  "I am only throwing this ball because the game wants me to do it and it makes something happen.  Oh, I threw the ball to the dog directly and he is disappointed that I am not playing the game in a way that entertains him.  Oh, I can hide from the dog behind this patch of scenery, can he find me?  What if I throw this ball up into a tree?"

Wrath of the Serpent
I liked the discussion about relationships and their mutual nature!  I will say that I took sort of a literal interpretation on this one based on an image in the background of two people yelling at each other over what looked like telephone receivers.  Is the connection of a uroboros representing phone lines or connection via social media?  I don't know, but the discussion in the background sure makes me think of two people talking over a crappy phone line and getting mad at each other for it!

Tales of Terror
Do I remember discussion about feeling like we were the antagonist in this game?  If so, hey, I agree!  After playing GREAT! Mouse Friends, I felt inclined to do a pacifist run of this.  Nothing changed, but I felt a little better about not killing any innocent monsters.  I find it charming that driving off the road was safer for every critter involved, which is generally not the case~

Nasty
!!!!ART GAMES!!!!  I mean, I will be honest, I think there is some level of pretense in the fact I spent 30 minutes writing about some video games that took me less than 30 minutes to play.  To the credit of everybody in this thread, there have not been many posts here along the lines of, 'Watch me legitimize my claim to have the best interpretation because look at all these citations I AM VERY SMART WITH MY COLLEGE DEGREE.'  I think my take on Nasty is that sometimes a mouse is just a mouse that loves to eat pussy and fucks like a dog, but it's still fun to come up with a plausible allegory for what it represents.

 

[gamesthatexist]

wow great job catchin up

 

and welcome!

[gamesthatexist]

ok I am embarrassed that I fell into the trap of spending more words on this game than any of the previous ten I’ve written about. this is exactly what they wanted! humiliating!

i find that sometimes it is helpful to point out obvious things. there is a lot of audience manipulation here. the game quickly puts the audience in a position where they have to defend themselves, reversing the traditional interpretive relationship where a work has to defend/justify its value to its audience not only explicitly but subtlety. “En guarde,” says the Nothing Much scholar. usually when there is some interpretation or exegesis happening, thecatamites will step into some dubious character, a distancing act of extra mediation, like another screen. the best part about Nothing Much scholar's character is that they never succeed in constructing an argument. it’s all confused notes, hopeless flailing, wondering at what the point of any of it is. this game is funny for the way it steps back and considers what and who these games are for, if there is any audience and if so what they might want to do with them, what the stakes are, and what’s in it for them? i mean there’s only so many things you can look at/talk about, only so many different self-serving approaches you can take! does any1 who pays attention to this kind of stuff actually enjoy it for its own sake, or is everyone, consciously or not, out to pursue whatever interpretive agenda has been nailed into their skulls by whatever cultural institution they prefer? predicting audience response, and using audience as excuse to pursue particular interpretive threads (how many RTs can I get if I go with this line of thinking?), sounds crude, but I know I’m guilty of this! and besides, reading is never an apolitical act, it’s always performance even if you’re just sittin’ alone in your room with a bourbon. always an imagined audience soaking up yr thought bubbles. there is no escape......

another funny thing about this is the way the game is packaged, how the order of items on the menu screen facetiously dictates the correct sequence you must punch in in order to interpret something, and this will probably succeed in tricking you into poring over every detail even if you immediately know what's going on. if you bother to read the notes, then you’ll probably go back and check each scene, walk around at the bus stop and see if anything happens if you walk off screen in each direction. this game is considering the kinds of stories that are written with the knowledge that no one will read them, or at least written in a mode that is PRETENDING that no one will ever read them (author seems to have some experience with both now). it brings to the surface the idea that interpretation traditionally is both an act of aggression and self-defense, argument must be air-tight full of meticulously cataloged examples so no alternatives can slip through. Nasty plays with this idea to the extent that it kind of doubles in on itself. perhaps thecatamites knows that at this point (of making the trainwreck games), there is a modest collection at least of people who will play whatever the hell thecatamites puts out there, so this is trying to see what that audience will put up with, or perhaps more accurately deflect having to worry about what the audience will put up with through accelerated production and esoteric fragment worlds. this game is pretty self-conscious & self-deprecating, but it’s not really sneering or wallowing; it's having fun with itself and its audience. i mean clearly it's a joke, but for a certain type of audience maybe it’s a joke that’s a lil’ bit cutting. but at the same time, if you look at the author’s note, again clearly a joke (btw any idea what the George reference is about? maybe a beckett play or something?), but i think it’s also genuinely wondering what it would be like if, as author, you could actually control your audience? if you could put them in an ideal, quiet context (calm, sunny room with nice foliage) to where even the most disingenuous player might consider beauty of fragmented things instead of wondering why the gfx aren’t more polished. but then, of course, control would defeat the whole purpose right? art has to deal with the culture that produces it, not the ideal culture for it, which raises questions about institutionalized high culture, gallery spaces, and such. it also makes me think of how i kind of fruitlessly try to "keep up" with this stuff, how many times something well-crafted has been shared online but its craft didn't really matter nor did the person who shared it. i just wasn't in the right mental, physical, or emotional space to appreciate it at the time.

perhaps this game also functions as warning against getting over-enthusiastic about importance of curation and criticism, but I don’t wanna say it’s that preachy or curmudgeonly. i think it’s sort of reflecting and poking fun at the way culture gets produced more than it’s condemning. i think it’s important to point out that there is a genuine love of note-taking and documenting, the idea that preserving and talking about culture, even perhaps one that is totally contrived, can be fulfilling and meaningful in its own right (for an example look no further than the author’s notes that come packaged with the launcher). i mean obviously there’s a lot of analysis and interpretation out there that is very hegemonic, formulaic, obnoxious, etc. but that isn’t a particularly interesting thing to point out. like any other game this is its own lil’ microuniverse that constantly refers to itself, speaks and reinforces its own vernacular. part of the fun of playing a game is the fleeting sense of learning a meaningless new vocabulary. we’ve talked before about how these games seem content to exist without the player’s intrusion, and this game is a further extension of that idea. it positions itself as an object of study, fabricates a fake discourse around itself instead of waiting for an equally dubious discourse (such as the one now taking place in this very forum) to arise on its own.

i was wading through the old bog over at Mystery Zone last night, and this passage struck a chord:

 

A much more unsettling idea, I think, is that of the net as just a kind of huge escape valve from ubiquitous "real" media, which seems ever more alien... The implicit sense that most of these mass cultural products (big films, pop acts, etc) are essentially as unstoppable and untouchable as glaciers, that criticizing them or trying to think of them as human products - in the context of human systems of ideology&finance which promotes some ideas/works and treats others as untouchable - is by now impossible. That they just sort of happen, and complaining about it is like shouting at clouds. I don't really have the critical vocabulary to talk about this properly but there's a sense in which the generally accepted idea that anything worthwhile will just be tucked away secretly on some server is only possible due to a mass alienation (aaaa) from 'wider culture' as a whole. And hence that there's some level of reduced expectations and internalised cynicism at work in the way we think about those things. The 'mole'/'toad' idea that all you can do or hope for is burrow your own hole in the massive plains and hope maybe someone steps in it... even this geocities site is a function of this idea, maybe...

the idea being grasped at here is so difficult to articulate because it lives in this very narrow space between cynicism and hope. between narcissism and desire to connect with other humans. it’s a scary place to think about. most people end up wanting to express ideas in the first place in order to make some kind of dent in the glacier, and that usually doesn’t work so maybe all you can do is burrow into the ground and take it one sublime accidental human encounter at a time. but then what about the glacier? does this mean we just gave up? were we just not cut out to live on a glacier?

 

I dunno. Sometimes I worry about PK Dick's idea of the Chinese Finger Trap of paranoia, where the more you struggle to get out the deeper you're enmeshed. There's something eerie about realising the hold that certain ideas have on you. Or maybe it's just the blow to the ego of realising that you're not complex, really, you're still harbouring the same obsessions and desires. They might be filtered through bookchat and Beckett rather than homemade video game maps and rented movies but you're still the same person. It's kind of a sad feeling but it's also a hopeful, grounding one as well, I think. There's something horribly insular and self-absorbed about trying to understand yourself, or at least of using this as the focus of your life, but maybe not. It could be that real self-knowledge is being able to see yourself in context and hence involves an equal amount of awareness about the world, your place in it, how you think about it, the secret lights by which you make your way through it.

i think these passages are useful as points of contrast to the “Nasty” game but also as connective tissue. there is a sense in this game and in the rest of 50SG, in their means of production and in their execution, of trying to escape the Chinese Finger Trap, of trying to outpace both frivolous adolescent interests and seductive technological conventions, of trying to stop letting them dictate creative output but without leaving that stuff behind entirely. there’s a genuine sense of trying to change, but also trying to stay grounded in some way so you don't just float away. vidyogame as insular, onanistic, recursive black hole that eventually collapses in on itself, hopefully leaving something redemptive in its wake.

p.s. does it really get to anyone else when “myriad” is used as noun? doesn’t it always sound better in adjective form? e.g. “myriad readings” rather than “a myriad of readings.” Nothing Much scholar needs to sharpen that proze. oh well no one's perfect, i'm tryin to cut down on my articles and pronouns.

NASTY (NOTMUCHANDEXEGESIS): AT RISK OF DAMAGING MY INTEGRITY I WILL REVISE EARLIER SCORE AND AWARD A TENTATIVE +1000 STARS

[Maxtion]

p.s. does it really get to anyone else when “myriad” is used as noun? doesn’t it always sound better in adjective form? e.g. “myriad readings” rather than “a myriad of readings.” Nothing Much scholar needs to sharpen that proze. oh well no one's perfect, i'm tryin to cut down on my articles and pronouns.

My life was ruined when I found out that the word was used as a noun long before it was used as an adjective.

[gamesthatexist]

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

[gamesthatexist]

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

 

You could, I think, make a fairly solid case that these games are abusive, in the sense of encouraging pattens of behavior which are basically repetitive, obsessive, paranoid, unhealthy. Rather than a clean exchange with all rules and expectations set openly on the table, the dynamic here is shifting and amorphous (although of course it's not difficult at all for "well-designed" games to encourage awful, obsessive behaviour patterns). But there's still something about them that I find engaging or haunting, maybe because of this amorphous aspect: by encouraging noise, by breaking down distinctions between the significant pieces of a video game experience and the background 'stuff' which constitutes most of the actual content, these games also defamiliarise and render threatening this content. It would probably be a dead-end to try to view these games purely on some moral level of detatchment and demystification... I think of them as a kind of Saturnalian inversion of video games, where the conventional structures are upended, rendered grotesque and ridiculous, shown in a new light. Rather than a wholly new approach to designing or playing games it's more of a refracted lens put on the mainstream, a bringing to light of what was latently present.

 

back to the drawing board.......

[Deadpan]

Did you plan your game club in accordance with the calendar year, which would suggest that the discussion of 50 Short Games should be complete now or some time soon? Because if you are doing another version of this, I'll complete one of my resolutions and join the fun.

[clyde]

@Maxtion

It's exciting that you are joining us!

@gamesthatexist

You are making so very interesting points that I will eventually be responding to.

@Deadpan

There are 50 games in this particular collection and I'm posting one every monday for a week's worth of discussion. So it comes out to about a year of discussion. We are currently about 25 games into the collection so we should finish around July(?)

That said, there is really no need to catch up, all of these games are very modular. We just happen to be talking a lot about the general sensibilities that we are noticing throughout the collection because we are noticing it. It would be nice to have you come in now because you would have a fresh perspective on the current selection(s).

Also, I am very interested in starting/participating in another game-club where we discuss a short, free hobbyist game every week. I'm not sure how games should be chosen. I would think that the next week's game would be suggested and chosen by people who posted about the game discussed the week prior. That way it would avoid a long queue of upcoming games that people are waiting to discuss and keep the selections current and relevant to the people still posting. If anyone is also interested in this, please tell me so and add concerns/suggestions.

[gamesthatexist]

obviously i am interested in another game club. the way I see it, we could approach it a few different ways.

 

1) Pick a specific developer and go through their entire catalog of short form/freeware/homebrew work. This method has benefit of really getting to know the sensibilities, interests, methods, etc. of a specific person. That's what has been nice about this club. Potential drawback I guess is people might feel more like they need to catch up if they get behind with this kind of arrangement, which leads to people dropping off.

 

2) Go through a random collection of trainwreck games--maybe use a launcher like one of the Pirate Karts. Or could just pick random games on the website week by week. this has benefit of getting feel for the culture and context that produces these kinds of games without placing as much stock in specific developer's sensibilities, which might lead to folks feeling less compulsion to catch up on stuff they missed (at the same time, i guess this could lead to less consistent posting).

 

3) Like clyde mentioned, a group could pick games week to week or individuals could take turns suggesting games. Only potential drawback is more organizational effort and posting, which might lead to less consistency or more reluctance to participate in first place.

[clyde]

i find that sometimes it is helpful to point out obvious things. there is a lot of audience manipulation here. the game quickly puts the audience in a position where they have to defend themselves, reversing the traditional interpretive relationship where a work has to defend/justify its value to its audience not only explicitly but subtlety. “En guarde,” says the Nothing Much scholar. usually when there is some interpretation or exegesis happening, thecatamites will step into some dubious character, a distancing act of extra mediation, like another screen. the best part about Nothing Much scholar's character is that they never succeed in constructing an argument. it’s all confused notes, hopeless flailing, wondering at what the point of any of it is. this game is funny for the way it steps back and considers what and who these games are for, if there is any audience and if so what they might want to do with them, what the stakes are, and what’s in it for them? i mean there’s only so many things you can look at/talk about, only so many different self-serving approaches you can take! does any1 who pays attention to this kind of stuff actually enjoy it for its own sake, or is everyone, consciously or not, out to pursue whatever interpretive agenda has been nailed into their skulls by whatever cultural institution they prefer? predicting audience response, and using audience as excuse to pursue particular interpretive threads (how many RTs can I get if I go with this line of thinking?), sounds crude, but I know I’m guilty of this! and besides, reading is never an apolitical act, it’s always performance even if you’re just sittin’ alone in your room with a bourbon. always an imagined audience soaking up yr thought bubbles. there is no escape......

[\quote]

 

At first I thought that the Noted Nothing Much Scholar was a strawman constructed from speculation about Nasty's audience, but I think this is more of a fun role-play than anything else. The absurd expertise with which the Noted Scholar attempts to establish themselves, gives us all an opportunity to laugh at them. 

I'm sorry,that the following sentence is so long, I couldn't figure out a good way to break it up:

The more you examine the particular gallimaufry of literary allusions the Noted Scholar casually throws out

to excuse their incompetence when dealing with the sublimity of the game

whose most notable scene is showing us a mouse player-character that demonstrates that their t-shirt says "I love to eat pussy" on the front

then turning around to reveal "...and I fuck like a dog" on its back,

the more astounding and hilarious their apology becomes in this context.

After reading Wikipedia's summary of Cú Chulainn's story in the Ulster Cycle and then reading Yeats' Cuchulain's Fight with the Sea, I still had no idea what the Noted Scholar was comparing their role as critic of the game to until I got lucky enough to find an interpretation that made sense somewhere on Google Books after finding a few that did not make sense. But the Noted Scholar can also identify with the lay player, shown by the next casual allusion to Wiley Coyote, a classic Looney Tunes character whose sisphyean existence we are likely to be more familiar with.

 

Is the Ulster Cycle and Yeats' poem widely known in Ireland? If so then I guess my experience isn't quite as relevant on this point; maybe it's more a demonstration of the Noted Scholar's breadth of cultural pools from which to draw these allusions. 

 

 

another funny thing about this is the way the game is packaged, how the order of items on the menu screen facetiously dictates the correct sequence you must punch in in order to interpret something, and this will probably succeed in tricking you into poring over every detail even if you immediately know what's going on. if you bother to read the notes, then you’ll probably go back and check each scene, walk around at the bus stop and see if anything happens if you walk off screen in each direction. this game is considering the kinds of stories that are written with the knowledge that no one will read them, or at least written in a mode that is PRETENDING that no one will ever read them (author seems to have some experience with both now). it brings to the surface the idea that interpretation traditionally is both an act of aggression and self-defense, argument must be air-tight full of meticulously cataloged examples so no alternatives can slip through. Nasty plays with this idea to the extent that it kind of doubles in on itself. perhaps thecatamites knows that at this point (of making the trainwreck games), there is a modest collection at least of people who will play whatever the hell thecatamites puts out there, so this is trying to see what that audience will put up with, or perhaps more accurately deflect having to worry about what the audience will put up with through accelerated production and esoteric fragment worlds. this game is pretty self-conscious & self-deprecating, but it’s not really sneering or wallowing; it's having fun with itself and its audience. i mean clearly it's a joke, but for a certain type of audience maybe it’s a joke that’s a lil’ bit cutting. but at the same time, if you look at the author’s note, again clearly a joke (btw any idea what the George reference is about? maybe a beckett play or something?), but i think it’s also genuinely wondering what it would be like if, as author, you could actually control your audience? if you could put them in an ideal, quiet context (calm, sunny room with nice foliage) to where even the most disingenuous player might consider beauty of fragmented things instead of wondering why the gfx aren’t more polished. but then, of course, control would defeat the whole purpose right? art has to deal with the culture that produces it, not the ideal culture for it, which raises questions about institutionalized high culture, gallery spaces, and such. it also makes me think of how i kind of fruitlessly try to "keep up" with this stuff, how many times something well-crafted has been shared online but its craft didn't really matter nor did the person who shared it. i just wasn't in the right mental, physical, or emotional space to appreciate it at the time.

 

I saw the author's note as being a part of a polite fantasy where we are all retiring to our smoking rooms to enjoy the subtle aromas of the game. Not so much a fantasy of controlling how it is perceived as much as a fantasy that the living artist is comfortable in their role being humble and simultaneously of significant cultural importance (and communicating that to the patrons and institutions they rely on). 

 

perhaps this game also functions as warning against getting over-enthusiastic about importance of curation and criticism, but I don’t wanna say it’s that preachy or curmudgeonly. i think it’s sort of reflecting and poking fun at the way culture gets produced more than it’s condemning. i think it’s important to point out that there is a genuine love of note-taking and documenting, the idea that preserving and talking about culture, even perhaps one that is totally contrived, can be fulfilling and meaningful in its own right (for an example look no further than the author’s notes that come packaged with the launcher). i mean obviously there’s a lot of analysis and interpretation out there that is very hegemonic, formulaic, obnoxious, etc. but that isn’t a particularly interesting thing to point out. like any other game this is its own lil’ microuniverse that constantly refers to itself, speaks and reinforces its own vernacular. part of the fun of playing a game is the fleeting sense of learning a meaningless new vocabulary. we’ve talked before about how these games seem content to exist without the player’s intrusion, and this game is a further extension of that idea. it positions itself as an object of study, fabricates a fake discourse around itself instead of waiting for an equally dubious discourse (such as the one now taking place in this very forum) to arise on its own.

 

I see the purpose of Nasty's components mostly as a setting for the Noted Scholar's character to perform. The parody of academia and high-culture that is presented builds up expectations of formality that allow for punchlines such as "This critical overview contains spoilers". I don't think it is a warning as much as a humorous exploration of widely accepted stereotypes about in-depth art criticism and interpretation. Whether or not you think that your highschool experience with The Yellow Wallpaper demonstrated the potential expression of symbolism or the science of bullshitting, we are still likely to have a caricature of the academic who states that something means Everything and then comes around to contradicting themselves with just as much passion with their argument that it means Nothing-At-All.

I think Nasty reveals that thecatamites shares your enjoyment of literary-criticism because it would not be possible for them to write this parody without the type of exposure to it that only comes from a willing interest. A deep understanding of what is being made fun of is apparent in the craftsmanship of the barbs. Speaking of barbs, have y'all ever heard of Gáe Bulg?

 

 

i was wading through the old bog over at Mystery Zone last night, and this passage struck a chord:

 

the idea being grasped at here is so difficult to articulate because it lives in this very narrow space between cynicism and hope. between narcissism and desire to connect with other humans. it’s a scary place to think about. most people end up wanting to express ideas in the first place in order to make some kind of dent in the glacier, and that usually doesn’t work so maybe all you can do is burrow into the ground and take it one sublime accidental human encounter at a time. but then what about the glacier? does this mean we just gave up? were we just not cut out to live on a glacier?

 

I think this is really interesting for a lot of reasons. I think about fame, influence, and significance to the broader culture and/or multitudes a lot; largely I consider how it is a more accessible measurement of social success and how the math doesn't allow for us all to achieve it on those grand scales with which we can easily identify it. The grand versus local scale aspect is additionally fascinating when you consider how the larger scale of desemination necessitates the disempowering of the author's further involvement with the work.

 

 

 

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

 

Indeed. Games that advertise +30 hours of required play-time often end up hiding any most of their potential messages with their inherent rhetorics about tedium, mastery, and commitment. Short games offer us an alternative where we can expect more people to have the time to read the source material and where the essentials are more apparent. 

[gamesthatexist]

At first I thought that the Noted Nothing Much Scholar was a strawman constructed from speculation about Nasty's audience, but I think this is more of a fun role-play than anything else.

 

to me these aren't two separate things. jokes containing truth and all that

 

I think Nasty reveals that thecatamites shares your enjoyment of literary-criticism because it would not be possible for them to write this parody without the type of exposure to it that only comes from a willing interest.

 

wait...who in here enjoys literary criticism SHOW YOURSELF

[gamesthatexist]

I saw the author's note as being a part of a polite fantasy where we are all retiring to our smoking rooms to enjoy the subtle aromas of the game. Not so much a fantasy of controlling how it is perceived as much as a fantasy that the living artist is comfortable in their role being humble and simultaneously of significant cultural importance (and communicating that to the patrons and institutions they rely on).

 

Yeah, I was more interested in the idea of controlling context than the idea of controlling perception of the work itself (though I guess adjusting context is indirect way of controlling audience perception. I mean, context matters so much! Way too much, probably!). I think there's a lot of obsession with controlling experiential context both in mass consumer culture and in more niche artistic communities. W/r/t the former, I'm thinking of big budget game companies that roll out the red carpet for certain people to preview and eventually review their game, using this IRL preferential treatment as a compliment to the in-game mechanics that reinforce the reviewer's sense of self-importance. W/r/t the art world, I'm thinking of debates over gallery spaces. Should a work be the only thing on a blank wall, so viewer can focus on one artwork at a time? Or should a wall be covered in art so viewer gets more 'realistic' sense of its context among other works? Should gallery try to avoid overwhelming the viewer, or should viewer just dip in and out and not expect to see/experience everything? Then there's

of Jeff Tweedy scolding some people in his audience for talking too much. First time I watched that I thought, man, what is Tweedy's problem? Then later I played a house show where I experienced every single one of those feelings across the spectrum (didn't say the shit out loud, but definitely felt all of it and cut off the set early). This is what's interesting about the internet as context for experiencing art. It's not impossible to build community there (lots of various curatorial channels, etc.), but in some ways it's like throwing your art into a black hole. One thing that's interesting about the fantasy of the "IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCE" is that it threatens to dominate context; it promises that this fake, digital context will usurp your actual physical presence in the world around you.

 

I think your reading of the artist's fantasy of humility/satisfaction is an interesting one. Humility is real struggle for anyone in capitalist society that preaches fantasies of meritocracy, rugged individualism, self-importance, etc. over community. This article in the Atlantic is pretty ok: it talks some about how "the artist" doesn't exist in the same way because we have a lot of apprentice creators.

 

The grand versus local scale aspect is additionally fascinating when you consider how the larger scale of desemination necessitates the disempowering of the author's further involvement with the work.

 

Yeah, that's interesting. In that light, fantasy of becoming pop culture phenomenon is on some level a disempowerment fantasy.

[Deadpan]

An obvious idea that did not cross my mind was to check the start date of this thread I suppose.

 

obviously i am interested in another game club. the way I see it, we could approach it a few different ways.

 

1) Pick a specific developer and go through their entire catalog of short form/freeware/homebrew work. This method has benefit of really getting to know the sensibilities, interests, methods, etc. of a specific person. That's what has been nice about this club. Potential drawback I guess is people might feel more like they need to catch up if they get behind with this kind of arrangement, which leads to people dropping off.

 

It also means narrowing down the focus something fierce and tying it very strongly to how relatable you find the work of that particular developer. The idea of going through such a large part of thecatamites oeuvre is laudable in its commitment to depth and detail, but as an activity I'd take up for personal enjoyment I guess I find the idea a little discouraging, if unreasonably so. I've got this mental block about learning in week one (or 25) that I'm just not into his work, and then what? Obviously nobody could force me to stick around against my will, so there'd be no harm in trying, but I suppose I feel like I shouldn't commit to this if I'm unsure about whether I'll actually stick with it. That said, this game collection was too good an opportunity to pass up.

 

2) Go through a random collection of trainwreck games--maybe use a launcher like one of the Pirate Karts. Or could just pick random games on the website week by week. this has benefit of getting feel for the culture and context that produces these kinds of games without placing as much stock in specific developer's sensibilities, which might lead to folks feeling less compulsion to catch up on stuff they missed (at the same time, i guess this could lead to less consistent posting).

 

3) Like clyde mentioned, a group could pick games week to week or individuals could take turns suggesting games. Only potential drawback is more organizational effort and posting, which might lead to less consistency or more reluctance to participate in first place.

 

These will take more organizational effort for sure, and I'm not sure putting it up to a vote is such a good idea if only because of the largely hypothetical concern of reaching an impasse that needs sorting out. I wouldn't want to wish the task of coming up with a predetermined (slowly evolving?) list of games on anybody, but such a varied and impractical effort of altgames curation is probably what I would most enjoy. Which is a preposturous demand to make when I haven't even brought myself to join the existing discussion. Ugh, sorry. I'm so in love with the concept of this thread, but such a lazy slob about actually taking part.

 

That said, what are we playing next?

[clyde]

That said, what are we playing next?

 

 

The next game in the collection is doug.zip available here and here. I'll post the announcement on Monday.

 

 

As far as another game-club goes, I would enjoy moderating it (especially if no one else wants to or needs to take a break). We seem like a polite enough bunch that we could probably come to agreements on whose turn it is to pick the game for the next week. I think that picking the games way ahead of time would encourage drop-off (but what would I know about preventing drop-off looking at this thread). If no one suggests a game, I have no problem coming up with one, I usually post atleast one game a week in the Share Short games that you enjoy and require no fee thread anyway. I just don't want to impose my own taste on others too much because I tend to do that by getting excited about things I like. 

 

What expectations would y'all have about the games we post? I'll go ahead and mention that I'm not likely to pay for the weekly selections and I am unlikely to post if the game takes more than an hour to play. 

 

 

 

 

 

[gamesthatexist]

I'll go ahead and mention that I'm not likely to pay for the weekly selections and I am unlikely to post if the game takes more than an hour to play.

 

Yeah I agree, short and free is a good baseline.

 

It also means narrowing down the focus something fierce and tying it very strongly to how relatable you find the work of that particular developer. The idea of going through such a large part of thecatamites oeuvre is laudable in its commitment to depth and detail, but as an activity I'd take up for personal enjoyment I guess I find the idea a little discouraging, if unreasonably so. I've got this mental block about learning in week one (or 25) that I'm just not into his work, and then what? Obviously nobody could force me to stick around against my will, so there'd be no harm in trying, but I suppose I feel like I shouldn't commit to this if I'm unsure about whether I'll actually stick with it.

 

If you don't mind my asking, what kinds of games do you like?

 

Also, it might be worth pointing out that you could literally just write one sentence per week about each game if you want to participate, but don't like the idea of feeling obligated to spend much time on it. There are no rules or anything about how many thoughts you need to write down.

[Deadpan]

What expectations would y'all have about the games we post? I'll go ahead and mention that I'm not likely to pay for the weekly selections and I am unlikely to post if the game takes more than an hour to play. 

 

Free and short is definitely a good idea to make participation easy, and also because these games never get enough discussion elsewhere.

 

If you don't mind my asking, what kinds of games do you like?

 

I don't even know! Sorry, I am just totally that guy in this thread, but I'm thinking out loud in part because we're planning to introduce a monthly game club type discussion across multiple essays at another site I write for (inspired by The Dissolve, movie buffs tell me) and now I have unresolved feelings about what our selection should look like.

 

I guess I wouldn't mind variety above all. We can include the free, short games that come up in games discourse anyway, but also go back some years and revisit some classics (Today I Die, Gravity Bone, The Company of Myself or such). I'm not sure how a list that achieves a good mix of different stuff would fall into place, but then I also don't have my finger on the pulse of altgames curation as much as you two or other fine folk around here.

[clyde]

So when I go back and play Nasty, I find myself enjoying the format and the decisions that were made within it. Each numbered option, played in numeric order, zooms out a little bit to extrapolate upon the fact that the last exists in a larger world. The game itself is cute and interesting (for reasons that the Noted Scholar actually addresses in many cases once they manage to get past the absurd citations and warrants); the author's note is ridiculous, but also a fantasy which I can get into; the Noted Scholar steals the show with their willingness to dive deep as a clumsy caricature with some genuine hints of insight; the Synopsis for Students confirms that this is kind of really happening (or just says "Yes, you get the joke."); then the study-questions resolve this excercise in absurdity with a short summary that exemplifies the through-line of Nasty's humor.

 

The Noted Scholar is such a great character. I love to find old art-history books and read the introductions for similar reasons that I enjoy the Noted Scholar. I should find some of them, but it's really going to be hard. I feel like one of them was written by someone named "Orzafont" or something like that and they were so cute with the way they made everything feel so grand when summarizing the the significance of the entiriety of western Art's history in 15 pages or so. I don't remember how the rest of the book was. One example of this tone that I do remember (though it is not on the same scale of zeal) Is Alfred G. Martin's Hand-Taming Wild-Birds at the Feeder. Sometimes the subject matter is just a jumping off point for a skilled writer to tell you what they think about painting deer in the fog. There was another book I came across once that was a moth-bestiary that had poetry between entries and these really entertaining stories about sugaring for moths* and what those experiences meant to them. So as an appreciator of that tendency in specialists, I really enjoyed reading a parody of those naturalists/critics who start from an observation relevant to the advertised subject-matter before trailing off into anidotes to nihilism. 

 

 

*Holy shit, I found an excerpt from The Moth Book online and it explempifies what i'm refering to. It is so good.

[thecatamites]

Good moth song.

 

I think a way you could have different authors without things feeling too miscellaneous would be to pick a certain time period and grouping criteria, like from all games posted to indiegames.com in 2004 or by using the random page function for freeindiegam.es (which was recent but i think still holds up as a distinct period / grouping lens for freeware, that i'd love to see written about and discussed as things maybe start to change up again).

 

In terms of short games from a specific author then increpare remains the undiscovered country http://www.increpare.com/