Just because you’re smiling doesn’t mean you haven’t drowned
--They Might Be Giants, Dark and Metric
There was a time in my life where I genuinely enjoyed Garfield. There has never NOT been a time in my life where I haven’t genuinely enjoyed free money. I consider myself a warrior of fortune--you can daily find me dutifully filling out surveys and watching ads in various services that will give you gift cards for being a cog in the capitalist machine, and I’ll put my hand in toward anything promising semi-paid semi-labor.
This is especially true with ground-floor terribly-planned enterprises, which is how I was able to legally flimflam Bing out of $15 worth of gift cards by searching for pictures of animals once a day. So of course after the initial wave of nausea and secondhand embarrassment over Garfield Go, I was installing it and ready to see how effectively I--and any other card-hunters--could grin and bear my way to some free Starbucks.
The Garfield emulation is so complete that you already know the punchline before reading it, but come along, won’t you?
WARNING: Yes I will be comparing it to Pokemon Go. To be fair, it knows EXACTLY what it’s doing.
WARNING THE SECOND: I batch-edited these and Tumblr doesn’t like the size, but in keeping with the true Garfield spirit, I’m too lazy to edit them again. You’re not missing anything.
The first thing I managed to do was break the app. I disallowed AR, thinking that it would have a stock background similar to PoGo, because that shit eats battery like...God, I don’t have it in me to make a lasagna joke, just let it be said that rather than issue a warning, it went to an entirely black screen. I fixed it manually and was greeted with Not Garfield on my coffee table, demanding food. Contrary to his nature, he refused to eat anything I didn’t curveball directly into his dish. My sister and warrior-in-apps commented on how I managed to land it in on my second try, and I realized I actually had an edge from never giving up on PoGo. Not a lot of edge, and not enough to get it more than one out of three times, but it set my spirits moderately high.
I did some checking around in the app, and wasn’t able to find much to do while stationary except bake food. I wasn’t sure what it was for, but when an app tells you to do a free time-based thing, you do it, and I threw a lasagna on. I was offered the option to bake it immediately for more in-game currency than it cost to buy one. I had a couple thousand free starter coins but also first-grade math skills, and declined.
The time was ripe. After trading comments on how janky the controls were (you have to use two fingers in a twisting motion to change the map view, which is one of the dirtiest sounding and looking mechanics I've seen since jerk-off jogging in Wii Fit), my sister and I parted ways and the experiment began.
My nightly walks tend to be heavy on the “nightly”. This led to the game’s first flaw disguised as a perk: While it’s true that it will gladly put its Pokestops anywhere (they’re Bistros here), “anywhere” includes “your neighbor’s apartment”. They’re also full minigames, which means instead of giving your phone a quick swipe, you stop dead and play a lackluster Simon expy, because there is nothing less awkward and likely to get security called on you than standing in front of someone’s house at 11:42 at night silently tapping away on your phone for an extended period of time. I threw the game, got some free food, and quickly moved on before I had to explain my motivations.
Things got dark fast. I mean that literally. One of the other reasons forced AR is a problem is that it isn’t built for nighttime play. Every time I tapped a hotspot, it gave me a “Waiting For GPS” screen before dropping Goblinfield in pitch black, enticing me to appease him with baked sacrifices. It’s a simple mechanic: If you successfully pitch food into his dish, Gerbfield will eat and then find a chest for you to open. It’s also a highly broken one. The food items are all made of lead that turns into rubber on the impact, requiring an unsatisfying Herculean toss to pitch a piece of cake that’ll most likely either miss or bounce back out again. You get three tries, which is somewhat generous, but the sheer frustration nullifies it. My frustration was amplified on the realization that GarGo does not allow you to throw high enough to even possibly hit Goobfield in the face.
"Hey kids, wanna see where I hid Lyman's body? Tap the box."
One of the things that is admittedly sort of clever is having a button to tap to refresh hotspots. One of the things that is not is not instructing the player that it's there. I was a third of the way through my usual route before I noticed it and could begin playing again. I stopped for a moment to relate the information to my sister. She replied that the app was claiming she was ten blocks from where she was and near an inexplicable horseshoe-shaped structure. I took a side-by-side of where I was to relate GerBo's...relaxed attitude toward geography and also the laws of physics.
Novelty was running low, but I got a boost in determination from getting my first gift card...fragment?
Well, that explained how the gift card scenario was going to shake down. I could guess how many first pieces of the promised $100 gift card were already being given out and how few of the next two would ever be found, much less that golden fourth, but that was fine. I play these for the little prizes, not the big ones, because expecting to win anything that isn't roughly 1/80,000th the value they squeeze out of you is a recipe for disappointment. I kept going.
The hotspots led me into the local Safeway, which happened to also house a Pokestop, and I ran flat against a new flaw: The game is NOT subtle. PoGo can be played with relative normalcy 80% of the time, since you can turn AR off and keep marching staunchly ahead as you catch. GerfCo requires either violently whipping around at 180 degrees or slowly turning the same distance with your phone up like a pod person, and I was quickly pressed to decide which was worse. I ended up buying a candy bar as a social apology for looking like a jerk in a public place and hopefully as an unspoken excuse for being there. Upon doing so, I realized I didn't have any cash on hand and was paying for a dollar candy bar at midnight in Safeway with a credit card, which made me look like a right pillock instead of a jerk, but now one hundred pennies deep into this venture, I soldiered on, chocolate in hand.
I had noticed by this point that the food system was tiered, so I switched to the one piece of lasagna starting the game had given me and stuck the landing. This gave me a "better chance" of finding the highest-tier chest, but I was unsurprised that it wasn't one. I was more surprised by what was inside.
I hope you weren't expecting "that $100 gift card". Ah, yes, Garfield's trademark white fedora, the one he's so known for wearing. Compelled to take every chance available to make this experience as viscerally unpleasant as possible, I equipped it immediately.
This is why I need meninism.
Things weren't getting better. The next refresh of the hotspots spawned absolutely every one on the other side of the street. I was now adding "crossing the road in the middle of the night" to the list of fun-filled family activities GlorpNo had to offer. I had run out of food and was now using the in-game currency to buy it fresh. My iPod, which has slowly developed sentience over the years, kept shuffling up Mountain Goats songs. I was starting to feel distinctly unnerved.
PoGo wasn't averse to getting its two cents in on the matter.
Standing outside of a dimly lit Pizza Hut where the cashier was closing out their drawer and probably wondering if the guy whipping around in half-circles outside the building was planning the world's illest-advised burglary, I won a comic strip panel. Not a comic strip. A single panel. Despite the ability to look up literally every Garfield strip ever made on multiple platforms with a casual Google search, I was being given a single panel of a single strip as a hallowed reward. I pictured a small child working for days for the RNG to let them read a three-panel strip in full, staring bleakly at the one they had in the meantime and wondering if it was the punchline or the setup.
I began redefining my understanding of the term "liminal space".
By this point, I was entirely out of food, nearly out of coins, and on my last percentage of patience. As if sent by Jim Davis’ automated humorbot itself begging me to reconsider, I got a notification that the lasagna I had started making an hour and a half ago was done. I hauled ass to the next hotspot and got ready to make good.
Yeah you all saw that coming. You know, Globeel, if I tossed a fiver toward a busker’s case and it landed behind it, they would just pick it up. I know it’s food but 1) you’re a cat 2) you are Garfield the Cat (question mark heavily implied) 3) at least the busker offers a return service.
I need to state that at this point I was actually going to stay with this game, despite my readily apparent feelings on it. It's not fun, it's not a mentally rewarding experience, but I am by nature a patient person, and I was willing to stick with it for the eventual gains. That's how you win at these things--being willing to put the time in for the gradual increments to stack up. I was actually looking forward to going home and checking in on food I was baking and slowly going after the gold.
Then I decided to check what I had earned so far, and the entire thing came to a screeching halt.
Here’s the grift, folks, here's how the carnival game works. Remember how the system is tiered? You have to have the highest-tier item to get a chance of seeing one of those diamond chests, and there's no guarantee the piece will be inside. Again, it takes an hour and a half to bake one piece of lasagna, or else 350 coins to buy one. You get a small handful of coins from chests and a slightly larger handful if you finish a "trinket" collection, but unless you are willing to devote your waking hours to the game, your recourse is buying your way there. And...how much are those coins?
Yyyyyeah. It's Vegas, baby. You pay to play and the house always wins.
So, friendly fast-buck-sters, this app definitely isn't worth it for money value. If it was a matter of staying inside and rolling the dice while I multitask, I might be on board for chasing the golden ticket, but GlerbGubler demands all of your attention in public spaces and turns out Sisyphean as a result, if Sisyphus was constantly aware of how awkward he looked pushing that damned boulder. Play Lucktastic, join e-rewards, get into the sites that actually reward you consistently for a reasonable amount of effort. Your time does have value, so make sure it's honored.
I uninstalled the app on the way home. Deleted all the data I had, torched it. Stood on the sidewalk laughing, watching it burn, all tabby cat orange and lasagna sauce red. Then I put on a top 40 station, got on the Hollywood Freeway, headed north.
I forgot to post this, but I love that styling contests are so common that the December Troupe’s theater has a dedicated room for them so they don’t block the hallways.
