Labryinth Companion

Bear with me, because this is going to sound unusually disrespectful and pretentious.

So C.H.A.I.N. is a compilation of small indie/alternative games made under the premises laid out, as a way to display the creative abilities within this indie margin. I have friends who I've met from this general itchio punk space, so I have no issue with that. The issue I have is with the premise itself. As put on the page for the download:

"The developers couldn't communicate with
each other during development. Each
developer would send their game to the next
person in line, who would make a follow-up.

Together they form a complete narrative."

While on the surface this seems novel and a great way to display the artistic talents of many people from this fuzzy grouping of an indie horror scene, I think in most ways its to the contrary of the goals of displaying a good vision. For one its, worth keeping in mind that this process of 'compendiums of a variety of talent with one conciet keeping it going is not new: In particular, film has been doing this for quite a few decades now.

See, before they were almost entirely fazed out and before the internet became the congealed pastry factory of retention exploitation and algorithms of appeal, the only way you could find out about indie directors was either talking to the VHS rental store clerk, browsing the back catalogue and winging it, or watching one of these. You have probably heard some of these in passing, ABC's of Death (2012) is a fairly popular one, and came at the tail end of the time of its productive nessecity. Hell famous directors you probably love like David Lynch has engaged in a couple of these. Almost every famous director that isn't a complete sellout has at least one of these credits way down on the listing of their directorial credits pages, 'cause nobody watches them. Just to name his inclusions: Lumière and Company (1995) which is an attempt by various directors to make a film with the contraints of the original Lumiere brothers, To Each His Own Cinema showing each directors feelings on cinema, and 42 One Dream Rush (2010) which shows a dream vision by each director. C.H.A.I.N. mostly resembles the approach of that last one, but only in that both are incredibly nauseating and innaccurate facsimiles of the dream experience as a scaffolding.

Yup, what I'm getting at is not that these films are hidden gems, on the contrary these bundle compliation films are delirious and unwatchable. Not a swanky, barbaric, Godard way but in a watching somebody flip through the channels endlessly when you dont have the remote way. These films are frusterating, trite, and ultimately stooped in pretentions to the point that the whole project becomes this sludge. Yes you can watch these, identify a short you like, and possibly even find a filmmaker you like through that process but its far from the optimal heuristic. If you dont believe me you're free to watch them and find out this reality for yourself. These are the discounted films in the back of the rental store for a reason: Nobody likes them.

And yet how prolific they are especially in the horror genre goes almost without need to mention. Horror comes in various forms, but for the most part they work well for the short format because they take on a similar quality to suspense that a roller coaster does, theres this edging of suspense on what's going to happen followed by an adrenaline rush of emotions to do the tasks that get you off the ride. Horror is also popular and easy to make for this same reason: You don't need that many mechanics to scare people, you just need a well timed scare. In Slenderman you just need to collect 8 pages, in Five Nights at Freddies you just have to watch screens and close doors. So it makes sense considering all the productive forces that horror, regardless of medium. would be subject to this splicing format. The issue is that eventually this sewer flood gets in the way of actually finding the niche works, it becomes a common heuristic and production model that even your VHS clerk has to now watch this to make headway.

That brings us to the point I'm trying to get at here, the VHS stores are no more. Technology has moved on. Databases and curators have come by to try and organize this art. Game Jams exist as a portal through which people can peer into separated creative approaches to a theme. This makes this specific approach a little outdated now which is not a problem in itself beyond the fact that the 'sludginess' of its lack of effectiveness remains. That being said, there is one way in which I do worry that this authorial splicing is causing problems: AI.

AI is a fairly hefty political topic at the moment. It has sent some people into a technophobic spiral, given others a reference point to dust off the Grundisse and tweeX about it, mobilized labor movements, caused copyright debates, etc. My favourite 2 reference points for thinking about AI in relation to the arts is in the videos a lukewarm defense of that stupid ai video by N0thanky0u where he says 'none of this is actually about AI, this is about art as property' and the massive critique into the subject by Jimmy McGee called The AI Revolution is Rotten to the Core in which he busts through the many myths of AI in relationship to labor, promoting the latter over the former. The reason I'm bringing this up is that I believe this sort of splicing approach is deadly similar to AI art, whether it be the hackneyed boring gimmick that is AI Dungeon, or AI art models, or that AI shitpost account etc. While they do have some niche uses on a technical angle, AI art on its own terms lacks both a sense of overall meaning, intention, and voice. This is also true here, you have a multiplicity of voice as trying to guide the next one, similar to how an AI script functions, but because they dont know the entirety of the project they can't keep a cohesive narrative. There's an argument to be made that somber surreal horror is more effective by not having this, that the kaleidoscopic effect is worth it. I would gently nudge at the well thought out art of Pablo Picasso and the animations of David Firth's Sock series as a counter argument. A defense of surrealism doesn't work for me here. Instead I find this specific approach to be spreading a germ that merely splicing the work of other people and following some nonsense narrative is enjoyable entertainment in itself. One that allows for an endless demiurge of indecipherable sludge. It's not the intellectual property that matters here, any form of property that isnt personal shouldn't exist in the first place, its more so that eventually so much of stuff like this will flood out the independent voices we are trying to seek.

Towards the end of the collection, a specific repetition started to emerge, where instead of building a journey from one world to the next, the process would repeat a series of games that were 'find pages in area and run away from monsters' several times in a row. This doesn't amuse me, it just makes me think of how many people find the AI Dungeon looping words funny and not being bothered by it. These AI programs don't know how to keep track of previous data and build on it in a satisfying way, they just spit out a highly aggregated collection of data of other peoples work. I find the fact that the authors of each game werent allowed to know any game but the one prior to imitating that same productive lack of memory to build an understandable story. Just as AI algorithms also include amateur or 'bad' art, here to we run into that same problem: hThere are some entries of the series I think work perfectly fine, but taken as a whole I can't look at the project in any way other than as a hideous slop sullying and constraining the talents of others from properly emitting a voice. While the intentions to display the work of others is ultimately good, I think this approach does anything but at this stage. This is an absolute blight on this medium in a way that is best to exist but nonetheless should not be repeated. Luckily the PS1 Demo Disc collection, being an interactable museum of Demos with no expectations or restrictions counteracts this approach.

I want to end this on a positive note though so I'll share some cautiously optimistic thoughts. Recently a very famous writers union strike succeeded in america, people may not know the exact details going on there, but basically the writers succeeded not only in protecting their jobs against AI dominion, they also protected the Writers room in the process. The Writer's room is where a lot of writers come together and hash out the script of the TV show or movie instead of forcing the whole process on 1 guy and an AI like Igor and his sycophantic zombies were inching towards. Writers rooms help everyone contribute to and understand a larger vision of the project, and while I would hardly call the analysis I've edited and discussed with others to be a 'writers room'. However, the experiences of reaching out to people to help hash out the deal of my infamous Vampire Survivors post the titan that it was. As a result, I'm very sympathetic to the idea that the best way to realize a vision is to talk it through and get ideas from your peers, and while I think I do have enough of a knowledge base to still contribute individually, the persistent and targeted alienation, harassment, and ostracization from this writing community lowered my desire to contribute actively, it made me understand that struggle of atomization all the more. I'm building those bridges up again in spite of that, and I think unless people want to isolate their personalities, it's worth doing so as well. By the same token, I'd love to see games made in writers rooms in the indie space, which are actually proud to admit that. I would love to see a collective vision that is well realized or at least one that is able to stand on its own and speak its own fantasies and worries into the world with a narrative where everyone understood what was roughly happening from beginning to end. That aside, I think fans should try and dodge these loosely entertaining forms of authorial splicing as advertisement. Nobody bought into them in the film era, we certainly shouldn't now. For my part, I'm not planning on playing C.H.A.I.N.E.D. or whatever series of games in this 'theme' follows.