Campfire Companion

When I first put together this list on games made by notable figures that reflect on games on this website, I had done it with the intentions of highlighting how creative and brilliant our next door neighbors could be. More illustratively it was a list of games that I intended to personally review for the purposes of creating a sort of internal diagesis. We often laud and discuss games that are popular or part of a series, and often leave our more trite one off thoughts for shorter smaller experiences. The intention of the project was to illustrate how the 'alternative' no budget indie scene is not only coupled with what your favourite writers are saying but how they express their values and perspectives through art itself. Reflecting on interactive fictions and writing them are potentially not as seperate processes as we thought.

This project, which the intention of reviewing the works thereof mentioned being a more implicit goal of mine, was ultimately a failure and rather intense misstep. That's for an important reason: There is no coherent diagesis between a work like Magenta Horizon and Another Pokémon Game, they are just games 2 people that happened to be on here made, thus the 'dialogue' is not really as robust as I anticipated across the board. Besides, even if you have a small amount of internet clout sometimes, you probably don't want it to infect literally everything you try to do. I found myself in an attempt to stay fair and help usher thoughts towards improvement often focusing on weak editing and proofreading etc. Which given how niche and ultimately unplayed these works are anyway becomes less a form of friendly criticism and more a form of personal backseating and jeering through social media. Even if I dont like a creative work some writer on here made, going out of my way to cover it was missing the point that there is underlying beneath all of these more important things to be concerned about ie survival under capitalism or keeping your friends close in the wake of disaster. Improvements dont happen overnight, and of course most peoples first work is going to be rough and trying to give every single one of them the same level of serious attention can be discouraging in the face of these wider issues. I keep the list intact today hoping it remains a useful yellow page to some, but otherwise have shelved the underlying bitterness of the surrounding project only focusing on works I feel like actually speaking about.

I bring up this folly because its the sort of concern that A Phone Found in Tall Grass (2023) wants us to dwell in. It wants us to consider what we might be taking for granted. It's a work about relaxing and scrolling through your timeline consorting and joking with others while apocalypse unfolds all around you. The protagonist of the story is the recently unemployed twibber user Lia, who is immediately greeted by her partner Luna and their irl friend Alex as they meme towards and into the brink of an apocalypse. One of the most effective bits of the worldbuilding here is showing how irreverance and venting go hand in hand. Of course, in keeping with the times and adding drama to the story Lia has a private account with presumably no followers on it but for the most part people are brazenly comfortable with finding funny ways to say things are a bit fucked whether it be Alex commiserating about his conspiracy boomer dad or others pointing out how inane the government is being. Even being so smart as to show how that irreverance can lead into a distancing callousness of overly joking about disasters that are currently happening. Throughout this, we are often treated to a helping fake annoying ads as well. This shows not only how social media sites can function as networks of solidarity and connection, but also how they do to some extent neutralize the social playing field. Top executives are shown to be immature and get ratioed by randoms. Memes about a conference have more staying power than the official account bragging about the numbers etc.

Perhaps my favourite bit of writing in this is when Luna vents about Lia just arguing with people online but then realizes the uncomfortable hypocrisy of how dangerous the relevent activism is. We often find ourselves getting annoyed with loved ones in this way, operating too slowly or getting in feuds instead of 'logging off'. It becomes such a concern that it bakes itself as an ironic insult, one I've even recieved on here, that you should just log off and touch grass. Yet often we end up finding out that doesn't always meet people where they are at. Sometimes this frusteration doesn't agknowledge the fact that doing so has coupled with it a serious set of risks. Even in the case of 'just going outside' with decaying air quality in cities, wildfires, urbanist sprawl development, and queerphobia the most insightful people you meet online are probably agoraphobic for a good reason. The moment in this story shows that to great effect. More broadly the other great piece of writing is how, instead of focusing on some personal growth Lia has, the focus instead turns to a collective recognition that we often take the serenity of a space for granted. People noticed this irl with the borderline apocalyptic overtaking and dismantling of twitter by everyones least favourite billionaire comedian. On the one hand we know that these places suck, which is why we spend so much time joking around, but on the other hand the ability to connect and show ourselves through the web represents a space between the cracks of reality. There is a sense in which there's something to mourn when the infrastructure flails and breaks down completely. In order to illustrate allow me to point out something bold here: The recent dismantling of twitter hasn't been stopped by other rich people or the governments because of a combination of ineptitude, apathy, and a recognition that the people that use these spaces to do important activism are people that work. Your manager will almost always ask you to come in regardless of if the wheather is about to crash the windows apart because they have your number, but the people in your area trying to help you live? They need these spaces to get to you (though of course this can be a double edged sword to see: the fact people use the app in this story to meet up doxes them).

More to the point if you share the politics of solidarity and worker struggle I tend to display on here, A Phone Found in Tall Grass has you covered. All you have to show is a couple queer people trying to live their lives in moment of disaster to represent why junevile actions of the powers that be cant be trusted. Short term gain with long term consequences is a constant theme throughout the story, showing how silicon AI industries will only think about shipping product and demonstration advertisement. The mismangement of resources and instensifying of collapse in this case is clearly touching on concerns of AI recently, be it self driving cars or industry wide diminishment of labor. Yet it also reminds me of how this seeming inevitable collapses connects to the synergisms between corporate and government incompetence to. For instance the energy crises connected to global politics, wherein petrol is still made nessecary as a continuous short term decision at the expense of long term climate issues, creating a nasty feedback loop of having to reinvest in the industry that's hurting us. In this sense this is one last effort I have to commend the story and its worldbuilding for: Portraying Empire as fallible. Disaster strikes first in America and Britain, contrary to what people expect. For those of us still slumbering through this recognition, we were shaken awake during covid to just how broken these systems are. Apocalypse maintained itself in the form of the pandemic in these two Empires and here the same is shown. In spite of the GDP, both of these countries have particularly weak logistical infrastructures and not a serious form of internal defense preperation, so the hubris is met in change.

I recognize how intense what I've covered is, but it really goes to show just how well the worldbuilding in A Phone Found in Tall Grass works. One of the best ways this is achived is via the use of images. The memes and photography from our central cast gives humor and presence to their voices, and allows their agency to shine through. This is an aspect that this sites lack creates a more stuffy and cynical atmosphere, despite our best intentions it can make us all come off more humorless and petty having to link in image attachments from off site (Risking a tangent here, this is one of the other reasons I dropped the beforementioned project, it starts to feel like empty air when you don't have any integrated visual medium to work with. Which is also why I've tapered off how many of these I write in the past year and why among other reasons I struggle to value this website as a platform for meaningful discourse and connection. Instead I use this place to push urgent recommendations to peoples feed while I construct a blogging space elsewhere.). This is all been represented by a more discreet member of this site. While I don't want to focus on this too much out of a passing respect to the artist's privacy, part of the benign accuracy of the story comes from a deep and personal understanding of both how people can exist on the margins of joy within popular culture, but also how the often juttering multiplicity of 'internet clout' affects somebodies relative experiences. In some ways its spontaneous but in others its pure numbers. Being in different spaces by design makes you aware of different forms of popularity and how they can effect you. One aspect that suprised me that shows this is that this isn't even Niandra's first interactive work because of how little they bring attention to it.

Despite this humbleness I have to be honest and say that on the level of writing, this is probably my favourite work I've played that has come out this year. It's deft and graceful in avoiding the traps of allegory or mere imitation, A Phone Found in Tall Grass operates as a salve to remember what we have and what we use the internet for, to relax, laugh, and share our struggles somewhere for the world to see.

I also reccomend the much more short thought piece about internet solidarity and its potential historical uniservalism in Vanitas (2023) and if you're interested in what I was musing about energy politics, the game Half-Earth Socialism (2022) which imagines an escape from this cycle towards collapse.