clyde

50 Short Games by thecatamites (Game Club)

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

 

I actually had the awesome experience of discussing increpare's recent 'break-up' series (title given presumptuously) with a friend in person a few months ago! It is a conversational topic I never thought would arise organically without planning, and yet it did. There is so much to dissect in increpare's work, and some great comments on the site from people who've already attempted it. Choosing a specific selection would perhaps be the hardest part... or maybe chronologically from the beginning is more feasible than I imagine.

 

Anyway. This 'section' of 50 Short Games (from Operative Assailants until possibly as late as Moppy Returns depending on how many wild guesses I feel like making about thecatamites' psyche) is one of my favourites, or at least the one I find most interesting. Sea of Love in particular has unexpectedly stuck with me the most of all of the games, to the point where I can hear its soft, low ditty playing in my head now despite not having heard it for a year. Sadly, this doesn't seem to be much help when I try to write about it at the moment. Hopefully I can catch up later. I'd also like to try answering the essay questions from Nasty.

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

 

Wow that is some performance, weird combination of saccharine and sinister(?). I'll never look at moths the same again. 

 

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/

 

These are both really good suggestions. I like the idea of freeindiegam.es because as mentioned it has a distinct voice (well, multiple voices) and is low maintenance (clyde, you could continue moderating/curating, and all you would have to do would be hit the "random" button and post the results). And yeah, it seems like freeware has already moved on to something else, or maybe just disseminated even further. It's important to document/appreciate lenses like FIG because they have wide ripple effects even as they seem to come and go quickly.  

 

Increpare's catalog would be great too because there's such an impressive body of work there. It seems like Slave of God got significant coverage, but that's the only one I know of that people payed much attention to? I loved Rara Racer. Only drawback of FIG approach is we wouldn't run across any of those games (though we would definitely get a sense of the curatorial voice since increpare was a contributor).

 

I am leaning towards FIG because based on previous discussion it seems like the method people would be more into.

 

increpare's recent 'break-up' series (title given presumptuously)

 

Which ones are in the break-up series???

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Which ones are in the break-up series???

 

Most broadly I would say it's all 18 games made from October-November 2014, although Click click click and Let your mind fall to rest are debatable inclusions. Chris Priestman wrote a little about them and I wrote even less.

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I think Doug.zip might be representing a death. Doug has two options, he can stay home or go to the hospital. Once he goes to the hospital, the story ends, somewhat abruptly as seen by the incomplete message in the final scene. This game feels more realistic than the others. A lot of people go to the hospital and die there but even so, it seems like the only reasonable option.

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I've been reading this thread for a little while now, but Doug.zip gave me the final push needed to actually contribute. I'd played the compilation shortly after it came out, at what I'd thought was a reasonably leisurely pace, but after playing doug.zip again I was struck at how differently it came across to me when I played it by itself, not as a part of a much larger whole. The smudged and unsteady "thanks for P" at the end shocked me a little bit with how stark and sincere it was (right down to the way the image is placed off-centre on a plain black background), which given that my previous reaction was that it was a simple joke, I was not prepared to feel. I guess what I'm trying to say is that playing these marker games one after the other is a completely different experience compared to each as an individual work.

 

I like that because of the starting setup, you can rapidly enter and exit the house by pressing down and jiggling left/right when necessary. I also like the gradient background of the house, and although I would hesitate to analyse this in ways other than simple contrast with the outside world, there seems to be many possibilities to what this represents. To me at least it is giving the game that weird mix of sterile computer art and organic paper art that is present in a lot of things that thecatamites does. 

 

I dunno, Doug.zip felt strange in that it didn't have a simulated kitsch feel to it (which would of gone unnoticed amidst the overwhelming majority of other games in this compilation that did), the audience reaction wasn't fed back into the experience so it came out being much more honest, although that could be just because it was so short. I'm looking forward to discovering new outlooks on these games now.

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To me at least it is giving the game that weird mix of sterile computer art and organic paper art that is present in a lot of things that thecatamites does.

 

Great description. Thanks for posting! Before reading yours and clyde's posts about this one, I think I really underestimated how different doug.zip feels in tone from the other games. I agree with you about this being less on the simulated kitsch side. I would also place Work Drinks in this category I think? Though doug.zip probably has a category all its own. It's such a terse little experience only extended by the potential stasis of perpetually entering & exiting your house in anticipation of this vaguely ominous trip to the hospital. The idea that doug.zip is this stark sputter of sincerity surrounded by oscillating kitsch is an interesting one, though I'm not sure I experienced it in this way since I found it so deliberately opaque (though in a very different way than the other ones). Your reading of this game is sort of how I usually see the other marker games, but on a more micro level - waves of pulpy simulacra with stranded little blips of sincerity mixed in.

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On the flipside of reading Doug.zip in contrast to the rest of the collection, here's me actually starting out with this one.

 

Really not sure what to make of it except feel thrown by this shortest of short narrative experiments. The hospital seems to be the only way to end the game, and the message cut short does lend itself to reading this as a game about a life cut short.

 

Things that I noticed and that haven't been brought up yet:

 

The soundscape: I loaded this game up from the collection and it was just instantly a cacaphony of bleeping and wailing, to the point where I had to turn down my sound a whole lot. This might be evidence of a haphazard mix perhaps, but it's also suitably distressing and lends itself to reading the moving colored blip on alternating sprites of the car as a siren. After remaining still for a while I got the impression that the sound intensified but I'm not actually sure that is the case.

 

The walk animation: As far as I can tell the little paper person we play is moving forward my continually wrapping and unwrapping, which, especially after pushing them up against a wall in the house and observing it outside of actual movement, gave me the impression that they were repeatedly doubling over in pain. Probably more food for the hospital interpretation, as if more material for hapless extrapolation was required.

 

Not a particularly memorably first look at the series I guess, just enter stage left, read a line, exit stage right. Oddly enough, in trying to mess with it after a couple of repeats, I learned that the game space doesn't actually seem to have any hard boundaries. You can walk out of frame and walk back in unhindered. Judging by the amount of time it takes you to get back, there's just an endless void out there, but your perspective is fixed to this little one-piece diorama. I don't know.

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I've missed a few but Stephenstown had the least interaction of any of thecatamites' games that I've played. It seemed like there were only 2 spots where you could do anything other than control the character: the two panels talking about the other denizens of the town. I guess also the final panel where you close the game. The lack of interaction in those two panels made me wonder if the player character in those panels is supposed to be representative of the residents who the narrator claims have no culture and do nothing, or whether it is supposed to be the narrator (based on the sprite it seems to be the latter). Following that thought, I wondered if Stephenstown was actually supposed to be a physical representation of the authors mind. I couldn't find a lot to back up this idea, so I fell back to my original thought, which is that this is just a game about how Stephen doesn't like the Dublin suburbs very much.

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Not sure I have much to say about Stephenstown. Two games in for me, it confirms the trend of paper artwork set against more technical, polished elements (in this case mostly the font I suppose). Although about suburbia, some of the things in there definitely remind me of growing up in the smallest of small towns.

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I've missed a few but Stephenstown had the least interaction of any of thecatamites' games that I've played. It seemed like there were only 2 spots where you could do anything other than control the character: the two panels talking about the other denizens of the town. 

 

I get the impression that the two scenes with interaction are there to highlight the lack on interaction with the citizens of Stephenstown; in most of these games, little animated figures produce dialogue or events when collided with, in Stephenstown they are just as static as trees or boundaries. Some places can really feel like this, being incredibly alone in a crowd of people because the  people around are not interested in interaction. Often I feel this way in the towns I've lived in, that the only opportunities to communicate with others are commercial interactions and church greetings. I'm certainly guilty of the stoicism that causes this, epecially when it feels like ever person who approaches me is just going to ask for money because that's what has happened in every interaction outside of work for the past two months. Based on the description of Stephenstown, I imagine that the established cultural habits of this particular place exacerbate this inaccessibility of social interaction. The need of the narrator to contrast the lack of social interaction with the visual beauty of the urban planning makes me think that visitors give the character a hard time about his displeasure with a place that is nice to visit, but a terrible place to live. 

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The lack of interaction in those two panels made me wonder if the player character in those panels is supposed to be representative of the residents who the narrator claims have no culture and do nothing, or whether it is supposed to be the narrator (based on the sprite it seems to be the latter). Following that thought, I wondered if Stephenstown was actually supposed to be a physical representation of the authors mind.

 

For me this is definitely part of what the game is about in the sense that who we are is inextricably bound up in where we come from. Like we're all stuck with this nagging adolescent fixation that we're just walking billboards for our static, unremarkable hometowns. There is no escape......

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My gut reaction to this (I'm guessing a common one here) is along the lines of "man, I really would love it if thecatamites made a Final Fantasy game!" Some further scrutiny makes me reconsider. What repels me most about RPGs is their often unnecessarily long playtimes and inevitable monotonous grinding. FF35 condenses Final Fantasy elements into a fast-paced playable trailer, cutting to the next humorous take on some RPG trope before I have time to be bored. This approach definitely wouldn't work for a longer RPG. Basically, I'm saying he cheated.

 

Of course, arguably this is already thecatamites' take on an entry in the Final Fantasy series (meta content is common throughout the 50 Short Games collection, and those games aren't any less the games they claim to be). There's also Space Funeral already.

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The treatment of the Final Fantasy games as a series rather than as individual RPGs is interesting to me because I do this and I thought it was because I haven't played any of them. In my experience, Final Fantasy has been a thread of games fandom that I've seen on both personal levels and on media scales. A kid my age who lived on my street showed me what I think was Final Fantasy 2 one time when I went over to his house. It looked like Dragon Warrior which I had given up on because I hated having to level my character. I think I compared them and I was informed that Final Fantasy was different and better, but I was unable to see any significant differences in the small amount of time in which I watched him play. This was a series that I have kinda always assumed I would stop hearing about. The next time I heard about it was when my girlfriend's brother was obsessed with the series. Whenever we weren't playing Mario Kart together, he was playing JRPGs. He spent far more time playing video games than anyone I had ever met. The next time I noticed the series was when my roommate in college bought Final Fantasy 7 and played all of it. It was interesting to see that the series had progressed parallel to my own tastes; though it seemed greatly improved, the aspects that made it unappealing to me had continued to grow and now it had super long, repeatitous battle-sequences. So as I play FF35, my frame of reference is Final Fantasy as a series that I've never understood the appeal of being enjoyed by those around me throughout my youth. 

In the epilogue of FF35, I'm struck by how Stephen wants to work on the series in general and in any capacity rather than wanting to make a single game or do something specific with the series. He seems to be asking for the opportunity to contribute to the continuation of a tradition. It's interesting to think of computer-games having reputable traditions that will continue to propagate like a cultural activity or religious rite, especially when it is created by a capitalist media-company. 

 

Since I am unfamiliar with the content of the series and have never grown attached, I think I'm missing a lot of the nostalgic aspects of FF35.  I like seeing the author's perspective of Final Fantasy being essentialized and quickly consumed, but I lack the personal experience to feel the hits and withdrawls that I imagine these images and phrases could provide. But I do understand how creating fan-fiction can allow you to engage with a fictional world that you miss being immersed in and I view FF35 as that type of excercise. 

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The treatment of the Final Fantasy games as a series rather than as individual RPGs is interesting to me because I do this and I thought it was because I haven't played any of them. In my experience, Final Fantasy has been a thread of games fandom that I've seen on both personal levels and on media scales. A kid my age who lived on my street showed me what I think was Final Fantasy 2 one time when I went over to his house. It looked like Dragon Warrior which I had given up on because I hated having to level my character. I think I compared them and I was informed that Final Fantasy was different and better, but I was unable to see any significant differences in the small amount of time in which I watched him play. This was a series that I have kinda always assumed I would stop hearing about. The next time I heard about it was when my girlfriend's brother was obsessed with the series. Whenever we weren't playing Mario Kart together, he was playing JRPGs. He spent far more time playing video games than anyone I had ever met. The next time I noticed the series was when my roommate in college bought Final Fantasy 7 and played all of it. It was interesting to see that the series had progressed parallel to my own tastes; though it seemed greatly improved, the aspects that made it unappealing to me had continued to grow and now it had super long, repeatitous battle-sequences. So as I play FF35, my frame of reference is Final Fantasy as a series that I've never understood the appeal of being enjoyed by those around me throughout my youth. 

In the epilogue of FF35, I'm struck by how Stephen wants to work on the series in general and in any capacity rather than wanting to make a single game or do something specific with the series. He seems to be asking for the opportunity to contribute to the continuation of a tradition. It's interesting to think of computer-games having reputable traditions that will continue to propagate like a cultural activity or religious rite, especially when it is created by a capitalist media-company. 

 

Since I am unfamiliar with the content of the series and have never grown attached, I think I'm missing a lot of the nostalgic aspects of FF35.  I like seeing the author's perspective of Final Fantasy being essentialized and quickly consumed, but I lack the personal experience to feel the hits and withdrawls that I imagine these images and phrases could provide. But I do understand how creating fan-fiction can allow you to engage with a fictional world that you miss being immersed in and I view FF35 as that type of excercise. 

 

I actually did play all the final fantasies when I was younger, as well as pretty much any 16-bit jrpg that I could get my hands on. I'm very familiar with the tropes that are being poked at in the first part of the game, and I can say that you're probably not missing that much except a few knowing chuckles.

 

I took the second part of the game as being (in a general sense) about someone who sees creative legitimacy as the only means to to find love and respect that he/she is missing elsewhere in life.

 

"A bee dies when it's been separated from the hive for too long. Lack of love, I'm beating my head against the window panes."

 

It's beautiful writing like that thrown in with the absurd humor that really makes me love these games.

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Employee Report reminded me of something I wrote before I had ever had a job I liked and was doubtful that they existed. I'm going to transcribe it here:

 

For so long now, my friends and I have had the problem of not having enough time or energy for the efforts which make us happy while maintaining jobs. A good employee is neurotic about being late, waking up in a quick jerk sweat and demanding "How long was I asleep! What time is it, is it night or day!?"

This is not healthy. 

 

-clyde from his sketch-book Inserts

 

I think that the metaphor of weighted bouyancy is pretty great for the wakeful sleep that irregularly scheduled part-timers (or anyone on call) can exist within for years at a time. It's such a waste of mental focus. Bouyancy also describes my undulating wavelengths of enthusiasm between the ages of 19 and 25. I would find a shitty restaurant job, work overtime for a few months, turn in my two weeks notice when I had three months for bills, starches, eggs, icecream, coffee and wine, and live a reasonable life for a while. Those off-seasons were very important to me; without them, I was unable to focus on a project (often just philosophical hypothesis) for more than two days in a row which was very selective of which projects took hold. While employed, my interests were culled by the short waits; it's hard to come up with activities that can provide the smallest moment of satisfaction when you are constantly feeling like you will be leaving to catch the bus in 15 minutes or when you need to go to sleep so tommorow won't be as shitty.

 

I can lie here, with my dick in my hand, before it's time to go to work.

 

I read that line as if it's an understanding of what allowances currently exist within the narrator's sustained situation. 

 

Time would expand when I was off for months at a time and contract when I went back into employment. I didn't understand how someone could have the same job for many years at a time because my time employed was often just a blur accompanied by memories of a small space. Still, I was always aware that I would have to give up another few months of my life at some point in the future while walking around, inconsiderate of how long everything was taking. It was a very persephonistic existence. 

 

Here is the drawing I did on the next page in Inserts.

 

OmRxIlO.png?1

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The fading into and out of blackness, and the slow rising and descending remind me of fading in and out of sleep. It's like sitting in bed in the morning knowing that you have to get up soon, but not wanting to fully wake up. But in this metaphor, I'm not sure if waking up corresponds to rising out of the abyss or falling into it.

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