clyde

50 Short Games by thecatamites (Game Club)

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More thoughts on Frank Tomato:

The author’s notes mention an excised line from an earlier version of this game that reads: “his was the last mission: "completed", all ties between the area and human use value have been severed.” I agree with the notes when they say that removing this line makes the end more succinct and evocative, but I also agree when they say that non-textual communication & deliberate obscurity enjoys a kind of privilege in digital art and obviously in games. I think including that line maybe would have made the game a bit cloying or heavy-handed, but at the same time, reading it made me take the experience and my relationship with JRPGs in general more seriously.

I’m only three chapters into Marx's Capital, Volume I (it’s been hard to read, and I don't understand a lot of it), so forgive my rudimentary comprehension, but one thing I think I understand about the way Marx sees the difference between “money” (symbol of the socially necessary human labor extracted on a commodity) and “use value” (what makes a commodity useful to us) is that use value is limited. Commodities are consumed. I might want to acquire 1,000 pairs of shoes, but as long as I’m looking at the shoe as an object that will be useful to me as opposed to some abstract symbol of value (in which case I’m looking at the shoe more like it’s money), then I’ll get to a point where I feel like I don't need anymore shoes. I have satisfied my shoe need, or maybe I just ran out of room. For Marx, money is different from the other useful commodities because it allows for infinite accumulation. Someone who starts with a commodity sells that commodity in order to purchase another one (C -> M -> C). Someone who starts with money lends it, trades it, invests it, moves it around in order to turn it into a greater sum of money (M -> C -> M+), and this is a process that can be executed and circulated over and over. There is no “consumption” of money.

If a video game wants to simulate a fantasy of collecting and consuming useful commodities, then it has to present things that can be consumed [potions] in an environment that can be mined and therefore eventually hollowed out by the player. Maybe one of the reasons JRPGs appeal to me is because our modern circulation of money has become so inscrutable, so dramatically distanced from any original use value of whatever commodities were deemed useful and worthy of exchange in the first place that by contrast, the JRPG system of collection and consumption seems like something I can grasp. It’s a simulation of the C -> M -> C version. Maybe I don’t want to spend the full amount of time mining out the environment, and of course it’s still a problematic, colonizing attitude to have towards an environment in the first place, but it’s still nice that there’s some kind of limit. Like you can consume whatever you were supposed to and still wander around afterwards. There’s this ostensible post-consumption state in the game world that, depending on your attitude, either represents a melancholy stasis/uselessness or the satisfaction that comes with the end of a productive work day where you have everything you need. Either way, the implication is that there’s an end somewhere, and that accumulation doesn’t need to be infinite. Most of these games have a level cap. Now, a simulation of the (M -> C -> M+) version would get a lot more complicated. The Disgaea series, for example, with its exponential growth of leveling and damage could be read as absurdest parody of the infinite accumulative potential of money as both means and end of exchange.

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. Now, a simulation of the (M -> C -> M+) version would get a lot more complicated. 

 

Off World Trading Company is a neat colonial capitalism simulator. 

Also for any lurkers who aren't interested in reading Capital,

explains some of the essential concepts very quickly and I've benefited from it greatly.

 

 

 

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True Detective Mysteries strikes me as both sharp and loose. The navigational grid provides a sense of space that feels small and purposeful, while the lack of collision on the non-triggering borders creates a lack of guidance that both makes the space feel larger and makes my role as a player feel accountable yet lacking in control. I wandered screens looking for navigational combinations that would unlock new tiles and conditions similar to a non-euclidean zelda-maze. This player-navigation circumstance provides a tropy sense of the character's fate on the scale of a shoebox diorama. I enjoyed this combination. It felt somewhere between Twin Peaks and Surviving the Game.

I thought the color palette was well chosen. I saw the black and yellow as a denotation of crime-scene caution that conveniently matches the dangerous curve warnings of road-signs in rural areas. 

Playing throughout the week, the sparse track became more and more familiar and oddly disposed towards complementing the narrative with a sense of unpreparedness. I'm not really sure how that came to be. It might just be a blunt force association created by multiple exposures to the cabin-style murder-mystery, but if nothing else, the pace of the tune lends to the mood. 

 

The lack of a kill with the provision of the killer is one of my favorite things about this game. Assuming that I finished the game, the non-ending of mutual existence of an amateur investigator and a known perpetrator was unsatisfactory evokative. It reminds me of the familial feel of small towns where everyone knows the extent of their neighbor's sins, but nothing can be done about it and these things are accepted in some  folk-knowledge form expressed in superstitious sounding gossip that informs new-comers and children about whoit's safe to be alone with and who it's best to stay away from. 

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I think what is happening in Robot Factory is that people are getting recycled into some sort of meat-paint that turns robots into androids that are indistinguishable from humans. The music and the dancy animations make it seem like a modern-day convenience brought to us by assembly-lines and their machine-like efficiency.

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Meepo in Love: Game begins in blocky corridor with incredulous banter. Turns out some smileys and suggestive abbreviations have been exchanged between Meepo and HQ. I think this game is playing a little bit with the way that corporate structures have appropriated informal internet nomenclature to the point where it’s almost sort of expected as a part of their formal communication. Use smiley while at work so you seem like a good people person. Or use them when you’re working in customer service to reassure the person you’re instructing to restart their computer that you’re not frustrated. Asynchronous communication is already kind of mysterious, and here Meepo has this flirty, asynchronous relationship with the nebulous HQ entity [“sentient (?) lifeforms (??)”]. Meepo is also ambiguous in that they have a sort of undefined physique. Perfect for HQ  ; ) The notes mention this, but I also think it’s true that you can build genuine, friendly relationships that don’t extend outside of the workday with coworkers who you communicate with for mundane reasons, even just via email, sending memos or whatever. I read Drizzly as the "appropriate workplace interaction" character, though I like clyde's unrequited love angle. Drizzly provides the “this is just what work communication IS now” perspective, that Meepo's violation is one of misreading, but the assertion that emoticons are meaningless is unconvincing. If anything, they’re overcharged with meaning, which is what makes them possible to (mis)interpret. One time I read this post on Tumblr that translated all the different ways people communicate laughter online. It was tongue-in-cheek, I think, but also pretty insightful! I can’t remember exactly, but “lol” was translated as something like “That is slightly amusing, and I am being polite.” And “Ha.” (with the full stop) was something like “What you said isn’t funny at all, and I hate you.” Meepo in Love isn't a cynical game at all, but I still think ideas about corporate appropriation of non-work discourse are in play here. I loved walking around in the text box! “I’m not used to having emotions” is a great line.

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I think what is happening in Robot Factory is that people are getting recycled into some sort of meat-paint that turns robots into androids that are indistinguishable from humans. The music and the dancy animations make it seem like a modern-day convenience brought to us by assembly-lines and their machine-like efficiency.

 

The final cyborg doesn't really look like a human, and we never actually see a robot fool a human with its disguise, so perhaps they actually just look like toasters covered in ground meat

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The final cyborg doesn't really look like a human, and we never actually see a robot fool a human with its disguise, so perhaps they actually just look like toasters covered in ground meat

Now I'm imaging a robot covered in ground-people trying to talk his way into a nightclub or something.

There was a Tick comic where these ninjas were standing in a line outside a house, each holding a couple of twigs with a few leaves on them and the Tick says "Who are you guys?" And one replies "We are a hedge." And he's like "Oh, ok."

I used to love land-shark style comedy sketches.

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I wasn't familiar with land-shark sketch, I had to look it up. Belushi strikes me as more of a Quint.

 

I feel like there wasn't that much to Robot Factory. Maybe partly because it's described as a dream, so I'm viewing it through that lens, as opposed to the rest of these games where I go in thinking the weirdness is purposeful in some way. Listening to other people talk about their dreams is boring as heck sorry it's just the truth.

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True Detective: The shadow characters set against that deep yellow (I like the taped-off crime scene comparison), plus the low notes with a soft delay, make the whole thing feel more brooding than the title suggests, until you get to the pulpy, gamey, self-referential stuff. Gives you a sense of what it's like to be a self-aware character in an especially formulaic narrative, just walking around waiting to get murdered. And it loops endlessly, which exaggerates the sense that the premise is just an excuse to exist in the space, and captures the fantasy that is so deftly and constantly exploited by video game [one word] marketing cycles, of stasis in motion, perpetual anticipation of climax. At first I saw a fence, later a railroad. I like the simple, two-color contrast, which we've seen before, and we've also already seen the way these games make you play around with edges, but this one made me pay more attention since the space begs exploration, but exploring it feels halting because of the unpredictable triggers and borderless screens. I also like the nod to the "WRONG WAY" trope, that character or sign or object that serves as an invisible wall replacement, existing only to clumsily announce the limits of its own environment; it's a frank concession of illusion, a sort of inevitable anti-immersion device. The repeating screen that acknowledges its repetition is a similar kind of trick. My favorite character is "GODS COUNTRY."

 

P.S. After writing this, I read through the author's notes several times over. A really provocative reflection.

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One of the things I've been enjoying about playing through 50 Short Games this way is that the games sometimes seem to theme my week. Typically I play the game for the first time when I make the Monday post, play it 3-4 times throughout the week as I try to get my thoughts together, and then I force myself to write something at the end of the week. These games tend to have an iconic quality like road-signs or something. So for instance, it was like I was exposing myself to a road-sign alerting me to factory-productions of autonomous machines and the anthropomorphisation of androids with human material. It flavored my week. I've been watching documentaries posted on Reddit and there's a certain genre that comes up there all the time. Chris Remo actually gave a pretty good description of this genre on Idle Thumbs episode 214 when describing a particular author's defense of their own work on Goodreads.com

The genre uses the metaphor of slavery with no real interest in the circumstances of the millions of actual slaves in present-times. I'll add that the genre often purposely conflates enjoyment of pop-culture with black and white footage of classically conditioned rats in pitiful conditions. I watched a few of those this week along with some more reasonable documentaries about the coming of mass underemployment due to automatization technologies. I also ended up reading about Donna Haraway's A Cyborg Manifesto (though I haven't finished the actual essay yet). Yes, I know all of this is barely relatable to Robot Factory, but my point is that this is not the first time that the 50 Short Games entry of the week has provided me with a dynamic reference-image that influences how I visualize my interests during the week. The cynical portion of my response to Chris Crawford's attempt to create a few Galateas with his new Kickstarter-campaign is represented in my mind with the image of a hopper that grinds up humans to cover machines (who are humorously lacking in self-awareness) with a layer of unconvincing meat-paint. I really enjoy how these short, marker-games can provide me with such powerful icons.

 

I should probably talk a little bit about Robot Factory though.

I'm a sucker for factory-tunes mixed with slow animations of few frames depicting a production line. Those cartoons always use that one song. I have no idea how to find out what song I'm talking about, but you all know what I'm talking about, the song that all the old cartoons use when depicting a production-line. It goes "doo doo dooo...do do do do. do-do" I love how much the rhythm of both have managed to establish an icon so firmly. I'll post one of those cartoons if I can find one. 

I also think that it's so incredibly satisfying that I can choose which robots will comprise the army that expels the human workers and captures them for meat-paint. I really like this game. It's this archtypical story that I've seen in quantities of fiction, drawn and made satisfyingly interactable with a level of production that looks accessible to me. It's like thecatamites can just condense a fully dispersed modern fable with kid art and a beginner's game-engine in a day. That says a lot to me about the artistic potential waiting to be observed in the cultures we are exposed to and how the tools to manifest clear icons are plentiful and cheap. But don't be fooled, there is a lot of skill required to make interactable iconography that so evokative and expresses a common motif so succinctly.

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Robot Factory: One of those where you have to squint and fumble around with the keys to make out what’s going on. Thrilling once you do. Reminds me a lot of the music games. For robots, autonomous machines who have shrugged off their ostensible purpose of transferring value for the sake of creating their own, there’s no difference between an assembly line and a parade.

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I enjoy that Groaning At My Baby is putting the more daily failings of a romantic relationship into the context of blues-music, but I have a hard time accepting the decision to not add a few bars of slow, regrettful blues. 

So I recommend listening to this as you play:


 

I said I'd help her clean. 

But I only have a few days off and I don't want to waste this one sweeping.

Do we have to do it today?

The mildew can wait another week.

It's the hottest it's been all year.

She's doing so much work, it makes me feel so, so, so very bad.

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I like how the "groan" is a cross between a sigh and a grunt. Too forgetable for a face, too selfish for feelings, too sad for anger, too lethargic for words, too confused to refuse, just a lump on a screen, got those groaning at my baby blues.

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220px-Tattoo_Assassins.png

From Tattoo Assassins

 

Ancient Warriors: Excessive collision and meta-game interruptions approximate some forgotten fighting game. Premise is that a Private Eye Collective has been trapped in this ancient ruin, presumably after investigating Indiana-Jones style, but then they decide to stay and colonize because there’s nothing left of the world outside (?) Meanwhile big totem monsters have been using the ruins to LARP Street Fighter tournaments, and the PI mini-narrative happens alongside those battles. So two separate, equally inscrutable threads of consequence play out in close enough proximity to one another so that each can view the other as an interruption. Each group assumes that it’s the one that matters. Except, the relationship between the two isn’t even that balanced. Though it’s impossible for the PIs to ignore the fighting tournament, the totems, untouchable monoliths of prowess and fortitude, don’t even seem to notice the tiny PI plot unfolding around them. On the screen where one of the PIs says “I’m shutting this thing down,” at first I didn’t even notice the little detective scrambling around at the bottom of the screen that you move with the arrow keys as you participate in the warrior battle simultaneously. The blocks and columns that get bounced around as the warriors collide emphasize the smallness of the detectives, especially as none them can be touched by the wreckage. Without health bars or anything, the totems mindlessly shove against one another until one gets pushed offscreen, a good approximation of the stubborn, blunt resistance of fighting games. In a way the competitive play envelops the narrative exercise. At the same time, the battles are sort of just an animated backdrop for the detective plot. You get to walk around (and jump, as in many games you can jump for no reason) with the little detective after the battle’s over, “YOKO WINS” still plastered on the screen. This corpse of conquest is simply a stage hosting humanity’s narcissistic tragicomedy, punctuated at the end by contrived symbolism that reduces an ‘exotic’ society to a parable warning against nuclear power.

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 I didn't see it being a population of private-investigators, I thought the small, controllable character was just one of many inhabitants of New York City that happened to be a P.I. Still, I also enjoyed the difference in scale between the Warriors and the native New Yorkers.
Ancient Warriors is a strong game. I think that the purpose of the majority of the game's design is to inflate the scale of the Warriors. The rampaging battle of the colossi causes a whirlwind of massive destruction, buildings are knocked out of the way like beach-balls. By obscuring the reason for the fight in a legendary unknowableness, the Warriors are given an olympian god-like status. The versus-placards seem to borrow an importance more from promotions of televised boxing matches than Street Fighter for me. Saturated, sunset colors and heavily shadowed structures, give the circumstance of the encounter a weight of finality. The auditory squishes and glass crackles of pieces of the environment being blown into each other reduces the size of the buildings in comparison to the collisional growls of the battling giants. And the player interaction of controlling Hawk establishes the scale of reference the player pays attention to in order to make the New Yorkers more insignificant to us until our scale of control has been reduced to their perspective after a few battles. Everytime I play, this switch in scale takes a moment for me to change modes and I think it's really effective in creating a circumstance where I am made to feel like a much less powerful actor.
The lack of collision between the New Yorkers and anything within the battle increases the scale again by putting it into the distance; it's far more common for games to do this visually with parallaxing layers rather than layers of collision alone.

I was reminded of Spinjas. The design of the warriors feels like it comes from a similar essentialization of visual design from the soldiers of ancient empires and science-fiction enemies, then mechanized. The fighting system was the most apparent similarity for me though. The way directional momentum is hard to build up, but the distances that result from bouncing off a collision with the enemy seems to be sudden and drastic. Most interestingly (to me) though is how all of that effort towards inflating the scale I pointed out previously seems similar to the goals of the context provided by Spinjas' promotional materials.



This isn't a toy, it's a hard-hitting action-packed stand-off and the victor will assume the throne of the kingdom at the center of the Earth. I'm a sucker for fictional context like that, it feels like a saturday-morning-cartoon version of some fantastical heavy metal album cover from 1981. There was often an implied scope of epicness and importance in commercial toy media of the 1980's cartoons. World-saving robots battled it out to prevent the destruction of all humanity. I think Ancient Warriors presents the imagery of that genre to us through the child-like perspective implied by the marker-style that thecatamites has been using in many other examples within 50 Short Games. But it's mixed with some interest in the narrative or contextual complexity we become interested in as adults. It doesn't feel nostalgic to me, instead games like this one give me the sense that there is a way to perceive our contemporary adult-reality in the terms of the media we consumed when young; I expect to go to work by way of looping HotWheels tracks unless I take the subway-train whose speed is controlled like a slot-car.

By the way.I beat Doug a few times, but even after an epic battle with Yoko, Hawk still couldn't win.

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Candy Planet is a lotus-eater story in a Star Trek log format  themed as a kid's paradise that turns out to be dangerously saccharine.    

 

I suppose a this may be helpful as a comparison:

                                                                                                                       

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Lotus-eater stories often engage my personal paranoias which consist of concerns that I have managed to inobligate myself from duties far enough to become obsessed with distraction; and here I am routinely reading, writing, playing, and thinking about computer games. I often lose my concentration while playing a game, due to a hallucination that there is something else of importance that I should be doing. My capacity to engage in the medium is so great, that I know I may stop paying attention to my true purpose, whatever that is. I could lose years to it. What comforts me in these moments of panic is that I'm not really supposed to be doing anything particular, atleast nothing that I'm neglecting in my daily existence.

Candy Planet shows one of the more revealing parts of this process by being completely focused on the dangers of lotus-eating, while never mentioning the reason they are orbiting a candy planet in the first place. The star-log implies that they have some form of duty, but that goal is never mentioned. I see this being similar to how I can think about all the damaging details of my guilty pleasures, while never coming close to considering specifics of the righteous missed opportunity which my resistance to pleasure needs legitimization from.. 
In my personal experience, candy planets are dangerous not because of their ability to distract from a mission, but because they dull you from perceiving dangers. You and your roomates can be so drunk that you won't wake up when someone is destroying all the musical instruments in the basement, snapping a collection of vinyl in half, and throwing your couch into the yard after a party. You can be comfortable enough with a friend that habitual abuses of power and general violent tendencies can be considered harmless until something really bad happens. But this is true of all non-eventful lengths of time. The advantages of heroic journies like the Odyssey are that there are explicit goals, that one can become apathetic to, and the boring parts can all be edited out. In times of peace, and with the scope of modern society, grand goals of thankless, isolating, matyrdom can be nulled out by none-of-your-business status.

 

I want to mention the way the camera, ship, landscape, and persons relate in the course of Candy Planet

At first it seems that the ship is our focal anchor as we watch disembarkers lack the ability to keep pace due to collisions with the landscape and the attraction to candy-induced sedentarism.  I think of the ship representing the means and goals of duty, the folks as instances of human tendency and circumstance, and the landscape as reality. The way the newer arrivals make more progress by default as their original purpose falls away and everyone eventually settles on simple pleasures, reminds me of generational tendencies. We lose vision of the ship entirely and our reason for seeing this all unfold dissolves.

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I've been putting an extra week of slack between some of the games when there hasn't been any discussion and I'm not in the mood to write yet.

I didn't know there was a 51st game. We will have to look into that.

gamesthatexist mentioned wanting to look at the menu-screens a few months ago. I'd like to see what he has to say about them at some point.

Also, as far as catching up goes, if you post about any of the games, I'll likely read it.

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Candy Planet extends the clever use of text in these games even further. The poetry in the sky is the ship narrator, someone documenting the journey, while the astronaut dialogue down on the surface is by contrast appropriately whimsical and sporadic, reacting to things and labeling them, so that you have both the wide lens and the close up, the long game and the limiting immediacy of experience that ignores exegesis. Paying attention to one jerks your eyes away from the other, establishing a distinct divide between ship and surface, between purpose and live sensation, and also between planet and outsiders. The game also builds on the idea of doubling the player avatar; the explorers you control just keep multiplying, pouring out like sprinkles, pleasant as toppings, but expendable and inconsequential. I like the way the game conceptualizes candy because it doesn’t feel like a crude, direct metaphor for something like drugs or consumerism or whatever; it’s more of a general tyranny of comfort and how stupid it is that something like that even exists (I ate too much. I’m uncomfortably full). It feels like some of the guilt that comes with the failure to be satiated by comfort, the sense that it can be hard to enjoy comfort because I probably don’t deserve it and by indulging in it I’m probably contributing to some kind of status quo. Then again, sometimes it feels like comfort is the only reasonable thing to aspire to, but that’s probably just the capitalist realism talking. There’s kind of a pushback against this guilt for feeling comfortable towards the end, with the use of the word “repent” and the halting, bureaucratic syntax of the phrase, “form questions commensurate to the response.” Presumably, a life of indulgence is not one of meaning, subversion, or change, but neither is one of devotion to Protestant work ethic. When the little astronauts collapse from diabetes, is that a teevee next to them? A ham radio? The Wonka factory is a really apt connection that I didn’t make when I played.

 

I think of the ship representing the means and goals of duty, the folks as instances of human tendency and circumstance, and the landscape as reality. The way the newer arrivals make more progress by default as their original purpose falls away and everyone eventually settles on simple pleasures, reminds me of generational tendencies. We lose vision of the ship entirely and our reason for seeing this all unfold dissolves.

 

Yes. Excellent. "Progress" in this game relies both on the fresh motivation of new arrivals and on their descent as they assimilate.

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