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50 Short Games by thecatamites (Game Club)

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Pamela's Adventures in Dreamland: I would say that this is the most well realized of the dream narrative games. I too enjoy how the two states of consciousness are clearly split, and how they shape each other. I admire this game for how it manages a creepy tone in concert with cheery bright palette and cartoonish character models. That's like a Mickey Mouse spider or something.

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The things I enjoy about Town is the precision of the one-pixel wide drawings and the confident, dissonant rhythm and melody of the music. The subject represented doesn't have much much novelty for me, but it demonstrates the things I appreciate well. There is a bead-art or minimal cross-stitch aesthetic going on here. Turquoise droplets laid in lines on inky blackness to create simple line-drawings exemplify the beauty of the dot-matrix media. I've only seen this medium used in pinball-animations and traffic-alerts so it's nice to see something playfully made. I wonder if this was an inspiration for Pink Zone which adds much more complexity and content, but lacks the elegance.

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Town: The music here evades aspiring to any specific tone. It doesn't try to be solemn or pretty, improvisation that doesn't adhere to any scale. This works for me because any attempt to augment the sense of distance and smallness I feel from playing this could only trivialize it. It's amazing how a smaller screen, black space, tiny models, zoomed-out view can affect tone so much. Corn fields rendered as rigid grids. Trees that never manage to organize in numbers larger than a pair. A few buildings enjoy an extra dimension that makes them appear stately among the rural 2d houses. Ambiguous shapes clustered together. Humans? Animals? Are those power lines? Out in the middle of nowhere, nowhere near the road? Not quite desert. Vaguely midwest. Or southwest. Doesn't matter. What matters is the distance, the sense of never having to experience this everyday smallness up close. For most towns that we encounter in our lives either directly or indirectly, it might as well be the case that no one lives in them. They will never touch us, so they might as well be like this.

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oooooh Lump Max has the best title screen. and i like the reckless similes that serve as impenetrable explanations of things. i feel like i keep rephrasing different versions of this observation, but: it's really weird how these games can use a teeming, energetic tone to overlay some sinister undercurrent. where you feel weirdly uplifted about something terrible happening

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Tangential to the thread, but inspired by its concept:

 

I've been looking into setting up a weekly games criticism club where we'd read formative games criticism and a dash of critical theory for a quick tour of different styles and important conversations/aspects/lenses (mostly by coming up with a vague list of texts consider important and have strong enough opinions on to guide a reading of). Would anybody here be interested in that sort of thing?

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Tangential to the thread, but inspired by its concept:

 

I've been looking into setting up a weekly games criticism club where we'd read formative games criticism and a dash of critical theory for a quick tour of different styles and important conversations/aspects/lenses (mostly by coming up with a vague list of texts consider important and have strong enough opinions on to guide a reading of). Would anybody here be interested in that sort of thing?

 

I'm interested if the criticism is about free, small games. I can't invest the time to study criticism of long games and responding to criticism about games I haven't played feels awkward and criticism about criticism tends to be ineffectually due to reliance on generality.

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It'd be more about the craft, the how rather than the what of the writing, which does limit it people who are interested in meta games criticism conversations.

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Tangential to the thread, but inspired by its concept:

 

I've been looking into setting up a weekly games criticism club where we'd read formative games criticism and a dash of critical theory for a quick tour of different styles and important conversations/aspects/lenses (mostly by coming up with a vague list of texts consider important and have strong enough opinions on to guide a reading of). Would anybody here be interested in that sort of thing?

 

I've been thinking about this again. I still have a mixture of curiosity/reluctance, largely because I feel like I just can't commit to another weekly thing like this right now, but I want to. I would be interested enough to show up sometimes, but not every week. 

Also, I think that this is a great idea, I imagine that others would be interested in this if they knew about it. If you become certain that you are going to form this club, please tell me and give me the details. I'd like to mention it on our podcast. 

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 it's really weird how these games can use a teeming, energetic tone to overlay some sinister undercurrent. where you feel weirdly uplifted about something terrible happening

 

I think that the uplifting aspect is the successful humor that seems to come from a benevolent voice. I usually hate satire. I really hate satire. I often find myself feeling that a piece of satire glorifies the thing it (might be) trying to make absurd or undesirable through hyperbole. Maybe thecatamites just happens to speak my language, but I feel like their satire is worthwhile. Lump Max is a great example of this. The suggestions that the mucaloids are possibly sentient are subtle enough that I would think the satire might not get picked up on but once the mucaloids are offering the protagonist a ham I'm simultaneously laughing and confirming that the protagonist is not a hero. The juxtaposition of insulting the gift, the semblance of culture in the formations of the victims, the realization that this is a village, and also that the slaughter is involuntary rather than skill-based and produces minimal feedback; all of this lets the narrative be funny without being fun. As a player, I don't feel that I am in control of the character, the gameplay feels more like I'm trying to plug a leak than that I am taking out enemies. 

Then when I go back and play again, knowing that the protagonist is just a dangerous douchebag, every screen conveys that arrogance. 

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Plug a leak is a good way to put it. There's this sloppy dynamism at play on the screens as you explore the planet - shooting, sliding, text, scattered topography - that makes it all feel just a bit overstimulating. And yeah the game is tinted differently on a second playthrough because of your knowledge of the protagonist. The narrator speaks immediately, on the title screen and then on the first screen after arriving on the alien planet. But it's sort of impossible to detect that they're a jerk at first because all of the narration reads as pastiche of impenetrable fact statements. "There are mucaloids on this planet, basically large enzymes." And "I hate life on planet Earth," the first line in the game (that doesn't fall in the fact-statement category), at first made me think I was supposed to sympathize. I hesitate to refer to something like this as satire for the negative associations you just described, but maybe that's because I'm only thinking of bad satire. I guess pastiche or camp or pulp would work better for me, but not entirely satisfactory either, and aren't the differences in these terms simply a matter of degree? Different adjustments to the sliders of self-aware exaggeration of thing, deflection of sentiment, & rejection of rubric of "authenticity." Maybe we could think of this tone as satire of satire, a kind of parody of formal pastiche in itself. I am more impressed with this one the more times I play it. Anyway, the author's note suggests Lump Max is about a relationship. Maybe about stumbling around and destroying things, pretending you did it on purpose because you don't like yourself. Maybe this does make Max sympathetic. What's going on in the title?  

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I've been thinking about this again. I still have a mixture of curiosity/reluctance, largely because I feel like I just can't commit to another weekly thing like this right now, but I want to. I would be interested enough to show up sometimes, but not every week. 

Also, I think that this is a great idea, I imagine that others would be interested in this if they knew about it. If you become certain that you are going to form this club, please tell me and give me the details. I'd like to mention it on our podcast. 

 

Certain enough to have started compiling a list of things I'd like to read with folk and asking them to signal interest. I put this up as a way of letting people know. Still unsure what format it will take, depending on how many people are interested a group email conversation might be enough, or we'll crash on a forum like this one, or I'll make a simple blog with a comment section somewhere.

 

I'd encourage you to join anyway if you're unsure. The critics and such I've gotten interested are all quite stressed, so it'll be low-upkeep, and there's always the option of just watching the discussion unfold.

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@Deadpan

Would it be alright to mention this on a podcast and instruct them to email you with the subject line "Game Crit Club" if they are interested?

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Controid: Curious how the trappings of video game land can be so ghostly and evocative when laid bare, removed of all pretense of challenge or purpose. The harmless, shambling, physics-ignoring humanoids on the screen aren't really your enemies because they deal no damage. Damage is not something that exists here for the player. There's no reason to shoot them, besides the fact that it's a genre convention, something to do, and the screen tells you how in the instructions. Made me wonder what is interesting about games like Contra and Metroid in the first place besides a lingering collective imagining of those spaces. Made me think about how trying to recreate a game like this with a toolset like MMF2 leads to inevitable mutation, a kind of deconstruction where authorial intent is besides the point. Theoretically, a Metroid-like is this place where you get pleasure from being able to explore, retrace your steps, look for new paths, unlock new paths. Here we have a baffling, slow elevator sequence (the scenic route) that leisurely descends to a lava screen, and another looping path that ends up at the same place. Either way, you can't leave the lava screen to return to any of the other screens. But you can walk off the lava screen so that your avatar gets stuck outside of the frame. Purgatory. Instead of unlocking new paths via exploration, you close off old ones.

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Notice the music. 
 

 

 

 

Controid: Curious how the trappings of video game land can be so ghostly and evocative when laid bare, removed of all pretense of challenge or purpose. The harmless, shambling, physics-ignoring humanoids on the screen aren't really your enemies because they deal no damage. Damage is not something that exists here for the player. There's no reason to shoot them, besides the fact that it's a genre convention, something to do, and the screen tells you how in the instructions. Made me wonder what is interesting about games like Contra and Metroid in the first place besides a lingering collective imagining of those spaces. Made me think about how trying to recreate a game like this with a toolset like MMF2 leads to inevitable mutation, a kind of deconstruction where authorial intent is besides the point. Theoretically, a Metroid-like is this place where you get pleasure from being able to explore, retrace your steps, look for new paths, unlock new paths. Here we have a baffling, slow elevator sequence (the scenic route) that leisurely descends to a lava screen, and another looping path that ends up at the same place. Either way, you can't leave the lava screen to return to any of the other screens. But you can walk off the lava screen so that your avatar gets stuck outside of the frame. Purgatory. Instead of unlocking new paths via exploration, you close off old ones.

 

This is a great point. The most memorable parts of Metroid and Contra for me are the worlds, their atmospheres, monsters and machineries. It's fortunate for me that Metroid and Contra were given the 50 Short Games treatment because I get a sense of what the threat of death provided versus what the worlds contributed themselves. I think I played more Contra than any other Nintendo game, it's burned into my memory. The two things that Controid doesn't include that feel essential now that I see their absence is

 

 

 

Controid seems like it is much more of blatant fangame than FF35. While FF35 was contextualized by its commentary, Controid feels more like a study to examine the parts or evoke the author's particular nostalgia. Coincidentally, I've been interested in fangames for the past few weeks. I'm starting to appreciate the way they express the most memorable aspects by only simulating the parts that take the most priority in the author's memory. Here is a great example of how hobbyist games provide something for me that I can't find elsewhere. In commercial releases, the sequel will inevitably add complexity to the visual fidelity, narrative, systems, environments and so on. Commercial relelases always provide older games with the treatment that contemporary techniques take for granted. But with hobbyist fangames, instead of trying to make the brand relevant again, they demonstrate what residue of the original games remain in the author's mind 25 years later. Both are valuable, I'm glad both exist. 

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In my initial play-through I really enjoyed the HQ/crush metaphor for it's cuteness and absurdity. The tropes or common experiences of reading too much into a trivial amount of affection (the emoticon) and the debilitating concern about how to effectively time a phone-call sustained the humor and cuteness of that theme. 

I eventually became more interested in the relationship between Meepo, Drizzly, and HQ. I think there is an implication that Drizzly likes-likes Meepo and is going through the confirmation that their affection towards Meepo is unrequited (something that Drizzly already knew, but there was still enough ambiguity to have hope). Meepo is so distracted by their own crush on HQ that they aren't observant of how Drizzly really feels. At this depth, the setting and narrative of Meepo In Love becomes rather interesting to me. Here is a pair that has been stationed together, assumably alone, to observe the existence of physical things of cosmic scale. Does Meepo not see how Drizzly feels towards them? Or does Meepo not care? Either way, it hurts Drizzly so much that all responses are either dismissive or angry. While Meepo is contemplating suicide over a hallucinated or contrived long-distance romance that has little chances of being confirmed, and even less of a chance of being consummated, Drizzly is stuck on the ship alone with a person they desire who has rejected them in a situation where the only competition for Meepo's heart is routine acknowledgement of infrequent data-reports from far away (now with an emoticon). I can see why it would be hard for Drizzly not to take this personally. The lack of information Meepo has about HQ gives the impression that the entire substance of this crush is a creation of Meepo; and it's such an absurd, desperate romance that Drizzly may suspect that Meepo is crafting it to avoid dealing with Drizzly's feelings. 

I enjoy that the setting hyperbolizes this form of unrequited love with its implied distances and tour-lengths. There is another quality to it demonstrated by the scene in the lab. The lab-scene gives me the feeling that Meepo has been investing all of their efforts into distant objects; Drizzly is too near to be of relevance. 

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Over the past year, I've been following @thecatamites on Twitter, reading some of excerpts from A1 Reviews, and I read Stephen "thecatamites" Murphy's article about the cultural practices of the RPG Maker scene of a certain time and place in Arcade Review #3 (now free). One of the things I've picked up on is that Murphy has a explorative interest in determining inherent qualities within RPG Maker games and top-down jRPGs in relation. I know very little about RPG Maker (and little about top-down jRPGs), but I get the impression that certain game-tropes were established by early jRPGs, those tropes were expected to be easy-to-integrate features by users of RPG Maker, and so RPG Maker games have a tendency to rely on and strengthen those jRPG tropes. I can easily see how this would happen with any genre-specific prosumer game-engine. It's interesting material, it's got a intriguing which-came-first feedback-loop going for it; do the community expectations of genre-signifiers determine inclusion of collection-quests and battles, or does the prevalance of collection-quests and battles determine the community's idea of what makes a top-down jRPG a top-down jRPG? Exploration of the jRPG-form's essential aspects will ultimately lead to this feedback-driven genetic algorithm of ambigious fitness-functions since it is the process from which the instances of detail come.
Frank Tomato HD is an expression of what those established tropes and expected systems offer us indirectly. We are presented with a forgotten valley, what I see as the aftermath of earlier playthrough. RPGs tend to spot vast landscapes with small zoomable points of interest, denoted with map-icons. Once in those places of interest, we often have either NPCs to get quests from, puzzles to solve, enemies to encounter and defeat, treasure-chests to loot, or world atmosphere to take in. The player is typically encouraged to permanently plunder the use from all but one of those.
In my personal gaming experience, Far Cry 2's respawning check-points is the climax of a debate between two sensibilities. There are those who felt inconvenienced by having to fight through areas they've already conquered, and there are those who fear the desertification of the fertile enemy-grounds upon which the player may test their weapons and skills. I'm a fan of watching that debate and others like it rationalize themselves with game-narrative implications rather than the arguments of the player's mechanical experience. In the case of Far Cry 2, this can become a debate that has some odd similarities to debates about U.S. military-strategy in contemporary wars; many believe that military-goals are achieved by fighting through the check-points, forgetting that this depends on the political views of those who repopulate the check-point. I apoligize if that analogy looks like I'm equating computer-game targets to actual people, my intention is instead to compare the simplistic fire-power fantasies of war-hawks egged on by defense contractors to the expectations of a gamer who wants worlds crafted exclusively for the execution of their own heroics.
Frank Tomato HD is a commentary on the player-spoils-desertification side-effect of the no-respawn design-decision. Empty towns, dungeons designed with architectual psychology techniques that now lead to corpses you don't remember the details of slaughtering and empty chests that once held items you have since ingested in battle or sold for scrap are remnants that you now find yourself wading through. Frank Tomato HD doesn't entirely communicate the effect since we play through the snap-shot of this later state without playing through the earlier combat that it results from, but this is of course necessary in order to guide the player into this contemplation; it is the only thing to pay attention to in Frank Tomato HD. Later, the player may think of Frank Tomato when playing though a Dragon Age, retrieving an unique item they have dropped because it encumbered them, but now need in order to complete a side-quest. Though, I think those items have no weight and cannot be removed from your inventory which is something that thecatamites may have also made a game about.

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The art-style in Work Drinks complements the environment represented in an interesting way for me. When ever I'm in this type of scenario, I'm carrying a ball-point pen and a folded piece of white paper. I typically end up with something in the same color-palette of this game and it also tends to have a lot of loose cross-hatching too. 

The voice of the narration is in the present tense, but seems to be walking through the memory of work drinks rather than actually experiencing it in the moment; this objectivity aspect of retrospect helps along the involuntary and unexplained estrangement depicted. Work Drinks is a snapshot of a mildly uncomfortable common experience, and it feels like it's presented as that photo rather than as the actual experience. 

Work Drinks has a few ways of obscuring its narrative. The mid-ground Bumps and the first-person drinking make the exposition difficult to read. I think this fits well with the environment described. Loud music and ritualistic drinking make hearing other people talk more difficult in clubs. Notice that there is no sound in this representation of a place where sound is somewhat explicitly implied as a significant obstacle. I see two layers of obscurity represented in Work Drinks. There are the easily identifiable icons of blockage and distraction being represented with their concealing tendencies included, paired with poor design choices closer to the level of the media used for the representation.  The choice of small white font, scrolling across diagonal off-white and dark-gray cross-hatch gives it a shimmer that makes the text unpleasantly noisey. The author's use of this wider tool-set to hinder the textual message makes me consider both the obvious details that create difficulties in communication and socialization, and a less definable rough interference that is probably even more of a limitation. 

All the details in the story are distant with the exception of the particular terms and theories with which the narrator uses to explain and describe their unease. Nothing about the scenario has managed to engage the narrator, the circumstances are just this viscosity that they are moving through because they haven't identified a solid reason not to.

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Self Portrait reminds me of Björk's It's Not Up To You.

 

 

I thought of Self Portrait as a simple game where a player-avatar moves towards consumable rewards and success is largely determined by the orientation of the arms at the time of collision. I see the rotation of the arms (and the portion of the circumference they take up) as this general clumsiness that is outside of the protagonist's control. The rhythmic cycle with which they move feels representative of my fluctuations in ability in my own life. This is what Björk's It's Not Up To You signifies for me, the idea that we fool ourselves into believing that we have complete control over our capability everyday. I operated myself on that basis for a long time and when I listened to the song it was an enormous relief to hear Björk tell me that I was being too simple minded and self-centered about the matter. Though I can show up and put effort towards something, optimal achievement isn't going to happen everytime I do that and I shouldn't think that it is all up to me because it just stresses me the fuck out. I should mention that I see the cherries as being a cutely video-gamey signifier of general instances of success. For the first part of the week, this was the totality of how I saw Self Portrait; a demonstration that the success of your approaches are not completely up to you (with an emphasis on your body getting in the way). I saw Self Portrait as a depiction of a self that clumsily knocks away what it desires with dumb, trumping indifference as often as it happens to achieve what moves towards.

During the second part of the week, I started thinking more and more about two aspects of the game: the spiralling mouse-cursor and the title in conceptual terms (I never got around to figuring out the background).

Spiraling shapes have a certain significance for me. I think of them as a symbol for focus. So I started realizing that in Self Portrait, I'm not directly controlling the avatar. I'm not directly controlling what I was considering the "self" of Self Portrait. In computer-games, I identify as the potential actions I am executing through the interface rather than as a character on the screen which I see as my body. The lag between the control and the character-sprite (and the point of control having a persistent visual representation) distances the body in the game from the self (what I'm actually controlling and paying the most attention to); this is what I find most interesting about the game. I'm not a person that thinks about my body much. I have learned that my body affects my mind so synergistically that I can't separate them when considering a self, and instead that, I am everything including the circumstances that surround me; because any useful definition of self will conceptualize my agency in this world, and my perception of circumstances, my body, and my conditioning, all impact my agency simultaneously. But still, I am always moving towards accepting my body as part of my self rather than starting from it, I think that this is a significant difference between myself and many other people. What I'm trying to say was that I was ready to think of the self in Self Portrait as a spiral rather than as a sprite depicting body-parts. And when I did, it made a lot of sense. 

I often define myself based off of one simple question that I am constantly answering: "What am I paying attention to at this moment?" After watching some people be hurt who were spacially close to me, I think I may have been traumatized into constantly making myself accountable to what (and who) I am paying attention to at any given moment. If I'm distracted, then I might not be ready to intervene in a timely manner. This has certainly affected the way I see my self. I am my interests and enthusiasms, I am defined by what I pay attention to. The logics I craft and the voices I choose to want to listen to are my methods by which I can influence what my interests and enthusiasm are. I don't have complete control as I do in Self Portrait, but it's impressive to me that Self Portrait demonstrates the focus of attention as the self rather than as the clumsy body that follows it like an spoiled dog. The "self" of Self Portrait is the spiralling-shape mouse-cursor which signifies a focus of attention. 

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