50 Short Games by thecatamites (Game Club)

[clyde]

For the week of May 4th, 2015 we will be playing:

 

Donald Fuck by thecatamites

 

 

You can play the game in your browser here.

You can download the single game from here for free 

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

[arthousegames]

This game is really abrasive and confusing. It's music is intended to hurt you. I think thecatamites had a bad day at work and this was him blowing off steam. It's meaninglessness feels like a rebellion. It is angry and screaming.

[clyde]

Sailing to Byzantium

W. B. Yeats, 1865 - 1939

That is no country for old men. The young

In one another’s arms, birds in the trees

—Those dying generations—at their song,

The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,

Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long

Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.

Caught in that sensual music all neglect

Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

For every tatter in its mortal dress,

Nor is there singing school but studying

Monuments of its own magnificence;

And therefore I have sailed the seas and come

To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God’s holy fire

As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,

And be the singing-masters of my soul.

Consume my heart away; sick with desire

And fastened to a dying animal

It knows not what it is; and gather me

Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take

My bodily form from any natural thing,

But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;

Or set upon a golden bough to sing

To lords and ladies of Byzantium

Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

[clyde]

In the notes included with 50 Short Games, thecatamites explains that the Yeats excerpt was intended as an example of cultural detritus that they were exposed to (I'm paraphrasing). That doesn't stop the quotation from having a huge influence on my reading of Donald Fuck. The particular line from the poem that is chosen seems so incredibly relevant to the rest of the game that I can't ignore it (and I have no desire to do so). 

 

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,

 

I think this line of the poem is a reference to the agelessness of culture and knowledge. I see Yeats wanting to infuse their self with grand artificiality of human creation. Something less temporal than the cycle of life or a youthful lust that is eventually satisfied or forgotten. I'd say that Yeats was successful in managing to do that. 

In Donald Fuck, I see the author enjoying using the lines from the poem to contrast the grandoise ambitions they originally implied with the banal reality of how the protagonist's self is being infused with the artificiality of culture. Instead of putting themself into the great golden works of Byzantium, they find themselves made partly of the monsters from Doom, neighborhoods, and hissing sprinklers. I miss walking everywhere. I used to identify myself with the ritual of walking paths. Now it's mostly Kpop, computer-games, and books on self-improvement/esoteria from the 80's. That's fine too. I'm fine. 

 

 

[clyde]

For the week of May 11th, 2015 we will be playing:

 

Truck Nuts by thecatamites

 

You can play the game in your browser here.

You can download the single game from here for free 

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

[arthousegames]

Side note, you got much further in Donald Fuck than I was able to, and I spent some time and multiple plays trying to find more.

[clyde]

Side note, you got much further in Donald Fuck than I was able to, and I spent some time and multiple plays trying to find more.

I had a hard time navigating this one. Not only is there a combination of mouse-controls and directional keys, but I think you have to exit the second scene from the top.

[arthousegames]

Truck Nuts Notes:

 

I like how wild, loud and dangerous it feels. It truly makes me feel like a bad ass driving a big truck. And you get to smash into stuff. The noises remind me of the disorienting, exciting sounds of a busy arcade.

 

It took me a while to figure out which truck I was controlling. I would have appreciated a visual signifier of my avatar; however I don't think the game wanted to cater to me in any way. This felt like being at your uncle's house and he just made some kind of dangerous invention and he's about to test it for the first time after drinking a six pack.

 

One other thing worth noting is how the screen continually flashes white and black, causing you to lose focus. This is an interesting touch.

 

I give this game 3 bags of popcorn

[clyde]

Truck Nuts reminds me of my desire to be an inconsiderate douchebag. When I see someone speed down the road dangerously and loudly in a vehicle that has no interest in fuel-efficiency, throwing beer-bottles at road-signs, I envy them for a moment. This moment is theirs. I have a very real desire to stop being considerate in all of my actions. It's real in the sense that I think it looks glamorous and fun, but it is an unrealistic fantasy not only because I fear being caught by the authorities, but more importantly, when someone gets hurt because of my erratic driving and aggressive littering I'll have known better. My wholistic understanding of that bravado includes the part where someone has to go to the fucking store and pay $20 for another mailbox and feel the directionless anger involved in that as they clean up other people's trash.

[gamesthatexist]

Truck Nuts: This is the only one I've played that I might describe as having a glitch aesthetic. All the others seem pretty deliberately broken in a careful, cardboard cutout sort of way. But there's something more ineffable, and why not transcendent, about the brokenness here, the way each screen bleeds into the other when it shifts from white to black, the way it's an endless loop, constant motion yet also static somehow. I think I tend to pay more attention to what's there in the games that don't have an end state.

 

My first impression was of an over-stimulation I would attribute as typical of monster-trucky type games. I've never really been into those because I've never found that fantasy appealing, and also it's hard for me to decipher how to experience them. Is this kind of game about the controlled experience of driving, like a racer? Or is it about the controlled chaos of destroying shit, like GTA or something?

 

Hard to tell where your truck is, but it's clear that you can move around on screen. Seems like you're more mobile when the screen fades to black. Off-road, trees in the way, and also some kind of humanoid figure. People? Statues? Topography is flat, yet loud and obtrusive, like gravel. Here it's interesting the way the artifacts on screen (lightning bolts and skulls, hypermasculine shit) are rendered charming by the pink palette that we see a lot in these games. They seem to spawn from collision, but it's hard to tell. 

 

I think Truck Nuts shares some consistency with the others in that there's a sense of your avatar getting lost in whatever else was already going on in the screen before you got there. This is the function of the other trucks, to obscure your brief encounter with this game to a point where it's allowed to remain kind of mysterious, so it's not just straight over-stimulation. You're not just destroying shit. You're fumbling around trying to figure out how much control you have. And the audio feedback enhances this sensation. That little crunch seems to result from collision, but all the other trucks keep banging into each other as well, so you can't rely on your own truck to consistently produce that crunch and reassure you of your own control.

 

The black screen allows a kind of respite, where you can more clearly see your truck and discern your control over it, but this screen feels kind of like an interruption, like there were too many things on the screen at once, so the background just kind of gave up. I'm trying to think of some meaning or symbolism, some way to tie this into my own life, but I sort of just like it on a visceral level. I like the sensation of a very limited sense of control as the screen in front of you seems to tear apart. We've talked before about how these games tend to affect indifference towards the player, but here it's almost like a very careful rationing out of player agency, letting you play around in the mess that was already made before you got there. 

[clyde]

For the week of May 18th, 2015 we will be playing:

Hazy Hazy Town by thecatamites

 

You can play the game in your browser here.

You can download the single game from here for free 

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

[clyde]

I like the music. 

I enjoy how any substantial conversation has to wait until they find a comfortable place to talk. Keeping the two of them together seems more similar to walking through tight crowds than a smoggy city. I enjoy Hazy Hazy Town but I don't feel that I have much to say about it.

[gamesthatexist]

The noisy chips and scuffs plus the yellow oppressive layers of smog work together to obscure communication. I feel this effect every time I run into one of these games where you’re controlling two characters. After closer inspection, it becomes clear that one of them moves slightly faster than the other, so even if you manage to avoid bumping into things as you stumble around through the fog, the two characters you are controlling gradually separate. This muddying separation combined with the content of the dialogue suggests that conversation is often not only mundane, but obscured. I was thinking again about how the text in these games is attached to the landscape, curled around the borders of the space you are allowed to wander in and trying to figure out why this appeals to me. Maybe a useful analogue is the audio diaries that are so popular in games now. In a similar way, an audio diary attaches exposition or conversation to specific parts of the world (walk through door to learn more about faceless drone you just murdered). Usually there’s this sense that the audio diary is serving a very explicit narrative goal (e.g. immersion). You need to be exposed to this content to understand more about the world and what’s going on and care more. The dialogue in Hazy Town feels to me more like genuine attempts at communication, where you are sort of stumbling around for something to talk about, filling in gaps in your memory, recalling the last thing you talked about or experienced with the other person, trying to locate and pry at the gaps in your common experience that still need to be filled in, interruptions arrive that blot out parts of conversation that may be abandoned or picked up again later (there was one moment where I kept trying to read about why one of the characters dropped out of medical school, but the smog cloud moving back and forth over the text continued to obscure the one or two words I was missing), so to try and maintain your connection with the other person you remark on the weather (or the oppressive smog smothering your city). The information contained in the conversation may or may not be useful or interesting if written out as a script, but I guess it’s the trying that counts. There’s a sense that the two characters aren’t really listening to one another, but not because they don’t care, but because they can’t completely understand one another. I'm not sure how the text being a part of the background contributes to this feeling. Maybe it's the fact that the text CAN be covered up by something else. Seeing it like this makes it more part and product of your environment and place in time. What’s with the hospital? Maybe hospitals are where conversation often becomes more premeditated and deliberate, purposeful.

[clyde]

I think the choice of a hospital being "a place to get a drink" is trying to give us the perception that we are being led in knowledge of a place. It's like hanging out with a someone who has been to a place before when you have not, and they seem to know some things about it, but don't seem entirely reliable. Those authorities often seem super-powered with the knowledge of a place, but the longer they guide you around, the more it seems that they are just someone who had to make due at a previous arrival and now you are retracing the compromises they made when they were green, with them. The hospital is a good place to get a drink because your host happened into a hospital during a previous visit and that's when they discovered it had a bar in the cafeteria. It's assumed that there is a much better place to get a drink, this is just the only one they know and you are dependent on their understanding of the place. 

[clyde]

For the week of June 1st, 2015 we will be playing:

True Detective Mysteries by thecatamites

 

You can play the game in your browser here.

You can download the single game from here for free 

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

[gamesthatexist]

Donald Fuck:

 

“Awful, pompous.”

 

A fascinating response, especially to your own work. Also inevitable if you give yourself a deadline. I want to push back, but obviously I respect the author’s taste too much to discredit this opinion entirely. The bright side is that we generally don’t apply words like “awful” and “pompous” to works that are entirely disinteresting (tho there are exceptions). Generally, we hate art or media when it embodies a sensation in a way that trivializes it: revealing, but not in a good way. In other words, we usually call something awful or pompous when we feel we are coming from a place of superior self-awareness. One of the nice/shitty things about making art is you can sometimes see yourself in this way, from the outside looking in, i.e. the shit that you made when you were a teenager still exists somewhere.

 

I also think there is an unwillingness to acknowledge the extent to which the lines of the Yeats poem are informing this game. Well, maybe not unwillingness (there seems to be an awareness that the poem & all the Video game iconography converge in the narrator’s character), maybe embarrassment instead. My favorite line in Donald Fuck is the last one: “I find I pay less attention to what people are telling me.” At first, the sentence seems to casually shrug off the preceding lines, the naked, academic explication of the interior psyche. I, I, me. The self colonizes that sentence. Humanity is dismissed as generalization, its message as vague and inconsequential. The syntax is curt, but also rhythmic, almost iambic, heartbroken. By the notion that it’s possible to shut the rest of the world out in an effort to immortalize yourself in art that synthesizes places, “intersections,” both digital and material, that have become mundane to you, that a certain kind of self discovery can lead to a weakened awareness of what’s going on around you (after all, the monuments of unaging intellect are neglected, right?). This is also what the Yeats poem is about, or at least it can be what it’s about. That’s what it’s about here.

 

I agree that the music is antagonistic towards the player. It’s a different experience without the sound.

[gamesthatexist]

Eve Golden Woods wrote a response to Donald Fuck on TwitLonger that I love:

 

Ok. So. Donald Fuck and Yeats and Ireland and Dublin.

All the background pictures are Dublin, for a start. I recognise a few of them. This isn't just a game using Yeats, it's a game set in Dublin, written by someone who grew up there.

That completely recontextualises the Yeats. Every Irish writer, every Irish artist since Yeats has been writing against him. Yeats defines Irish culture in almost every possible way. He founded Ireland's most famous theatre, he was part of the cultural revolution that led to actual revolution and independence, he helped to preserve and generate interest in Irish mythology. He didn't do any of this alone, but he was one of the central figures of that period of Irish history. He was even on our money at one point (btw the old Irish money was beautiful, I'm so sad it's gone). So for Donald Fuck to be using Yeats isn't some kind of random cultural debris, it's the direct contrast of his own work with one of the most celebrated literary figures in Irish history. The words of Yeats' poem are contrasted with their own presentation - in white text on a photographic background with rough art and discordant music, the farthest thing possible from the measured, beautiful, Celtic grandeur that Yeats imagined for Ireland. The photographs reinforce that. The second image is of the canal near Charlemont (I think), which is actually quite beautiful, and is referenced in another famous poem by another Irish poet, Patrick Kavanagh. However the picture Donald Fuck uses shows a grey sky, late autumn with the leaves dull and brown over the green grass, the water of the canal flat and lifeless. His photograph resists any investment of beauty, taking what the poets made glorious and rendering it dull and mundane once more, as he experiences it on a day to day basis.

From there we move to St Stephen's Green, right in the centre of Dublin. One of the city's most famous parks is there, clipped out of the frame for roadworks and shabby looking houses. Here, against the backdrop of some of Dublin's most expensive real estate, the narrator mentions places he dreamed of living: outer planets, ocean temples, and Ballyfermot. Ballyfermot, unlike the others, is a realistic place to live, and the joke is how unlikely it is that anyone would place it in a list of dream locations. It's a working class Dublin neighbourhood with little in the way of culture or beauty, neglected by the government for wealthier areas of Dublin.

As the narration moves from the Yeats poem to the narrator's experiences we get references to "alien" Americana. That's completely familiar to me: modern Irish culture is almost drowned out by the glut of globalisation, American-made shows and TV smothering the modern Irish experience. Against that, older figures like Yeats seem even more overwhelmingly mythological, entrenched in the collective Irish consciousness in a way that no modern Irish culture can be.

I think there's a very deep sense in the game of this double alienation. Alienation from the beautiful grandeur of Yeats, and alienation from modern pop culture which pretends to be universal while reflecting a very narrow Irish experience.

 

Eve also wrote a great piece in the latest issue of Arcade Review, comparing a game called Resist (Dan Olsen) to Joyce's The Dead. Here's a relevant excerpt about Yeats, Irish nationalism, and the Celtic Revival.

 

Similarly, The Dead also presents an artistic challenge to the community in which it was created. Published in 1914, two years before the Easter Rising (a revolution that sparked the Irish Nationalist movement and lead directly to the War of Independence), The Dead was written at a time when the predominant literary movement in Ireland was the Celtic Revival. Started by figures like W.B. Yeats, J.M. Synge and Lady Gregory, the Celtic Revival aimed to recreate Irish literature in English by drawing on Celtic mythology and folklore. Its prose was rich in symbolism and mystique, and there was a strong vein of literalized metaphor. For example, in the play Cathleen Ní Houlihan, the titular figure represents Ireland and Irish nationalism. In contrast to the work of the Celtic Revival, which heavily romanticized Irish country life and the country’s Celtic history, The Dead takes place in modern Dublin, featuring the middle classes. Miss Ivors, in her conversation with Gabriel, is a direct criticism of the Celtic Revival. She churns out all the usual Nationalist clichés in her criticism of Gabriel – that he goes abroad rather than visiting Ireland, that he doesn’t speak Irish, even calling him a West Briton (an Irish description of a person who comes from Ireland but imitates English customs). None of these criticisms, however, make any real impact on Gabriel. Indeed, they stand in shallow comparison with the real revelation he has at the end of the story, where he comes to understand his wife. His insights into her life, and his decision to go west to Galway and see a different part of Ireland have nothing to do with Miss Ivors. Miss Ivors sees the west only as an ideological entity, whereas Gabriel, through his understanding of Gretta and her life there, comes to perceive it as a real place.

 

By representing the Celtic Revival in the person of Miss Ivors, Joyce makes it clear that their mystical, romantic interpretation of the west of Ireland is fundamentally limited and unhelpful. The only figure in the text from the west is Gretta, and her memories of Galway figure it not as a place of magic or mystery, a nationalist heritage waiting to be reclaimed, but as a real place, the seat of experiences and emotions that have stayed with her as vividly as her life in Dublin.

[gamesthatexist]

Self Portrait: I like your reading of this one and the Bjork song, and I found it a helpful way to think about my own attempts at self-discipline and internally imposed work ethic.

 

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.

 

I know your second reading sort of debunks this first one, but I like it anyway, and I also like how the avatar’s casual interference with its own consumption makes the object of desire seem pretty trivial. Doesn’t matter if you’re swatting the cherries away, probably not what you should be paying attention to anyway. Maybe the hands are a clumsy obstruction; maybe they're protection.  

 

The movement and response feels childlike, which makes sense since it’s an extrapolation of a childhood drawing. It’s childlike in the way that children will often play games with themselves, contriving their own obstacles to overcome, but that’s also probably a good description of adult psyche as well. Also childlike in the way the face, the portrait, is the sun in this universe, exerting its own gravitational pull. I like the idea of using some sentimental drawing or trinket as the avatar, but I’m sort of puzzled as to why thecatamites didn’t use the drawing he drew as a kid (included in the notes) instead of drawing a new portrait based on that drawing. Probably some matter of utility. Maybe the original wasn’t available at the time, so he had to redraw it from a blurry memory. In this light, it’s interesting to consider the almost featureless face, its chomping contortions an indiscriminate vortex, its halo hands a similarly indiscriminate twirl.

 

It reminds me of Doug.zip in a way, though this feels less forlorn, more transparent, more direct, less evasive, less abstract, more concrete. It’s also interesting that this feels like one of the more explicitly videgameish ones, though the feedback from chomping doesn’t subscribe to a vulgar economy of points or extra lives or anything like that, just some nice positive affirmations. For some reason the term “self-portrait” connotes seriousness for me, which the game playfully contrasts.

 

Great Bjork jam. Perfect soundtrack for this. So pretty.

[gamesthatexist]

Work Drinks: Not only is the minimal-contrast text hard on the eyes, it’s presented, scrolling past windows of visibility, like one of those speed reading exercises, a sensation exaggerated by the sparse punctuation. The text’s meaning revolves exclusively around the narrator’s thoughts. The beer and music obscure the narrator’s internal monologue, as opposed to whatever dialogue is taking place around it, which makes for a useful simulation of how you have to read between the lines instead of zoning out to actually see what’s going on in any given social setting. But at the same time, it is this same act of excessive interpretation that leads to not really paying attention, zoning out, staring forward, pretending to active-listen as those first couple of drinks settle into the bloodstream. For me, this effect feels more immediate than a retrospective snapshot.

 

Reading comprehension requires repeat playthroughs, focusing exclusively on the text and ignoring the beer. The phrase “pleasantly dour” and all those spooky half-silhouettes in the background at first suggest a kind of antisocial superiority. The narrator wishes he could have a good time, but that doesn’t keep him from feeling smug. Despite the drabness, Work Drinks ends on a discordantly hopeful note that makes the overall tone harder to pin down, and a hint as to why the author has devoted an entire website to video game frog iconography. The frog is a convenient, and not at all glum or smug, metaphor for our movements through cordoned off, yet not totally impermeable, social circles. It’s funny that the author’s notes say the onscreen BUMPS are meant to represent obtrusive techno music, but I interpreted them as tipsy human interruptions: drinks slamming on counters, chairs knocking against tables, that sort of thing.

[ihavefivehat]

For the week of June 1st, 2015 we will be playing:

True Detective Mysteries by thecatamites

 

You can play the game in your browser here.

You can download the single game from here for free 

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

 

 

Cool game. This game has a very similar atmosphere to Yard Doggz. It's sort of empty, bleak, and dreary. It gives a really strong impression of a muddy, overcast day despite supplying so little to go by. The janky movement between screens makes you feel like you're always lost; the game is tense and uncomfortable, forcing you to wait for something terrible to happen, even when you realize that it's never going to. The feeling of it stayed with me over the months since I originally played it.

[clyde]

Question about True Detective Mysteries:

Is it possible to be murdered? The most forward state I can progress to is the fellow saying "I AM THE KILLER".

[ihavefivehat]

Question about True Detective Mysteries:

Is it possible to be murdered? The most forward state I can progress to is the fellow saying "I AM THE KILLER".

 

As far as I can tell, no. The game just kind of hangs in that state where violence seems about to happen, but never crosses the threshold where it actually does.

[gamesthatexist]

Frank Tomato HD: The zoomed out view from Towns FM is exaggerated even further here, and the palette is its inverse. Towns was a shadow city, neon desert. The Forgotten Valley is landmarks sprinkled on a glacier, outlined in pink. Hub world. World map. A pond, a building, a village, some snow-capped hills. I think maybe that’s a crescent moon at the top of the screen, but I’m not sure if the ground ever separates into sky. The mid-frequency loop is lazy, lonely, kinda sad. Probably shouldn’t ignore the letter at the beginning. Fetch quest. A “forgotten valley.” Ominous? Pleasant signature, though. Kisses. Avatar is even more undefined than usual. Squiggles. Switching screens brings us closer. Avatar is some kind of knight errant. Animation is a glib trot. The building looks like Tetris. Inside an infinite “hey! you!” struck through. Is that thing laughing at me? Skull on the ground. I guess this building is useless, already pillaged. To get out, I think I had to walk against a random piece of wall. The pond is like a cavern or volcano. In the middle, is that some large creature, or some indefinite depth? Frogs! Man’s best friend. Game over. The game ends, lapses into silence, when you collect things. The useless building was my favorite.

[clyde]

I enjoy reading your hypothesis, arguments, and reactions. But I enjoy reading your staccato observations as well.

[gamesthatexist]

Thank you, one thing that's been rewarding about this has been figuring out which type of response each game is calling for. Or maybe just which type of response I'm equipped to give at any given time. I think I'm more likely to do the staccato observation thing when I've been drinking.