Suprise Forest Encounter!
Man or Muppet (2021) is a great performance on how certain forms of nostalgia and memory weave as associations within the contemporary mind. First you have a problem, in this case the feeling that your identity is fragmented from people excluding you based on your body. Then you reach through the mind to find various media reference points to associate that to. I feel like this is worth stating boldly because even in other essay games that I do like, the sincerity of this form of memory is fairly uncommon, at best the form will be presented as mundane and then in the last moment revelatory which can wear out as a trope especially in a digital world of clickbait and 'revealing'. I praised the admittedly quite weepy and sordid He Fucked the Girl Out of Me (2022) for touching on this concept of 'unpacking' a memory through referentiality before, yet obviously the contexts between both games are a bit different. This is about the abstraction of a problem and its representation in media experiences, rather than a pure biopic on media itself as you might see in see Crime Life Crime Wave (2021). Describing the trans alienation through pastiche successfully defines the space of the problem being worked through.
On a more technical note, HotelBones was really clever in utilizing video as an interactive overlay to rifle through here. You can choose to stick around with the muppets during certain moments in the essay for as long as you like, thereby inverting one of the main dissonances within narrative driven gaming. To illustrate if I'm playing a game and have control over the movement of my character I can simply choose to not move for a long amount of time and thereby break the immersion if even so slightly. Here, the 'character' is just a thought abstraction you're piloting. Instead the desire to linger is shown as meditational. These videos are all equally situated as cultural memories, some wonderful and others awful, but all in reference to the main point.
There's a specific hard to articulate aura about this. It's the plunderphonics stream of conciousness. To explain what I mean, allow me a small anecdote. I spoke to the creator once before about how I have 'Glover Circus level 1 brain' and her immediate response was that it was an awesome metaphor and she would love to play a game about that, an urge to represent that which would be strange to anybody else just 'makes sense' to people who immerse themselves in this style of thinking. The disorders of life are immediately understood through analogue reference and I think we are often trying to hard to avoid how often our minds really are like this because it would freak us out. Yet, if this project shows anything aside from its central thesis, it's that embracing this weird part of our brain that compresses the media we overconsume into reference points is maybe what we should be doing instead. Like yeah the game is good and I agree with it, but there's a profound form of bohemianism I find here that is worth putting a spotlight on.
As I see it you have 3 primary interactive psychological 'bohemian' relationships with games.
1. 'Hatemusement' where you interact through often 'enraged' amusement and confusion (Puzzle game frustrations, The Angry Nintendo Nerd)
2. The observational and rather clinical approach thoroughness of a work in itself (LP Archives, Matthewmatosis and his clones, most long posts people like on BL)
3. The sentimentalist approach that sees art in terms of profound immersion that is trying to get you to enjoy it.
1 and 2 are spoken for, and are to a large extent most of what gaming culture is dominated by, but the niche scene artists like HotelBones and Bagenzo are working from, speak for this much more faint relationship to gaming and art in general. As an internal memory wistfulness. I'm not the best at speaking towards it myself, in part because I think text is actually too limited a form to do it successfully. For instance I've attempted it in my Pagan: Autogeny post, which while I'm not fully unhappy with feels much too much like a 'one off' for me to adopt as much as I like just yet, I feel too 'anecdotal' doing it at the moment. That said I see a lot to love in the sentimentalist approach to art and feel a deeply passive sense of endearment and love of media from others that do perform it. As I feel my memories fragmenting and falling into disarray, wartorn by overindulgence in disparate media and failed attempts at community the candidness of these pieces and how they work keep me anchored at bay from feeling that its all totally useless ^-^
Also this is a great if you're furry or furry adjacent because it exposes that human bodies are disturbing to begin with fundamentally. I'm down with that. If it was up to me we would probably all be covered in fur I'm ngl.
Man or Muppet (2021) is a great performance on how certain forms of nostalgia and memory weave as associations within the contemporary mind. First you have a problem, in this case the feeling that your identity is fragmented from people excluding you based on your body. Then you reach through the mind to find various media reference points to associate that to. I feel like this is worth stating boldly because even in other essay games that I do like, the sincerity of this form of memory is fairly uncommon, at best the form will be presented as mundane and then in the last moment revelatory which can wear out as a trope especially in a digital world of clickbait and 'revealing'. I praised the admittedly quite weepy and sordid He Fucked the Girl Out of Me (2022) for touching on this concept of 'unpacking' a memory through referentiality before, yet obviously the contexts between both games are a bit different. This is about the abstraction of a problem and its representation in media experiences, rather than a pure biopic on media itself as you might see in see Crime Life Crime Wave (2021). Describing the trans alienation through pastiche successfully defines the space of the problem being worked through.
On a more technical note, HotelBones was really clever in utilizing video as an interactive overlay to rifle through here. You can choose to stick around with the muppets during certain moments in the essay for as long as you like, thereby inverting one of the main dissonances within narrative driven gaming. To illustrate if I'm playing a game and have control over the movement of my character I can simply choose to not move for a long amount of time and thereby break the immersion if even so slightly. Here, the 'character' is just a thought abstraction you're piloting. Instead the desire to linger is shown as meditational. These videos are all equally situated as cultural memories, some wonderful and others awful, but all in reference to the main point.
There's a specific hard to articulate aura about this. It's the plunderphonics stream of conciousness. To explain what I mean, allow me a small anecdote. I spoke to the creator once before about how I have 'Glover Circus level 1 brain' and her immediate response was that it was an awesome metaphor and she would love to play a game about that, an urge to represent that which would be strange to anybody else just 'makes sense' to people who immerse themselves in this style of thinking. The disorders of life are immediately understood through analogue reference and I think we are often trying to hard to avoid how often our minds really are like this because it would freak us out. Yet, if this project shows anything aside from its central thesis, it's that embracing this weird part of our brain that compresses the media we overconsume into reference points is maybe what we should be doing instead. Like yeah the game is good and I agree with it, but there's a profound form of bohemianism I find here that is worth putting a spotlight on.
As I see it you have 3 primary interactive psychological 'bohemian' relationships with games.
1. 'Hatemusement' where you interact through often 'enraged' amusement and confusion (Puzzle game frustrations, The Angry Nintendo Nerd)
2. The observational and rather clinical approach thoroughness of a work in itself (LP Archives, Matthewmatosis and his clones, most long posts people like on BL)
3. The sentimentalist approach that sees art in terms of profound immersion that is trying to get you to enjoy it.
1 and 2 are spoken for, and are to a large extent most of what gaming culture is dominated by, but the niche scene artists like HotelBones and Bagenzo are working from, speak for this much more faint relationship to gaming and art in general. As an internal memory wistfulness. I'm not the best at speaking towards it myself, in part because I think text is actually too limited a form to do it successfully. For instance I've attempted it in my Pagan: Autogeny post, which while I'm not fully unhappy with feels much too much like a 'one off' for me to adopt as much as I like just yet, I feel too 'anecdotal' doing it at the moment. That said I see a lot to love in the sentimentalist approach to art and feel a deeply passive sense of endearment and love of media from others that do perform it. As I feel my memories fragmenting and falling into disarray, wartorn by overindulgence in disparate media and failed attempts at community the candidness of these pieces and how they work keep me anchored at bay from feeling that its all totally useless ^-^
Also this is a great if you're furry or furry adjacent because it exposes that human bodies are disturbing to begin with fundamentally. I'm down with that. If it was up to me we would probably all be covered in fur I'm ngl.
Reviewed on May 23, 2023
4 Comments
Bump
a nicely wrapped writeup from you!! i find myself relating more and more to your third description of relationships with gaming, and happy to know i share my similar experiences of memory with others ^^
Thanks @01156 ^-^
Erato_Heti
10 months ago