gamesthatexist

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

My initial reaction to clyde’s first post was similar to SBM’s; I found the web game a lot more approachable than that post, which I was pretty uncomfortable reading because I agree that it sounded like it was looking for justification for this patriarchal, colonizing attitude towards art. I think for me it started with the language of the middle paragraph, the ‘I’m ok with being a douchebag’ stuff. My reaction to reading that was “What? Why are you OK with it? Stop being OK with it! Being human means figuring out when you are a jerk, and then figuring out what you can do to stop!” And I guess I don’t think developing as an artist should be different than developing as a human. I was also uncomfortable reading the last paragraph, with its assumption about unreasonable fears, but I guess it’s better to air that assumption and have people interrogate it than to just keep it bottled up and never question it. I also think iax was right to respond with the point about “reputation” in response. After all, a forum like this is a pretty public venue, and people will read it and be affected by the language. After reading through the thread and thinking about it some more, I think my issues are more with the language of that post than with the ethical dilemma implied by it. I agree with clyde that a lot of people don’t really deal with this question at all. We just carry around assumptions about what is “public” or “free” once something is uploaded to the internet; and we have all these unspoken assumptions about what an “art object” is and what that means and what constitutes “ownership,” and a lot of it in games spaces is wrapped up in BS corporate anxieties about mass media IPs. Some have been pretty glib about dismissing the question as a simple one with an obvious answer. I think part of the problem is all of these abstractions. People interpret the question as “How do you feel about stealing?” and the response is “You should never steal!” Or “if you steal you shouldn’t sell it!” Well ok, but the whole point of the thread is to interrogate what we mean when we say “steal.” Saying you’re against stealing is like saying you are in favor of freedom. Some politicians who adopt this truism mean that they want corporations to be free to trample on workers. There was a story on NPR where they interviewed a woman whose picture was made into a meme and uploaded by a friend onto Facebook, and the image went viral within 24 hours and spawned thousands of spin-off memes. The woman interviewed seemed pretty OK with it, even made a sort of internet career out of it with a comedy channel on Youtube. So in this specific case it turned out fine, maybe in another case it could have been horrifying, totally demoralizing. The answer is always it depends, right? I think I would have been terrified. I am always anxious about uploading pictures to the internet and am really picky about what goes up when other people want to tag me in something. I like to have a lot of control over my own image, and I think a lot of other people are like that too! I think this is why people seem to be reacting most strongly to the hypothetical of taking someone’s personal image or likeness and using it without their permission. I also think a lot of the concerns are with this idea of appropriating the image of non-public figures because that feels like more of an invasion than using the image of a politician or celebrity, who has already to an extent come to terms with their image being part of a public ecosystem. Images are really powerful in modern culture, and the culture has a lot of anxiety over them, and if you’re going to make art in order to interrogate or remix the image, I think it’s important to weigh the concerns of the subject heavily against the desire to make art. I guess conventional wisdom is that if you don’t want something seen, then don’t upload it to the internet, but the response to that is always yes and no, right? Most of us have all of these different microcommunities where we exist online, not to mention the residue of past versions of ourselves, the dregs of some forum or livejournal or xanga or whatever where we don’t want people snooping around. You might say, “well get rid of that shit! Clean that shit up!” but I dunno, can you ever really be sure that you got everything, that there’s not still some ghost floating around somewhere in some archive? Anyway, if you’re making games in a small space and uploading on glorious trainwrecks or something, you can usually safely assume that anywhere from a handful to a hundred people will experience the work, but you never know how or when something could get linked at the right place and seep out into a larger audience. I think a personal artistic ethos should always be able to imagine this scenario, of the audience of the work moving beyond the artist’s control, and act accordingly. As for blanket policies, I really don’t think there can be one that always applies? The whole point is to develop a personal ethics that is aware of social mores, what the stakes are, who benefits, and who doesn’t, which means case by case, right? I think the only useful response to this question is specific cases. I like thecatamites’ point about how anything that makes you consider “legal issues” naturally affects your relationship with the work and how you might choose to (re)distribute it. So in that sense, it's sort of impossible to completely separate "legal issues" from "ethical issues" when it comes to the practice of making art. Btw everyone should go read this piece thecatamites wrote in Arcade Review #3 about an RPGMaker community, where there was this sort of (sorry if I paraphrase wrong) unspoken practice of never actually interacting with the work as part of a passive “audience,” but always poking around in the RPGM file in order to recycle other people’s art and ideas. I think it's a good illustration of how ethics will always depend on your community, your space, your place in time, and what you are making. It might be worth saying that I generally think people’s feelings are more important than intellectual, abstract ethical positions. Or I guess I’m saying that we shouldn’t always need a sound rhetorical argument to convince us that we shouldn’t do something. If we can’t always ask someone directly, then we should practice imagining how people will respond to things. Like, if someone doesn’t want their image used in something, I think that emotion should be enough to command any artist’s respect. They shouldn’t need some ethical justification for their emotional response, grounded in greek philosophy or something. I think empathy is just as useful of an artistic tool as the will to go out and find things in the world, remix them and make them new. I think that if an artist underestimates empathy, then the artist risks making shitty art. I think the Appropriation game clyde made is good for exploring these issues because it brings up a lot of different layers of ownership that we don’t tend to take seriously (for whatever reason), taking it case by case. The examples in this game are pretty banal/impersonal (picture of building, picture of hotel rug). One thing I would like to see Appropriation deal with is the issue of asking for permission. The first time I wanted to say “It’s not OK” is when I got to the image of the cartoon with the goatee, but I thought, “If I knew who drew this I would just ask.” I think the game has a lot of potential, and it could be a lot more interesting if it considered the different categories of “usage, reference, and commentary” that SBM mentioned and maybe deal with plagiarism, satire, and others as well. I kind of like the matter-of-fact non-subtlety of the Q&A format, but it would also be interesting to consider all the different ways the question might be phrased, right? How much control the player has over interpreting the question. When you see the word “OK,” yeah, maybe it’s ethically ok, but maybe it makes for lazy art. I don’t think it’s about who's harmed more; it’s about who has more to lose. Human vs. monolithic entity. I’m making my own assumptions here, but.......it’s true that a human originally drew sonic, but that person has more cultural cache and capital than the fan artist. And then more humans designed, rendered, and animated sonic for other iterations, then more humans later drew different versions of sonic with the understanding that many different versions had already been drawn and would continue to be drawn for other media. I think its easier to identify the source of the fan art than it is the source of whatever image I tend to associate with the word sonic.

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

Mashkin Sees it Through: When I wrote about thecatamites' work for Arcade Review, I compared Mashkin's writing style to that of a Freshman Composition paper. Unfortunately, I don't think this is a metaphor that really works because it sounds to most people like I'm just saying it's shitty writing. What I'm talking about is when students first enter into the university, the institutional weight of the academy plus the alien and mythological quality of its "standard discourse" combine to force students into a particular mode of writing that is unique to composition courses. Ironically, by trying to teach students to sound more like "real academics," composition courses end up producing a type of writing that you wouldn't find anywhere else outside of those courses. Which is kind of what happens in any writing class anyway, even though institutions supposedly want students to be working towards some even, objective standard. So what I was trying to refer to in making the comparison was how the prose in Mashkin deftly evades specific detail in order to play up to, and focus exclusively on, the formal qualities the narrator seems to think the audience expects. Mashkin is pretty exhausting to read! The way the writing evades meaning and runs the reader around in circles reminds me of something from A1 reviews that I posted earlier. Here is thecatamites describing a passage from Robert Walser: I still can't get over this passage. What a performance. The Daniil Kharms stories that clyde linked are wonderful.

UFO Panic Attack: More dreams huh? Or at least dream logic? Or weird blurring of conscious and unconscious states. I like that the game literally overloads the screen with alien iconography in order to enforce its X-files-esque alien abduction, and then adds in the arbitrary Space Invaders clone where it's impossible to shoot down all the aliens. Space Invaders always was an apt metaphor for overload or saturation, on the level of both theme and hardware. I think UFO Panic ends up making the point that we are so saturated with certain iconography that it's not all that surprising that we have "believers" for anything, no matter how unlikely. The comparison "like being chased through the forest by an animate cannabis leaf" drives this point home. It's just so ubiquitous, how could we not imagine ourselves abducted? And maybe that's enough to make it real. For most of Western society, advertising + pulp archetypes = reality. I think there's also an allusion to the idea that conspiracy theories are actually a way of avoiding the most sinister aspects of ideology. Think 911-truthers who think they need dramatic intrigue to explain "terrorists" because the cold everyday logic of American imperialism won't suffice.

Creamerz: From the author's notes: This is an interesting effect to try and trace in each individual game because I feel like it happens a lot. Just because of the accelerated production of these things and because its a common defense mechanism there is often a sense in these games of not taking the original idea seriously. But then there is a moment where the game slips into genuine enthusiasm for what it is, and then usually slips back out into a more distant register by the end. It's kind of amazing that this transition can take place over such a short time. In Creamerz, I think we can locate this in seemingly minor choices in diction: The pulling back from straight parody or hyperbole here is jarring for me. That "I don't want to make a big deal out of anything but..." Sure, it's a performed reluctance, but it's still awkward. It's especially jarring since it shares the screen with a line that is much more straightforward, a second-person direct address to the audience imagined as consumer: I wouldn't call the first quote sincere. More like unsettled. The effect of this juxtaposition for me is reminiscent of when I find myself accidentally moved by an advertisement, and I feel kind of dirty afterwards because I've been emotionally manipulated. There is this voice or tone that the author is trying to emulate, but can't play it straight, can't play it without being sucked in to some extent. "I love the Creamerz."

Moppy Returns: thematically similar to Space Mouse and Employee Report. Alienated labor. Strong points here are the brooding earth tones and Dark Moppy's sinister sound effect. I am impressed with how confusing the tone is. It is genuinely unsettling when Dark Moppy comes for you. But I would find myself, alone in my room, laughing out loud at the same time I was really creeped out. Especially at the final stage, where it's just the one claustrophobic hallway, only key and door. Grab the key, and it's like you've been cartoonishly hooked off stage. It is totally a mop. Dark Moppy is bad because they carry no mop. I think the character is also trying to pretend that the labor is meaningful instead of trying to deal with the notion that maybe it isn't by trying to find meaning in life elsewhere, which contributes to this cycle of nebulous resistance. I think that's part of the joke(?) here. That the protagonist keeps blaming some internal ineptitude or mental state, and doesn't consider the possibility that the problem is external, systemic exploitation. Everyone else seems to be living their lives or whatever, so I must be the problem. I think maybe a minor 7th or 9th or something. Something weird.

Employee Report: I think this is a nice point of contrast to FF35. ER lingers on the text long enough for the phrases to resonate with multiple layers of connotation, as opposed to the screens in FF35 that shift before you can process them. I am having some trouble with the octopus metaphor. I get the basic gist, but am having trouble picturing it, maybe because I don't know that much about marine life. But I like how the metaphor is only half-realized visually. The central figure appears as human, not as octopus, and the unmoving boat is appropriately impotent. It floats, holds itself up above the depths, but without reason. It can keep you from plunging down, relinquishing consciousness, but it can't do anything else but remain in stasis. And if you plunge down, you are simply thrust back up by some unseen force. The tone here is irreverent, as usual, but not really playful at all. This one is almost solemn. This is my reading of it too, and I like how clyde extends the metaphor to also apply to a more generalized state of labor. I love this description. And it's pretty wild that your personal experience reflects this state of half-awake constant anticipation, but on a more macro level. The way you describe working months at a time, it's like hibernation, except the opposite, without the implied relaxed, rehabilitating stasis. Actually, now that I've written it down, it doesn't sound that uncommon. It's generally how teachers work as well, and also students.

Hello friends! FF35 ruined me! When we got to that one, I had the idea of connecting my interpretation of that game with poking around in the Final Fantasy 7 debug room. The pursuit was a black hole that produced the following: http://gamesthatexist.tumblr.com/post/112908593851/a-review-of-the-debug-room-in-final-fantasy-7. Earlier, sergiocornaga said: This is pretty much the interpretive approach I pursue at length in the link above. Here is the relevant bit about FF35: Not much after all that! But at least now I can catch up with the other games. Much thanks to ihavefivehat for the screenshots. Very helpful. Stay in school everyone.

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

Most striking here are the towering, twitchy-white specter people on the third screen. Some real Twilight Zone type shit.