50 Short Games by thecatamites (Game Club)

[clyde]

For the week of September 1st, 2014 we will be playing:

 

Some Bee Ess by thecatamites

 

You can download the single game from here for free 

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

[SuperBiasedMan]

Blast! I'm a game behind now. My responses are pending, I'm currently barely on a laptop because of living situation but I'm not out of the club, just incapacitated briefly.

[clyde]

The quick mock-up style of 50 Short Games makes for a good dream-journal. I get the impression that closely related chronology was not a priority in the selection of these dreams as  much as trying to do a comparative study, keeping in mind the width and depth of the spectrum of potential dreams in a month or so*. Typically, learning about a dreamer through depictions of their sleeping-dreams involves decoding symbolic archtypes and hidden fears; here we have an opportunity to also consider the dreamer's methods of categorizing their experiences with the inflammed examples of full-blown hallucinations.

Three dreams are presented and filed in a sterile, non-titled, medical enumeration on an opening screen; a vital, objective examination done professionally. 

The first dream reminded me of Giorgio de Chirico's work which is appropriate since the surrealism tradition deals in sleeping dreams. 

 

 

I often think of his paintings in terms of Marx's concept of estrangement or alienation in its most common visual form: the inhabitation of a landscape of large buildings created by humans, with which humans can't manage to compete. Giorgio de Chirico's landscapes have always provided me with a more conspicuous ancestor of Ken Kessey's the Combine; what many refer to unironically as the system; an established logical method that cares nothing for the life, interest, or health of an individual in the name of a greater good; the bypass that Arthur Dent's house is in the way of. And so my obsession with the specific archetype overpowers the visually depicted portion of the imagery of first dream for me. But the words paint a different picture. The text suggests a comfort created by the system, rather than a fear and frustration with it. Once I played through the second dream, I credited this comfort to a wide-open, unpopulated landscape in comparison to the claustrophobic private-property of dream #2.

 

I see dream #2 being a direct contrast to dream #1. Really, in my pretentious assumptions, I imagine that dream #2 was the first one depicted and that dream #1 was included to give sense that of the range of the narrator's emotions in dreams go beyond the neurotic paranoias that dream-interpretation is known for. I really don't have much to say about dream #2 except that I can very much identify with it. Having a route to work gives me a sense that it is my territory, and I'm always reminded of how narrow that territory is. I'm just allowed to go to and from the place where I labor to produce something for exchange, and to then go to a place where I buy something with my earnings. With this as my general understanding of my official role in the dominant culture, the commercial areas that don't appear to be economically viable are the ones I find myself fascinated with. The shoe-repair store run by an old man with archaic tools of his specialization in the window, how could he possibly charge less than a new pair? The chinese-restuarant that is always empty because they serve frozen vegetables on white rice and corn-starch soup, they have to be laundering money. The pharamacy who has a shelf of school-supplies with bottles of Elmer's Glue dated twelve years ago, since dried completely into bottled, white brick, still waiting for someone to buy them for the price on the sticker that is so old it doesn't look like the ones on everything else; are they just waiting for the last of their elderly clientle to join the great majority before they close shop? I love these places, but my interest lies in the way that they break the rules. They have secret mechanizations and motives and secrets are potentially dangerous. I think that the narrator hints at this quality when they describe the sense of "ownership", the proprietors have been running the place since before I was born, their motives and methods are grandfathered in. As such, unless you are a regular, these places aren't predictable. 

 

Dream # 3 is middle-ground between the two extremes of dream #1 and dream #2 and its subject matter is more comfortable because its so Freudian. We are used to thinking of dreams as sets of archetypal symbols of sex, social pressures, and guilt. The subtility of the first two dreams makes me feel slightly uncomfortable, while the third dream gives the entire collection a more comfortable tone of generic weirdness. The dream feels no less personal or sincere than the other two, but it seems to borrow the comfort of normalcy by demonstrating the symbols, roles, and themes typically referred to in amateur dream-interpretation. 

 

 

 

 

*I suppose I should read the notes, but I want to just conjecture first.

[clyde]

For the week of September 8th, 2014 we will be playing:

 

Voyages of Mogey by thecatamites

 

You can download the single game from here for free 

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

[SuperBiasedMan]

Glory Days of the Free Press was an experience that had me expecting a satire when I heard the name I had thought was sarcastic. But as I started talking to people I switched from thinking it was very stupid satire to realising it was just silly fun. The abstraction of removing specificity and detail from the tropey back and forth gave the unusual effect of capturing the feeling while highlighting the fact that it was just nonsense.

 

I thought this one flowed better than some of the other 50 games, since it is essentially allowing you to wander through and grab bits of conversation from anyone you pass by. I realised in the after math how much it actually does give a genuine Glory Days vibe and feels like an enjoyable shameless roleplay.

[clyde]

I enjoyed the Voyages of Mogey in a similar way to how I enjoyed the portions of Winsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland episodes where the princess of Slumberland gives him a tour.

 

 

 

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

[Ozzie]

Okay, this week's game is merely the second thecatamites game I've ever played. The first was, of course, his greatest hit Space Funeral.

So I already knew he likes to make games fast and dirty, he's about as far away from a perfectionist as you possibly can be (so the opposite of me), has kind of a Punk ethos regarding the game making process and goes for easy to use tools.

Nevertheless...no fullscreen mode? Fixed resolution? (A punishment for those with high desktop resolutions...) Music that starts from the beginning with every room change? The controls are...? Oh right, arrow keys...now I'm stuck on this one screen and I don't know how to get out of it. No key press does anything. Oh, RIGHT, MOUSE CLICK!

 

I didn't get anything out of this one particularly. Soo, the thing has two endings? And the game loops after you reach the end?

I have to go with the obvious and superficial and say that the game grated somewhat on my nerves, mainly because of the repetitive music. I guess it was somewhat humorous, but the humor was drowned out for me. Hm.

[clyde]

Yeah, I played a small game by another developer yesterday that used the "Ctrl" key as the main action button. I was like "Who does that?!"

 

When I played Some Bee Ess (last week's game) it took me a while to figure out that I was supposed to manually move the little guy into the former video-rental store. 

[clyde]

For the week of September 15th, 2014 we will be playing:

 

Octopus Decision by thecatamites

 

You can download the single game from here for free 

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

[gamesthatexist]

On Criticism Roundup: I think at first, I thought this was about not much, but now it's touching on something sort of specific for me. There is definitely disconnect or dissonance here, but I didn't find it unusual as I consider all of these games pretty dissonant. Dissonance as tone. Now, I'm finding this one to be about how there has always been a certain strand of games criticism that imagines itself as "saving the medium" or doing something completely new, even though it is really embedded in centuries old rhetorical modes, only without the benefit of historical hindsight. At the same time, this criticism imagines itself as immensely important and swimming against the tides of history, steeped in ignorance. This can be extended out to any kind of criticism really. The rhetorical mode of literary criticism, and, by extension, also capita-L Literature is that of learning to structurally position your ideas as "new." In fact, this is how we teach students to write in basic composition courses. It's not necessarily a matter of actually having original ideas, but of learning to rhetorically position yourself as overthrowing a more ignorant, naive version of yourself and others.

 

I've had formative/traumatic experiences that have reprioritized the way I view the world and how I view my role in it. These high-water marks of stress have a tendency to simultaneously make me feel a I've-seen-worse kind of confidence and have made me feel isolated. That's what this game reminds me of once I give it a few play-throughs and put some faith in it. 

The more I think about the game the more I like it. Putting the blaze-of-glory at the beginning of the game and having academia as a fail-state properly reflects a lot of the opinions I've heard about adulthood and the eventual inevitability of career-paths: the cop who walks the beat, gets shot, is then assigned to the desk making bureacratic decisions weighed heavily by the most traumatic of experiences; the biologist who travels the world to breed sea-turtles, meets someone, settles down and becomes a highschool teacher; the graffiti artist who breaks a leg when falling from a scaffolding, gets the fear of death in her and then does pieces in a studio to be sold at gallery. All of these pairings are largely defined by the duality in the actor's understanding, between the real experience where they found their limits and the fake experience where they have negotiated for an ambassadorship and struggle with how no one in their peer-group knows the actuality of their formative experience.

 

I like these musings as response to this game. I would only add that our tendency to view things like teaching high school as a failure state is one of the most insidious parts of American culture in particular. I really kind of hate the old "carpe diem" truism because it sets up these kinds of binaries, between "really living" and "settling," binaries that are also grounded in the idea that hoarding capital (i.e. having a successful career) = identity formation, realizing self-worth. I think this breeds contempt for education, the arts, or anything else that should be promoted both for its own sake and for like, sorry but I don't care I'm gonna say it, the betterment of humanity. 

 

I didn't read it as the same person being the cop and the person on stage, I actually thought that the first section was just a game, a shamelessly gamey AAA style game and the person on stage is an ex designer, ruminating on their work.

 

I like this idea too! The idea that eminent Triple-A lead designer and eminent games critic are sort of hopelessly connected by the idea of what "eminent" means in this culture.

 

Sorry I've been MIA.

[gamesthatexist]

Also, this isn't particularly insightful, but I guess Criticism Roundup is the first game we've encountered that relies on forced failure.

[gamesthatexist]

On Glory Days of the Free Press:

 

This game really is great. The sound loop is more shimmery than usual. The one-two animations match up with it perfectly. And the game really nails the tone of self-importance which a lot of these games aspire to. The idea that the characters in this world view what they are doing as the most important possible thing, as clyde puts it "like a bunch of friends making a zine, but with a scope of historical importance." This tone can go a lot of different directions, and I think this self-importance is portrayed in a more negative light in the previous game. Most of these games are at least somewhat facetious, but they all at the same time seem to realize that it's pretty curmudgeonly to make fun of traits like passion and enthusiasm so the player probably ends up admiring these characters to an extent. The mad-lib style headline creation is great for a meditation on pre-internet click bait, and the passage at the end half-jokingly points out that reality is subservient to the narratives we constantly construct in order to determine what reality is anyway.

 

I love that the motives of the inaccurate and unreliable sources of content presented in the game's narrative aren't bribes, political agendas, or predjudices; you just need to get a paper out everyday and news is slow.

 

This is key, I think. The idea that the motivating factor for "news" is the very process of creating narrative, of generating content.

[gamesthatexist]

Some Bee Ess: There are a lot of things I like here. I think I am discovering that one of the things I appreciate about these works is their ability to make a churned out idea that probably sounded kind of dopey even to the author (GAMES ABOUT MY DREAMZ) work. So one of the reasons this idea works in execution is careful curation. Often, people describe their dreams to you as if they're interesting but they're not. These dreams are genuinely interesting. The game avoids the pitfalls of perhaps overly heady or subtle abstract representation by describing the dreams in clean, lucid prose so the player can simply judge these descriptions against the limited representations of the colors and drawings. There's an honesty to this method, and at the same time the two forms of representation are allowed to compliment one another. Consistently, one of my most favorite things about these games is their use of prose. Wisely, the author only bothers to interpret one of the dreams, the one that is most eery (hell in an internet cafe, my parents' living room), and each dream genre is clearly distinct (1. pleasant 2. nightmarish 3. incoherent).

 

Once I played through the second dream, I credited this comfort to a wide-open, unpopulated landscape in comparison to the claustrophobic private-property of dream #2.

 

Agreed. One of my favorite descriptions was "the pervasive sense of ownership" that is so present for unfamiliar customers in small cliquish coffee shops. This "ownership" is often ambiguous, having nothing to do with the actual "owner" of the business.  

[gamesthatexist]

Voyages of Mogey:

 

For some reason, text grafted onto landscape of simulacrum of imagined enemy-less JRPG microuniverse never gets old for me in this series. It speaks to such a specific, peculiar combination of bemusement and genuine longing. My favorite part of this is how the game doesn't attempt to differentiate between the different stock NPCs that are supposed to populate the stock JRPG castle (soldiers, knights, children, w/e). They're all just identical bubbles bouncing around identical rooms. The glib responses of Mogey, your avatar, play up this inevitable lack of distinction. Paradoxically, this actually makes the world feel charming and alive. Also.......don't you dare neglect to unlock all of the mysterious ALTERNATE ENDINGS.

 

Nevertheless...no fullscreen mode? Fixed resolution? (A punishment for those with high desktop resolutions...) Music that starts from the beginning with every room change? The controls are...? Oh right, arrow keys...now I'm stuck on this one screen and I don't know how to get out of it. No key press does anything. Oh, RIGHT, MOUSE CLICK!

 

Yeah, it's pretty difficult to get anything out of these games when coming at them from a usability standpoint. The author literally made one of them per day after getting off work at a day job (way more fast and dirty than Space Funeral, for example). I find that if I sort of accept whatever they left out as an inevitable part of the experience of playing them and try to pay attention to what the games choose to focus on instead (at the expense of say other resolutions or controls), I often get a lot more out of them than I would a game that is more 'playable' in the traditional sense of the word. It takes some getting used to, but I think it's good that these games kind of force us into this mode of experiencing them!

[gamesthatexist]

Octopus Decision:

 

Pretty straightforward parody of CHOICE IN GAMES, I guess? I like how the friendly octopus version has everything the octopus enemy version has except a "shoot" button----movement & collision detection. The only real difference is perspective, what you feel the game is supposed to be. I like the bouncy collisions in friendly mode, of course, and the way it feels like this sleepy endlessly looping space like Minus World in Super Mario Bros. Contrast this with the angry combative version, which has a kind of approximated victory condition, and then it gets way meta and either simply makes fun of itself or sort of briefly reflects on the kinds of communities fostered by antagonistic design. 

 

I caught up!

[clyde]

For reference (it's long and boring like many NES games, but note that you drive a submarine around in space and dock to go inside and kill brains:

 

Video of Air Fortress (1987)

 

 

I assume is the "octopus-decision" is at the beginning of the game. It feels like a effortless feature-add that comes from that desire to talk to the monsters in Doom. Oddly, it does make the limited-agency induced killing of the anti-octopus portion feel more short-sighted and cruel. This was what I found most interesting about the game. I haven't explained it well yet though. Playing through both portions of Octopus Decision makes me want to actually play Doom with monsters I can talk to. Not because it would be a better game or because it would provide more mature context for the killing; Octopus Decision shows me that such a feature-add can be like a dipping-sauce at a foreign food restaurant that you try once and decide it's not your thing. It is still on the table being unused and you are reminded of the unsatiating option before most bites. This prescence doesn't actually add flavor to the food or any memorable significance, but just having the option makes the core-experience feel like part of a broad, bland spectrum. I'm having a hard time describing this. The "octopus-decision" doesn't feel like having the option to read books in Skyrim, it's more like how Skyrim had kinect-support for dragon-shouts. It's never a viable option and non-use doesn't add much, but it is there and you know it is there. 

 

As far as the meta-game goes,

I did enjoy how Thecatamites makes fun of their motive to make the game. This is a sensibility that I frequently enjoy from this series of games. Even though the games are made quickly, they still require some effort and expertise. I enjoy how just being like "I wanted to make a parody of a game that one person online might remember *fart-noise*"  subverts typical motives such as love, power, and fear.

 Making goofy shit for goofy reasons is always very inspirational for me. I don't need a real reason; I just need the will, the time, and the tools. 

 

--------

I caught up!

 

I appreciate you writing those impressions. I very much enjoy reading them. For some reason, my personality makes me desperate for input from people who enjoy things I enjoy. It's really hard to find people who like 50 Short-Games as much as I, but it's such a noteworthy collection. Having your input feels like it did when I found someone else who enjoyed The Bald Soprano. 

[ihavefivehat]

I have been playing these games and enjoying them, but I'm not great at writing insightful things.

 

However, I just played Criticism Roundup and I want to take a moment to acknowledge how great the phrase "I gibbed Romero!" is.

 

 I imagine that this speech is taking place maybe 60 years in the future. Gaming is now universally recognized as a Serious art form and this character is receiving a lifetime achievement award of some sort. But I imagine that in the intervening years there was some sort of crisis in gaming culture that resulted in real-life death matches between video game developers and this guy along with his school of followers emerged victorious over the old guard, after he literally blew Romero up with a rocket launcher.

 

 

 

edit: Also I just went ahead and played the rest of these games. At first I found thecatemite's work a bit grating but tonight something clicked for me and I now totally love them and actually find them quite inspiring.

 

Also, I definitely get a bit of a Pokey the Penguin vibe from these, but I think thecatemite's work is a lot more substantial.

[gamesthatexist]

At first I found thecatemite's work a bit grating but tonight something clicked for me and I now totally love them and actually find them quite inspiring.

yay

 

Also, I found your comment quite insightful; it filled in all of the plot holes.

[clyde]

Also, I definitely get a bit of a Pokey the Penguin vibe from these, but I think thecatemite's work is a lot more substantial.

What is this vibe. At first. I think it's the accessibility of unrefined technique, but then I play some other games that may have the same amount of scope (MS Paint or whatever) and they don't resonate with me. I find the effortless style and lack of polish to be deceptive. I feel the same way about haikus and abstract expressionism; it looks like something anyone can do, but then I try and realize that a high level of technique is there. Some types of technique is easier to identify than others perhaps.

[ihavefivehat]

What is this vibe. At first. I think it's the accessibility of unrefined technique, but then I play some other games that may have the same amount of scope (MS Paint or whatever) and they don't resonate with me. I find the effortless style and lack of polish to be deceptive. I feel the same way about haikus and abstract expressionism; it looks like something anyone can do, but then I try and realize that a high level of technique is there. Some types of technique is easier to identify than others perhaps.

 

In a certain sense, thecatemite's technique is very highly refined. That unpolished / broken style must not be easy to wield so confidently and with such success. I'd imagine that it took a lot of thought and practice to get to a point where he could do so.

 

In the fine art world I'm reminded of Cy Twombly, who also uses a crude aesthetic in a deceptively complex way:

 

[clyde]

For the week of September 22nd, 2014 we will be playing:

 

Night Thoughts by thecatamites

 

You can download the single game from here for free 

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

[gamesthatexist]

Interesting controls in this one. Vaguely impenetrable, confused perspective of 3D space. I love the description of the waking world's transformation into "tomb dimensions." It makes me think of "day/night" cycles in games. The idea that the mere addition of a feature like this is supposed to completely transform the way the world operates. The switch in screen transition from mouse click to moving off the edge of the screen makes you hesitate long enough to appreciate what's there, mess around by drawing the cursor over the spiders. I like these waking dream bits, especially the way they tend to fixate on bugs as this interconnecting force between dark reality and dreamworld. I like how the dream is described as "unbearable," and also that it's not really supposed to mean anything. Or is it?

[clyde]

I see the presentation of the first screen being representative of both how sometimes when I wake up my eyes don't naturally focus. It simultaneously creates a disassociative effect where the elements of the room are individually identifiable, but asunder from their contexts and placement. This also happens to me sometimes when I wake up. It's a neat and pretty accurate depiction of a hypnagogic state for someone who is not currently in one. The contents of the prose are also something I have felt the importance of in a vulnerable half-awakedness. I have had experiences where the place I live, the place which should be the most familiar, the place that I should be the authority on, has suddenly lost its meaning and become just a portion of space. It can be alarming. It's incredibly rare though, the most common thing that is similar to this for me is just waking up and not being sure which bedroom in my long and various history-of-bedrooms I am in. 

 

I think the second screen is just trying to express this idea with an additional example. It is helpful for me because I usually think of these concepts in reference to how my cats experience the house, what it would be like if it was upside-down, that type of thing; the spider example informs me that there is a venomous banality residing, and that it is the focus of the discomfort.

 

I find this context to be more interesting than the dream itself, but I think it's unfair to separate them. Dreams are often difficult to describe because what is known by the dream-avatar is difficult to communicate and we often just focus on the visual portion of the hallucination. I think that the context of the first two screens in tandem with the dream itself is an attempt to triangulate the specific feeling of waking up in this particular instance of discombobulation.

Here I am, in a dark room. I know this is supposed to be where I feel secure, but I don't; the room has transformed into a dark place inhabited by creepy-crawlies. I've just woken up from a dream where I simultaneously killed someone in self-defence and was murdered. 

 

Dreams where I kill someone are so incredibly uncomfortable when I wake up. It takes me a while to stop feeling guilty even when he was trying to kill me. Sometimes, the intensity of the killing-blows are what wake me up and sometimes when that happens, it's as if my mind wasn't ready to wake up so I end up staring without being able to see anything.

[gamesthatexist]

I see the presentation of the first screen being representative of both how sometimes when I wake up my eyes don't naturally focus. It simultaneously creates a disassociative effect where the elements of the room are individually identifiable, but asunder from their contexts and placement. This also happens to me sometimes when I wake up. It's a neat and pretty accurate depiction of a hypnagogic state for someone who is not currently in one. The contents of the prose are also something I have felt the importance of in a vulnerable half-awakedness. I have had experiences where the place I live, the place which should be the most familiar, the place that I should be the authority on, has suddenly lost its meaning and become just a portion of space. It can be alarming. It's incredibly rare though, the most common thing that is similar to this for me is just waking up and not being sure which bedroom in my long and various history-of-bedrooms I am in.

This is spot on. I think most of my time with this game was spent on the first screen, struggling with the arrow keys (though not in a frantic or unpleasant way), trying to get it to focus just so I could read the text in full.

[clyde]

For the week of September 29th, 2014 we will be playing:

 

Fashion World by thecatamites

 

You can download the single game from here for free 

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

 

WE MADE IT TO PAGE 2 OF THE COLLECTION !