50 Short Reviews

reviews of 50 Short Games by thecatamites

[50shortreviews]

Garlo’s Gambit

I am aware that I probably overstate these things sometimes, but I’m going to do it here anyway. Consider the scene above, how extraordinary it is, yet how typical of the entire compilation. It has the look of a washed out popup book. The illusion of three, no two isometric dimensions (see the top-right house facing inward?). It’s like the tracings and shadings of a child who’s lived a thousand lives. The colors, carefully chosen, are the loudest possible, yet they run together in a way that prevents any one from standing out. The characters, bending and buckling, are not even vaguely humanoid, barely recognizable as shapes, yet they are deliberate, not scribbled. We know they are alive. The first person prose is uneventful, and nestled in the corner unassumingly, yet it shouts phrases like “forbidden city” and “satellite suburb.” The city is inside the suburb, inverted. The setting is alien and familiar, fantastic and mundane, everywhere and nowhere. Where are we? What is this? A story about a man ditching a city to figure out what magic is. I have yet to play anything else that looks and feels like it.

[50shortreviews]

Cigar Afficionado

Hovering “jealous” eyes stalk a docking cruise ship. The music sounds like a rattlesnake ringing a doorbell. Cigar Afficionado quickly introduces a character and a conflict. Vanessa is a glamorous n’ powerful New York editor who wants nothing more than to steal n’ smoke Katherine Van Horne’s fabulous cigars.

Glamour is portrayed as a ruthless, seductive power. Almost inhuman. You start with disembodied eyes, and by the second screen you have more facial features, but still no actual outline of the shape of a face. Vanessa’s red lipstick is the only color on the screen, and the only thing animated is her puffing on a cigar. Both protagonist and antagonist are rich enough for mansions and cruise ships. There’s no underdog here, no hero’s journey, just power plays. It’s a style of character that hasn’t been attempted yet in 50SG, and it contrasts sharply with previous cute & shapeless personas.

Vanessa’s objective is to obtain a glamorous signifier of power, the Buster cigar, her Excalibur (or Buster Sword). In this game we have some ACTUAL COMBAT. You blow smoke at the guards to incapacitate them, and your attack comes with a disorientingly heavy delay, as if Vanessa is taking a slow, deep breath every time you press the keyboard. The Buster animation is incredible. When Vanessa puffs her smoke cloud, she turns into a giant, fearsome pair of blood red lips. In this game the cigar isn’t just a status symbol. Blowing smoke in someone’s face is a physical expression of dominance. 

The game builds from its first screen, which is also its most minimal, shifting frame and perspective, varying the amount of text, white space, and art with each new scene. When you’re trapped and subdued by Katherine Van Horne, you can’t control your character and the screen changes too fast for you to read all the text. Towards the end, when the two enemies meet for the final battle, the camera zooms in so their faces hog most of the frame.

Obtaining the Busters allows Vanessa to relax and gives her the confidence she needs to boost her magazine’s circulation. Interesting how some of these games function in that weird space between art and advertisement, which must be the “oscillating kitsch” sweet spot. Houses made of abstract, intangible placeholders for human desire.

[50shortreviews]

Happy Astronaut City

Trapped outside the frame. The world’s inaccessibility obviates its comprehension; cities remain mysterious when you aren’t allowed to explore them. My avatar’s position on the margin reminds me of Ursula Le Guin, who wrote, “Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on.” So which of us is inside?

Your avatar’s animation, instead of alternating between two similar frames to create the illusion of motion, like it usually does, shapeshifts between two distinct images. One looks like an igloo; the other a sign. The scene is like a children’s book. Brief, expository prose rests underneath the frame. Smiling, bouncing astronauts and a nondescript landscape rest within. There is no sound.

On the next screen there are more frames, like a comic book. You glide through a closed off corridor between them. The prose suggests that these are adjacent rooms that make up a “facility.” The American flags suggest expensive investments in jingoism.The astronauts seem happy. But are their smiles overly resolute? Perhaps the title doth protest too much. Is this city really on another planet? Is this city real? On the third screen, the narrator refers to the inhabitants as “ex-nauts.” Are the astronauts retired?

This city is a dollhouse, its ‘astronauts’ caricatures of achievement. Or at least, that’s how the narrator sees it, from the outside looking in. Perhaps the narrator is the one living in a dollhouse, subsisting on the sly, anesthetic comforts of conspiracy theory.

[50shortreviews]

Bogey’s Report

It seems like reflexive critical metafiction is getting more recognition with stuff like Beginner’s Guide and Undertale. What I like about the metafictional approach in 50 Short Games is that it feels like it’s earned over time because of how the individual games can at first flounder mysteriously but eventually snap together like puzzle pieces as you work through them, so there’s no need for something like BG’s unreliable narrative voiceover to make you think about T H E  P R O D U C T I O N  O F  C U L T U R E. Any one of these games, and especially this one, is almost too trivial to recommend on its own. In other words, Bogey’s Report appeals to its audience in the same way its muse, the JRPG, appeals to its author. Not necessarily as anything holistic or even coherent, but as a small, perhaps idealized, piece of a larger implied memory.

I don’t think the author likes this game very much, but I like it because it’s one that made me consider the entire compilation more deeply, and it made me want to come back to the games that achieve their effects more subtly. The splash screen introduces us to a kind of pulp detective fiction rendered comical by the crayon green checkerboard background, pink handwriting, and clownish yellow cartoon character. The prose is overwrought yet conversational, addressing the reader directly, setting up a character that will basically be abandoned on the next screen.

The next screen establishes the game as an act of criticism. The narrator becomes the author’s voice superimposed over Bogey’s, explaining the strange appeal of JRPG towns with little pretense of fiction. Pink marker houses. A blue river made of blocks. Individuated blades of grass sprinkled gently across a blank white landscape. You can wander around the town. The sound stumbles and distracts, atonal and arhythmic. Only your avatar and some signs undulate with a simple animation, so you walk up to them. The tone of the prose has shifted, now distant and philosophical; it will eventually unravel into the standard elusive slapstick. The game is not subtle, but it’s still playful, not self-important.

It’s interesting to juxtapose the tininess of Bogey’s Report with the ostensible goal of the kind of game it’s referencing, which is to cram as much experience as possible (in terms of time spent) into a limited framework. It is possible that no one has ever actually enjoyed an RPG in its execution, and yet RPG mechanics are the kind that seem to inspire the most profound feelings of longing in those who have had some prolonged experience with videogames. We only enjoy the idea of RPGs, and once we start playing them, we realize that their purpose is not to be enjoyed because tedium is such an essential part of this fantasy of existing somewhere else, where you feel at first very small and then later very large. The more things you have to clean up, exterminate, or collect, the better. Bogey’s Report wears a different kind of tedium on its sleeve. I mean, it’s an essay that you download and then read while walking around bumping into little signs. Unlike an RPG, an esoteric piece of games criticism doesn’t (have to) pretend to be fun. Except this one sort of does, and it sort of works, so maybe that’s actually at the heart of the appeal of these games.

I don’t think I buy the argument in the previous paragraph, and I’m sort of writing myself into a wall here because tedium is not something the author claims to admire about RPGs, preferring instead to celebrate their fragments: the pop cadence of irrelevant dialogue, the little towns where you don’t do anything, where time is static. Perhaps the implied tedium that comes with these little fragments (the inevitable, laborious adventure) is irrelevant. Or perhaps it is completely necessary, like much of life. Either way, it’s kind of nice to see a universe try to explain itself.

[50shortreviews]

GREAT! Mouse Friends

Tamagotchi dungeon crawler. Closed-off, top-down room with disinterested creatures pacing. You can engage with them on a friendly JRPG battle screen. Most curious is the eye icon. You walk up to the eye. By examining the eye, you become the eye, looking in on the room like it’s a cardboard box, examining it & the mice objectively without yourself in it. What is this shift in perspective? Sergio Cornaga pointed out that in adventure games the eyeball is a common symbol that you can move around and use to “look at” things. At first, I thought your avatar was meant to be looking through a hole into another room. But instead, it seems like you’re looking in on the room you’re in (hence the mice), which makes your perspective feel disembodied, pieced together, and removed.

Your avatar is gormless and ripe for projection. Your ability to walk up to your own eye and detach yourself from your own body supports another reading from the 50 Short Games Club by user ihavefivehat, who suggested that the protagonist establishes a relationship with the mice in order to achieve psychological distance from something else. Ihavefivehat says the game might be about coping with poverty: “Your apartment is totally empty and filled with mice, but the mice are treated like friendly co-inhabitants rather than invaders. Maybe this is some sort of psychological distancing mechanism for the protagonist.” I don’t think my own interpretation is this specific. Psychological distance can be desirable for a lot of reasons. But the room definitely has a wistful quality. Your interactions with the mice are playful, but the game itself isn’t just playful.

At first, I thought I was supposed to be taking care of the mice. But I realize now that my role is not so paternalistic. I simply exist alongside them, like a virtual pet simulator without the guilt of inevitable neglect. In elementary school, all of our tamagotchis shat and starved while we were in class.

[50shortreviews]

Klogg’s Krapsack

Mysterious skulls (or squids?) accumulate at the top of the screen. A steady, purposeless pulsing unrelated to anything you’re actually doing in-game, like the yelping frog symbols in Goblet’s Grotto. Crayon crocodile drawings, impenetrable buttons with arithmetic symbols attached. You click on them and the effect is either moving the foreground (croc & ghosts) or background (a kind of slot machine). You can move ghosts! You can move crocodile. The two seem vaguely related, but only related enough so that you feel alienated and confused by whatever you’re supposed to be doing or celebrating. Such is the purring symbiosis of videogame iconography.

A side note: I was talking with a friend this weekend about how little sense there is to make of the relationships between chants and mascots and names of college football teams in the American South. Alabama is called the Crimson Tide, but their mascot is an elephant. MS State is called the Bulldogs, but the fans ring cowbells. Auburn is called the Tigers, but their fans chant “War Eagle.” So basically, you’re just not supposed to think too much about the relationships between these things. Mascots, avatars, lines to be recited, these are all interchangeable, stand-ins for the impenetrable & illogical fears and dreams of sports enthusiasts. One of my students tried to write a word history paper on “hotty toddy,” one of the nonsense terms in the Ole Miss victory chant, only to discover that most of its history is gibberish hearsay.

This is how poetry is taught in schools: You identify the subject, then the speaker, and then the speaker’s attitude towards the subject, which allows you to detect the essentials of irony and tone. Identify these three things, and you will develop a reaction to the poem. We know this is a poem because there are lines instead of sentences, and stanzas instead of paragraphs. We know this is a videogame because there are ghosts instead of people, and crocodiles instead of chess pieces.

The experience of being alienated by a machine is a very human one to have. In Klogg’s KrapSack, the speaker is you the player, who is playing some archaic video toy thing. Ok, so the speaker is the player, and you the player are viewing this other player through the lens of your experience of playing through the medium of the screen. Wait, maybe the speaker is the camera? Anyway, the subject is what the author calls a “garish, chattering toy.” So the subject would be Klogg the Croc and his ghost friends and whatever they get up to inside their modest slot machine home. The speaker’s attitude towards the subject would be alienation, but not in the traditional high modernist sense of the word. This is a kind of amused alienation. A flailing about in the waters of alienation with a kind of deranged joy. A kind of, ‘wow look how intriguing this machine is, this cultural artifact long discarded by its parent culture!’ Garbage, how intriguing! Delicious! So the tone would be bemused, or something, and the irony would be about 315%.

Don’t forget that you can always walk away.

[50shortreviews]

Fashion World

In the 50 Short Games Club, clyde said that fashion is like an accent—everyone has one, but many go through life without ever considering their own very deeply. You only notice accents once you’re out of your element, or once someone else is in yours. Fashion World speaks to my sense of not really identifying with clothes. It’s not that I don’t pay attention to them, everyone does, but that I don’t really know what to do with them. I don’t really know how to use clothing to signal to another human the self that I want to project. I mean, I’m not totally inept, but I think I dress in a way that aspires to shift attention elsewhere, away from me and the clothes. Avoid mistakes. Blend in.

Though the font is gaudy, the fashion meter is fickle, and eventually rendered irrelevant anyway. The author’s notes apologize because you have to play the game five times to see all the endings, but it’s true that I had to play more than once to get something out of it, or at least to articulate what I got out of it. The inputs and feedback seem almost entirely irrelevant to the project at hand. You’re guiding a little laundry basket, trying to catch socks, but you could just as easily be shooting at the fashion police. The key is that success and failure are randomized, so your experience of the game is correct. I keep coming back to the idea of fashion in the abstract, an attempt to project outwards through material signifiers. This is a game that’s inseparable from the player because it exists to reinforce and validate the player’s interpretation of what “fashion” is.

[50shortreviews]

Night Thoughts

Most of what I have to say about Night Thoughts feels like it was already said with more nuance by the game itself on the first screen. Is the success of my observations inversely proportional to the success of each game? I don’t really think so, just that I’m getting hung up on thinking I’m just repeating myself. I think I may have hemmed myself in a bit by trying to write completeish essays about these things instead of brisk microreviews as the title of this tumble page originally promised. Night Thoughts starts off angled, off-kilter, with the text already partly off screen and slipping further so you’re rushing to read it. With the arrow keys you have some control over the shapes and text on screen, but it’s unclear how much, and it’s unclear if you’re moving the shapes themselves or your own nauseous first person perspective of them. Waking up in the middle of the night in pitch black without anything like the soft glow of a teevee, and a thin film over your corneas, which compounds the sense that this place is nothing like the one you were in before you closed your eyes. There’s no logic to the way the shapes are positioned, like there usually is, and things seem to be moving because you keep blinking and can’t seem to get your vision set. Your oscillating sense of your own body becomes hopelessly attached to the room you find yourself in. But there’s also the very real possibility that this place really is strange, unfamiliar, hostile. What else could make it impossible to successfully navigate a room you’ve walked through tens of thousands of times. Really the night itself - stark, shifting, and neutral - will always be more mysterious than any darkness, any complexity, we might imagine within ourselves. It sort of mocks us. I think this is why I fear it. It’s been awhile since I allowed the night to blanket me completely. I prefer some kind of indirect glow to keep it away. Spiders seem to serve as connective tissue between reality and dreamworld. This is Night Thoughts, signing off.

[50shortreviews]

Octopus Decision

Trying to avoid calling Octopus Decision a straightforward parody of CHOICE IN GAMES because really it’s two games grafted together, one sincere and one ironic, the “choice” only a flimsy binding. The choice ends up feeling not entirely arbitrary, though, because the version of this game that you play second registers differently based on the one you played first, so in a sense there’s no going back. The sincere one, the “Friendly Octopus Zone,” is so unassuming and pretty, just a sleepy looping space that exists, like a JRPG town. I played this one first, and one thing the space made me pay attention to was the music, which has a kind of consistency across all of 50 Short Games. The short Bosca Ceoil loops are usually expedient and atonal enough to draw attention to more ineffable characteristics of sound, like breathiness or sharpness or in this case warmth.

I imagine playing the ironic one first would have played up the comedy angle, but playing it second as I did makes my actions as player feel a little more cruel, and the game itself feel more biting and less goofy. It’s still funny, but it also made me think about how Lewis Hyde compared irony to alcoholism, and called it “the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.” In this sense, the “choice” between these two experiences is comforting because the sincere version is made plainly distinct from the ironic one. Even though the new sincerity has sort of already happened, I often find it difficult to disentangle irony from sincerity, not to mention disentangling the useful form of irony from its fatalistic brand.

Can’t shoot the big octopus, so must dive inside like Jonah’s whale and plant a bomb. Then, exit the water and find an additional octopus on the beach, where I plant an additional bomb. Then cut to human sitting at computer uploading a parody game of Air Fortress (1987) to an online forum, its only feedback a single coy emoticon.

The friendly octopus version has everything the enemy octopus version has except a “shoot” button and an implied objective. What matters, then, is your perspective, what you feel the game is supposed to be, which really does change with your avatar and the accompanying shift in gamefeel, away from the lazy floating and bouncy collision of friendly mode, towards the stumbling brainless brutality of combat. The ironic version is either making fun of itself or reflecting on the kinds of insular communities fostered by antagonistic design, or maybe both.

[50shortreviews]

Voyages of Mogey

Voyages of Mogey refuses to concede the pervasive sameness of its world, a stock castle and its surrounding town, populated only by a few dogs, some rocks, and some randomly placed columns, hand-drawn and shaded in with markers.

The king blithely insists on labeling several different, but visually identical, categories of bubbles: warriors, knights, and children.

The generic is what makes fiction both tedious and surprising, both necessary and useless.

Fantasies are competing sets of generic conventions; the generic is what animates us.

Non-player characters interest me more than player characters because they have such a confused sense of purpose, like scattered pieces of a jigsaw, hollow collections of sprites with a character limit.

Text grafted onto landscape of enemy-less RPG microuniverse never gets old for me because it speaks to such a specific, peculiar longing.

Smeared across landscape, text exaggerates a sense of space modeled outside time, an opportunity missed by every other RPG where text appears then disappears like a thought bubble.

As a practical alternative to scripted cut scenes, you walk up to prose as if you were making it happen.

Mogey, more cadence than character, seems both glib and oblivious; his responses to the king and others play up the static character that paradoxically gives the world life.

A cadence is a quality in art that aspires to a certain rhythm and humor instead of useful instruction or explicit meaning.

Mogey and horse look sort of featureless, their simple animations controlling most of my perception of them, a sense exaggerated by the loud, green, candy cane grass tiles that seem to swallow up their shapes as they cross the plains.

The sunset pink castle and horizon, with clouds carefully arranged in rows, is a visual relief from the plains, a welcoming.

Though the bubble king spends most of his time trying to impress Mogey, there’s something sinister about him.

I feel like there’s a lot in this game that I don’t have language for.

As King Bubbles tries to seduce the adventurer, the king and knight errant tropes are overturned.

Mogey seems to have little interest in serving the king or gaining his approval; the king is a nervous host trying desperately to please an attractive house guest.

It’s clear from the beginning that Mogey is looking for the Bubble King, but it’s not clear why until later.

Later, you find out that Mogey and King Bubbles met on the Bubblenet.org chat server.

Their meatspace meeting is disappointing.

Two outcomes to choose from: Either the king’s fragile body collapses at your touch, or you reject his advances; you can exit underwhelmed, or stumble into someone else’s revolution.

Under conditions of romanticized, asynchronous distance, how well can we separate people from our projections of them?

For sale: bubble stick, never used.

[50shortreviews]

Some Bee Ess

I am discovering that one of the things I appreciate about these games is their ability to make chicken salad out of churned out ideas that probably sounded dopey even to the author (Here are some games about my dreamz). The cliche is that people will describe their dreams to you as if they’re interesting, but dreams are only interesting to the person that dreamed em. But I think the key is in careful curation.

Some Bee Ess avoids half-baked surrealism by describing the dreams in clean, lucid prose, so the player can simply judge these descriptions against the limited, though evocative, representations of the colors and drawings. There’s an honesty in this method. The author draws attention to the two conflicting, yet complimentary, modes of representation in the first dream (pictured above). Clicking the mouse reveals more description:

“Represented here are the machines and the desert. Not represented: the constant pleasurable warmth of the area, the momentary sensation of being in two places at once.”

We can extrapolate the sensation described onto both videogames and dreaming in general. Not existing fully in any one place somehow allows you to spread out and cover more ground. You can move the small blob person around, but your perspective is removed, an angled bird’s eye view. The machine arms lend depth to the horizon, stretching the desert, emphasizing the distance between your perspective and the small avatar, between reality and how you perceive it, between what you see and what you feel.

It also helps that the dreams don’t run together, that each is clearly distinct. The first is like a warm expressionist painting, but the second dream is piercing and nightmarish; it’s about getting trapped in the familiar made strange. You enter a mundane building that continues to unfold downward, and you can’t leave. 

The third dream is an anxious, loosely structured narrative that recycles the closed off NPC technique from Magnificent Planet (Remember the snake?!) to involve the player in the dreamer-narrator’s voyeurism, which communicates another kind of doubleness often present in dreams–that teenage conviction that you’re constantly intruding and being stared at. You peer through a window only to discover you’re on a stage.

There’s no ending. You can dip in and out of the three dreams freely.   

[50shortreviews]

Glory Days of the Free Press

The writing in Glory Days nails a tone of self-importance that’s less negative than what we saw in the previous game.  Every adjective a superlative, every verb one syllable, every noun a murderer or politician or special interest group. Pre-internet click bait. Content generation. Every headline either aggressively vague or impossibly specific. It’s a kind of popcorn syntax, where the sheer pleasure of phrases outwits the desire for information or coherence. I read a recent article on The Onion’s A.V. Club that compared Aqua Teen Hunger Force to Waiting for Godot. The anticipation of a meaning that never arrives, though at its core a kind of existential angst, also allows for certain sensory pleasures. I often feel better looking forward to what the weekend represents than I do in the act of experiencing it. 

The highly expressive, back-and-forth, two-frame animations make the characters seem like they’re breathing along with the shimmery sound loops. You can tell thecatamites likes writing in the voice of late-nineteenth century tabloid newsroom, a mode which features an accidental deference to language that eschews traditional boundaries & expectations for what a legitimate writing process is supposed to look like. I find that the text is always arranged very effectively in these games. Here we have dialogue in the top left corner and a newspaper headline at the bottom of the screen. The headlines, ostensibly articles as they’re being touched up for publication, pop up along with the tangential dialogue when you walk up to each character. The arrangement lets you remain present in the visual scene while appreciating the writing. The drawings of the newsroom characters are mostly eyes, noses and hats; arms, legs and torso are all one uninterrupted, featureless shape. The patterned tile distracts from the details of the characters, discourages lingering on them for too long so they remain ripe for projection. The room feels like it has separate workspaces without complete privacy, an open arrangement that suggests everyone on staff is expected to maintain constant access to everyone else.

From talking to each character, you learn that the content of the newspaper stories is inconsequential. It’s all about the process, and the effect that arises from an unchecked churning of that process. The accidental profundity of cutting up a piece of writing and putting it back together. Montage without all the careful planning and editing. Editing without deliberation. Deciding how many clauses your sentences will have before you write them. The idea that filling up space is a way for content to create and justify itself. Start with skeleton, then dress up with flesh.

It's pretty impossible to communicate through analysis how funny and rewarding Glory Days of the Free Press is when you first play it. The mad-lib at the end is your big moment, the bleeding edge! You move from delegating to getting your hands dirty, from observing everyone else’s punchy headlines to proving you’re the best at punching. All the boss’ snap-second decisions prime you to inhabit the role when you are served a vocabulary scramble that invites your arrangement. “QUAKERS SMASH CRIME BOSS PEACE TAX.” The selection of words is glorious, terrific, magnificent. I've never made a headline with this game that didn't deserve every superlative.

I guess the news boss’ casual misogyny and antisemitism mark the betrayal of the game’s underlying fantasy. He dismisses a couple of headlines by calling one “Kabbalah stuff,” and in response to another he says “Punch it up a little! This ain't Women and Home!” Clearly this contributes to the characterization of “The Man,” a caricature who goes around firing everyone and calling Burroughs an amateur. Perhaps this sort of language also features prominently in the Smithsonian collection of newspaper comics which inspired the game (see author’s notes). But maybe it also reminds us that nostalgia, at its core, is conservative. Though I don’t think it’s inherently conservative to try to place yourself or your audience in a specific moment in time, it is possible to idealize & fetishize a historical moment in a way that invites yet ignores all the baggage that comes with it, and prevents moving forward.

If you wanted, you could extrapolate further to apply this idea to the toolset used to make these games. Is it inherently “nostalgic” or “conservative” to create using 90s educational game-making software? Perhaps if I phrase the question like that, it’s too easy to say no. It’s not inherently conservative to write with pen and paper, even though we have computers. What about if you’re using the tool not just for economical reasons, but in hopes of capturing some ineffable charm supposedly harbored in the tool itself?

The newsroom simulated in this game is not the legitimate kind, these guys are hacks, but it’s true that a lot of newspaper production involves filling up space, then somehow convincing your audience that what you've filled the space with is not only necessary but a kind of entertainment. A newspaper’s structure is prearranged. There are allotted spaces for photographs, graphics, advertisements, specific word counts so that half an article can go on the front page while the part you don’t expect people to read jumps inside. The justification of all this doesn’t really have anything to do with what actually happened in the world that day or week. The newspaper’s existence is (was) intended to be self-justifying, which is comforting in a way, and by its very nature requires experimenting with different ways to communicate meaning. Reality is subservient to the narrative structures we constantly construct in order to determine what reality is anyway.

[50shortreviews]

unearthed from the horrible bog

[50shortreviews]

Criticism Roundup 2013

You shoot impotently as cops flood enclosed space. They overwhelm you. Cut to decades later, and you’re speaking at GDC as the esteemed videogame critic who invented “gameism.” Criticism Roundup, perhaps, is the first of 50 Short Games that feels genuinely like a journal entry, resigned to its own imperfections in a way that’s different from the previous four, because not only does its execution lack conventional polish, but the idea itself is somewhat dubious. It remains halved. Two phantom limbs eye each other suspiciously from opposite sides of a room.

This game also appears to look outward more than the others; the way it flirts with its imagined audience seems pretty flippant at first, but ends up feeling anxious. I’ll go ahead and say that I think the part at the end about being discovered, where the speaker rants about finally getting the attention deserved, is a genuine fantasy, no matter how deeply couched it is in the punchy, elusive tone. You could say that this game is just making fun of “the state of games criticism” or whatever, but that seems too easy.

The fantasy that an audience will eventually notice great work that has gone unappreciated for too long is in some ways a product of Western literary economy, which holds that a canon should be uncovered, appreciated, and cauterized over time: If a work is truly brilliant, then someone will just stumble over it later, recognize its brilliance, and exhaustively document that brilliance for posterity. With the benefit of historical distance, the work’s true audience will emerge.

Of course Criticism Roundup also roundly critiques this fantasy as ultimately insular and unproductive, and hopes to distance itself. I can see how it’d be easy to entertain this fantasy, especially while making games that hope to avoid presenting as products. It’s hard to get anyone to care about anything, easy to complain about what’s most visible. Ironic joke tweets about E3 always get more play than clumsy enthusiasm for undiscovered work, and there’s an established economy of paying attention to undiscovered work that moves too fast for most of us to keep up with. There’s already so much we feel like we’re failing to pay attention to. Ultimately, it’s both self-serving and self-defeating to feel like everyone else should pay attention to the work I produce, or that I find most interesting. 

This observation is not new or particularly insightful, and Criticism Roundup doesn’t treat it with much nuance, but I think it’s something that’s hard to talk about, because it’s hard to talk about what’s reasonable to expect of an audience when your work doesn’t command a high price on the market of exchange value under capitalism, and when it has a tenuous relationship with that market in the first place. Is the way we conceptualize “audience” antithetical to the way we might hope to conceptualize “community”? It’s sort of like the problem of disseminating knowledge through authoritative teacher-student relationships.

To an extent some of thecatamites’ work and writing has already been “discovered.” Their value has been recognized and appreciated, if on a small scale. What is this scale? When each of 50 Short Games was released originally on Glorious Trainwrecks as individual works, they were free; they didn’t participate directly in the market of exchange value. Later, they were repackaged as a compilation and commercial release. The individual, free versions are still available. I think that altering the games’ presentation and selling them for a price definitely changed the way their value was conceptualized. There was a flurry of attention, though it didn’t translate into much sustained conversation with the work. In some ways, selling the games meant insisting they are worth an audience now, as they are, and shouldn’t have to wait for someone to stumble across them in some ghost archive decades later. In other ways, it’s a resignation. A price gives the audience a reason not to participate. Except we don’t really need any more reasons. Time is already our most valuable commodity.

Intellectually, it’s easy to see through the fantasy of “being discovered”, to recognize that it’s crass, and that even if it happens, attention doesn’t bring fulfillment like we expect it should. At the same time, audience feels necessary. Audience is magic. Knowing someone else is reading literally changes the way we see our own words on the page.

The creative process softens loneliness, but somehow the creative product can intensify it, because for most of us part of the process is always rhetorical, imagining a conversation, not a monologue, and an audience that may or may not show up. I think that now, with so many options for constructing an online presence, it can be easy to confuse the creative process with a compulsion to validate every thought and emotion, to justify one’s existence through a constant stream of content, to seek out and shape an internet audience just to avoid disappearing. I’ve been thinking of the rapid production of 50 Short Games as a kind of journaling exercise, but daily journal entries are quaint and slow compared to the content of most Twitter feeds.

The author has explored similar ideas in a blog post on the site Mystery Zone, dated June 22, 2011:

“A much more unsettling idea, I think, is that of the net as just a kind of huge escape valve from ubiquitous “real” media, which seems ever more alien… The implicit sense that most of these mass cultural products (big films, pop acts, etc) are essentially as unstoppable and untouchable as glaciers, that criticizing them or trying to think of them as human products - in the context of human systems of ideology&finance which promotes some ideas/works and treats others as untouchable - is by now impossible. That they just sort of happen, and complaining about it is like shouting at clouds. I don’t really have the critical vocabulary to talk about this properly but there’s a sense in which the generally accepted idea that anything worthwhile will just be tucked away secretly on some server is only possible due to a mass alienation (aaaa) from ‘wider culture’ as a whole. And hence that there’s some level of reduced expectations and internalised cynicism at work in the way we think about those things. The ‘mole’/’toad’ idea that all you can do or hope for is burrow your own hole in the massive plains and hope maybe someone steps in it… even this geocities site is a function of this idea, maybe…”

A difficult idea to articulate, because once articulated it risks sounding trite. It lives in the narrow space between cynicism and hope, between narcissism and the desire to connect with other humans. A scary place to think about, but I think it’s probably true that most people end up wanting to express ideas in the first place in hopes of making some kind of dent in the aforementioned glacier, but this usually doesn’t work, or at least, it feels like it’s not working, and I guess in many ways productivity is a structure of feeling? So maybe all you can do is burrow down and take it one sublime accidental human encounter at a time, and maybe that’s what wisdom is. But then, what about the glacier? Does this mean we just gave up? Were we just not cut out to live on a glacier?

The author continues,

“I dunno. Sometimes I worry about PK Dick’s idea of the Chinese Finger Trap of paranoia, where the more you struggle to get out the deeper you’re enmeshed. There’s something eerie about realising the hold that certain ideas have on you. Or maybe it’s just the blow to the ego of realising that you’re not complex, really, you’re still harbouring the same obsessions and desires. They might be filtered through bookchat and Beckett rather than homemade video game maps and rented movies but you’re still the same person. It’s kind of a sad feeling but it’s also a hopeful, grounding one as well, I think. There’s something horribly insular and self-absorbed about trying to understand yourself, or at least of using this as the focus of your life, but maybe not. It could be that real self-knowledge is being able to see yourself in context and hence involves an equal amount of awareness about the world, your place in it, how you think about it, the secret lights by which you make your way through it.”

Is audience the difference between “working” and just “trying to understand yourself?” I worry that my own analysis of these games sometimes veers into the insular and self-absorbed, like I’m using them as an excuse to write my own Wiki page or something: I think we usually refer to this as “projection.” I guess it’s probably obvious by now that I see Criticism Roundup, as well as the rest of 50SG as a conversation with the “Chinese Finger Trap.” They try to outpace both frivolous adolescent interests and technological seduction, hoping to stop them from dictating creative output without leaving them behind entirely. The compilation suggests an effort to change, but also to stay grounded somehow, to avoid floating away.

[50shortreviews]

Cowboy Living

The cowboy talks to you and says things like the caption above, which is emblematic of how the game playfully puts on an air of forgetting about you, like you’re interrupting. The whole thing is cast as a tutorial, bookended by an initial “Push up arrow to move” instruction and a drag-and-drop-gun-onto-desperado objective at the end, the pink gun’s sole purpose. I tried dragging it around on screen earlier, idly attempting to shoot the cowboy and some of the objects as they flew by, but to no avail. It’d be just as easy to assume the gun is only decorative. I find it charming that Cowboy Living presents itself as pointless tutorial led by disinterested narrator. Most tutorials simultaneously coddle and obstruct, demand undistracted focus, confine initial curiosity and playfulness.

As the cowboy begins to teach “Enthusiasm” and “Respect Parent,” it becomes clear that the game draws from a category of multimedia sometimes still referred to as “edutainment,” as does other work by thecatamites like Pleasuredromes of Kubla Khan, which positions educational games as grating, but also surreal and endearing. All that hyperbolic enthusiasm mixed with inevitable failure to actually teach anyone anything, like old professor shouting about cosmic beauty of math equations to audience looking for expedient solutions to immediate problems.

Of course, educational software can also reinforce perspectives that contribute to systemic oppression. Look no further than the Oregon Trail, a game that helped launch the American edutainment industry by tapping the culture’s well of exceptionalism. On the trail your sole motivations are claim territory and harvest resources. The game offers a superficial, tokenized multiculturalism that erases the experiences of marginalized people, and presents history as problem to be solved by individualistic patriarchal imperialism. The cowboy mythology is not, of course, unrelated, as it is born of the same ideology of manifest destiny and history of genocide. When we discussed Cowboy Living in the 50 Short Games Club, I agreed with clyde when he said that it succeeds at locating “some value in [the heroic cowboy fantasy] while keeping it at a responsible distance.” Now as I revisit Cowboy Living, I wonder if this is true. Is this kind of “socially responsible distance” even possible? Is there redemption to be found in this archetype, and is it even worth looking for?

Perhaps this game is more about what it’s like to face an alien mythology that expects your approval without context. Perhaps this distance from the idyllic cowboy was not chosen, but inevitable, a fact of life. Your control of the cowboy’s movement is elegant, simple, but your perspective is mediated through an extra screen, an explicit distancing effect and effort by the author to dodge the trap of repetition, which turns out to be the most interesting part because it creates the feeling that you’re watching a more naïve version of yourself get schooled in cowboy discourse. The cowboy does not face us because the cowboy is also looking in, distracted, bouncing jauntily as if on a horse, unsure which side of the screen is his rightful place. This is a common trope in 50SG, metascreens & stages, fourth wall breaking, self-reflexive attention to form which accentuates & makes light of how minimal those formal elements often are. Cowboy Living is the first of 50SG so far that doesn’t end with an explicit coda, but lumbers on with endless looping terrain, right after advertising its wealth of scenic virtual content and referring to a “main menu” that doesn’t exist filled with subquests that don’t exist. The Wild West.

In the 50 Short Games Club, two people (one Irish, one British) expressed bemusement because they had zero context for the free wheeling mythology the cowboy is ostensibly supposed to represent, a lost-in-translation quality that probably has a lot to do with the ideology of American individualism at the myth’s core. SuperBiasedMan, speaking of the shows he watched growing up in Ireland, said “I definitely had the feeling of being served American culture second hand.” Ironically, the author of Cowboy Living is also Irish. On the A1 Reviews archive, the author recalls feeling simultaneously alienated from and fascinated by American videogames, and describes a sense of remove from conventions that seemed like they were ubiquitous somewhere else:

“…during time of prime interest with these things i mostly engaged with them in the same brutally stupid way i did with everything else. watching a movie when you’re 8 years old, when you kind of don’t care about a lot of the stuff like dramatic subplots and musical numbers but you accept them anyway as possibly appealing to a kind of phantasm audience that you don’t belong to but which presumably exists, and which has needs and tastes far more defined than yours. the fact that this structure seems so consistent across the board just heightens this feeling. playing videogames and feeling that anything awkward or silly about them was just you failing to get some kind of reference that would undoubtably be picked up by the people that the game was REALLY made for. i remember having an extremely hard time dissociating actual videogames with the idea that there was some all-explaining context behind them which just never made it to Ireland, sort of like back-issues of Spider Man. people who make these things have Real Jobs and a logo and live in LA, so they must know what they’re doing. i think i was something like 18 before i realised there could be such thing as a bad videogame apart from me not understanding things correctly.”

I think part of what’s going on in Cowboy Living and the rest of 50SG is a kind of double refraction of the author’s experience of consuming another country’s already aging pop culture artifacts, digesting them along with Irish culture & literature, then regurgitating them as something new. Digested kitsch, or a sense of delay and distance from that which is being churned up and replicated in the creative work. I think it’s easy to imagine how this practice could produce something both amusing and unnerving that sometimes flirts with the grotesque. I grew up and live in the American southeast, so one of the reasons these games fascinate me is a sense of witnessing vaguely familiar generic tropes repackaged and sent back as something more appealing and strange.

[50shortreviews]

Anxiety World

The surreal dreamstate is ubiquitous in videogames, but less common are depictions of the more pressing intensity of being shaken between sleep and wakefulness. Anxiety World portrays a blunt stress, animal and antagonistic, a close cousin of sleep paralysis. You should not be awake. Scolded by some unseen force, jarred from feeling outside of your body to feeling hyperpresent yet diffuse, you wanna leave again. Anxiety can be slow and brooding or sharp and physical.

As opposed to melodrama or kitsch, Anxiety World communicates something as blatant and direct as its title, an autobiographical snapshot, a microexperience. Yet it’s structurally indirect, overloaded, a gluttony of text, sense experience, synapse syrup, whizzing by. Pulsing neon against black, the palette suggests the abstractions we furnish a dark room with, disembodied body parts, vague flashes of geometry. The rapid-fire monologue, full of vaguely ominous yet mundane preoccupations, punctuates the physical assault on the senses, is experienced in its immediacy then quickly dismissed as half-awake farce, but with recognition that the farce will return tomorrow night.

Strangely, the effect is couched in something like Space Invaders. Text progresses as you fail to catch, with your wide rolling eyeballs, lightning bolts that shoot down from the top of the screen, a twitch challenge, something else we didn’t see in the first two games. Reading comprehension requires a happy medium between catching all lightning bolts and letting them all through. Once you realize this in-between space, you can process the monologue, but really the text is most effective when you first see it, as garbled, fragmented mess. Memory documents the fragmented nature of experience by ignoring a lot of the formal structures we set up to organize experience.

Three games in, we can begin to trace a collage. First two games are more thematic and spatial, one fantastical and one mundane, both worlds to explore, like ideas that had been kicking around for a while. The third is claustrophobic, experiential, and fleeting, like a day less planned for, with less space for reflection.

[50shortreviews]

Space Mouse

Space Mouse presents a scraping, grating, industrial noise track and haphazard collision detection. You can wade through walls like sludge. There’s a hub world, and you can keep reentering the same mouse hole over and over after you’ve already collected the cheese. The whole thing feels pretty sloppy, not like the sense of deliberate, calculated mundane you get with something like Cart Life, Papers Please, or Always Sometimes Monsters.

I played Cart Life back when I was working closing shift at a Starbucks and partly for this reason found it very affecting, but now I feel I’ve gotten most of what I can out of key-pressing my way through workday alienation. Though I would argue that Cart Life succeeds not just because of the way it simulates wage labor, but because it emphasizes how you connect with people both because of and despite wage labor’s endlessly divisible mechanisms.

Space Mouse has a “New Game Plus” of sorts where after you’ve completed the game once and started over, you can just leave with your ride without having done any work that day, which colors the world as a kind of fake grayscale work simulator where the labor underneath the hub is optional. So the game ends up being funny (Mouse should be more grateful. Seems to work in some kind of unsupervised cheese cave), but still feeling somewhat alienated. The comedy tries to help transcend the grind of working enough hours at some numbing job to go home and dream about it, because the job really does occupy that much time & consciousness, even though it isn’t at all challenging or interesting to think about.

On the Idle Thumbs forums, user SuperBiasedMan responded to Space Mouse by speculating on authorial intent:

“I am yet again confronted with the question of what parts are intentional and what is limited skill. Is the poor collision detection just a fact of the quick turnaround on the game and a programmer’s limited skill level or is it an intentional enhancement of the overall broken and unsatisfying experience that the game entails?”

Though I’m not usually interested in intent, I think this is a pretty interesting question in the context of Space Mouse and 50 Short Games. Videogames, throughout their history, have overwhelmingly trained us to look for what’s supposed to be there. Am I having the implied “correct” experience, or is the game “broken”? Now we have open alpha games where developers essentially crowd source what people like & don’t like, what they should fix. Release day is opening night, the first live performance. Devs not only imagine an ideal player for their game - they trace that ideal via metrics as the audience anthropomorphizes the work, points out its flaws, gives advice on how it could improve, cheers, jeers, gets bored, performs the necessary synthesis of consumption and free labor.

Authorial intent has already been problematized in literary criticism by Barthes and whoever else. I mean, if you write a novel that no one ever reads, then sure, a theoretically “correct” interpretation of the author’s intentions exists, but it’s not an interpretation that means anything to an audience. Interpretation is a thing that an audience actively pursues and creates. A lot of it’s outside the author’s control. It’s true that authors can select and shape an audience, and manipulate interpretation, but the exact consequences of a work are pretty difficult to predict.

In the case of videogames especially, intent often becomes way too complicated to trace in any reliably coherent fashion. With big budget commercial games, you have all these different people working with different teams in different areas of a building, perhaps the labor is even outsourced to another city or country, and these teams are sometimes only allowed to communicate with each other indirectly via creative management intermediaries, and maybe management even restricts their communication with the outside world. I’ve never worked in one of those places, so I’m speculating & drawing from secondhand knowledge, but even in the case of small homebrew games created by a singular author, the work in question is still a videogame, which usually means it’s all these different sense experiences cobbled together with varying degrees of emphasis. And videogames are pretty much always on an accelerated production schedule, from triple-A to homebrew, and as consumers we look for the cracks where accelerated production led to some mistake or gap in the implied perfect fantasy immersion experience. We gleefully post videos of body horror glitches, or upload other evidence of systems buckling serendipitously, allowing us to do or see something intent would have forbidden.

I believe 50 Short Games are actually pretty interested in the context of all that stuff. They’re interested in what it means to be characterized as videogames. In the case of Space Mouse, where the collision detection is only partly functional, yes I think this is a consequence of tools and time frame, and it’s pretty safe to say that “realistic” or “smooth” collision detection were not traits prioritized in its design. Most of these games were created in the author’s spare time after work, using a program called Multimedia Fusion 2, an upgrade of Klick n’ Play, a tool designed in the 90s to help kids learn to make games in school. These games aren’t programmed from scratch, but arranged around the constraints of a particular program conducive to quick work flow. Not really a question of skill, but of toolset and mentality involved. But to me this isn’t what’s most interesting about them.

These games seem interested in the question of intent because they spend a lot of their time evading any identifiable intent, moral, or message. They want to dismantle “intent” to the point where our experience cannot be governed by it. At the same time, they seem to be implying some ‘player response’ we can never quite grasp or keep up with, often through exaggerated pulp horror or crime tropes. In Space Mouse, the working day is presented as simple trope exaggerated to absurdity. Mouse smoking cigarette, crunchy nearly unlistenable melody, everything black and white. All this to say, I think our expectation of closure and “intent” is one of the primary things being deflected here. Any fantasy of “ideal game experience” for “particular imagined player” eludes us, is only hinted at and then discarded.