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Erato_Heti

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Erato/

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Erato_Heti

Completed

again

CN: Discussions of Queerphobia, Popularity Investigations

Est. Reading Time 20 mins,

But Dont Worry, I Brought Some Tunes this Time :D
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This is very similar in tone and style to I Die A Lovely Life and that's not by accident. Apparently they are both 2 lesbian VN's that were submitted through an obscure preference competition called VN Cup. Shoutout to the wonderful Blood Machine for illuminating this, she's more lovely than an entire wife some days. I should state for those looking for a summary that this VN is absolutely worth giving a try as it's cute and tackles a lot of really messy ideas about the complexities of social functions in an honest and romantic way. It's not however immediately unique or nuanced and so, knowing me, I simply must get into this more specifically.

Getting Popular

This is a kinetic VN about the day in the life of a depressed 10th grader named Miya, going to an awful disciplinarily obscurantist high school and the constant navigation of the 'high school' social relations within. Miya starts by just wanting to cling to her friend Hina and make it through high school. There's a character conflict between her and her friend who, obsessed with the idea of seeing the fictions of her high school's popularity dynamics as a reflection of the real world, is constantly obsessed with trying to instill onto Miya the idea that she is breaking with community and that maybe it's not so good an idea to be an outsider.

Hina is wrong obviously, her perception of adulthood and fitting in is dramatically poser and desperate, but comes out of a genuine sense of alienation with the world. Popularity is an awful psychological power imposition, not just for those that are popular but for everyone. High school represents something that not even social media itself has resolved (and is often something that disparagingly gets both caught in reference to each other): That of the disparity between local popularity, and power. In order to understand the dysfunctional aspect of what makes this trope of 'fitting in' so actually thrilling I feel some aspect needs to be given to this funhouse mirror between popularity and power. This discursion will take a bit, so let's do something a little fun here! I will keep the theorists, academic citations and philosophers out of it this time. Sorry Foucault, you'd probably be useful here but I think there's something entertaining in trying to build all this on simple observational logics and massively appealing reference points.

Fool's Power

In particular there's a cognitive dissonance here, one that I think a lot of people do miss, popular people don't control you and the only arbiter of their popularity is how long they were able to maintain the conventions of a social script before slipping. I mentioned in my Backloggd Systems Analysis write up that

"The first thing cis people do to keep queer people in line is through fame resentment. They assess the amount of 'clout' somebody has and says 'thats too much clout' they use the instruments of success against us."

There's no question that popularity and charisma don upon somebody a certain level of power and control within smaller systems. However, it's not a hard power. To use the text for a moment the popular kid at school here, Sara, is sadly not going to have any agency in changing how, for example, stupid the dress code at her school is (nor did any of us when we went to school). In the same way the most 'popular' celebrity has some soft power but no stand up comedian is through comedy going to be able to affect the policies of their country. Such hard power is found not through popularity but through money and specific connections. Put this way it's actually a bit of a fool's power, especially if we think about it in terms of extremes. When rich people obsess with the idea of being just as famous as their hard power reflects they often end up looking like fools. Popularity is quite frankly a fools power because at a certain point it makes sense to take what you've gained from your public face and hide behind the curtain only to come out again at specific times.

In other words social capital, as it's often phrased, does not actually care about how much some conglomerate of people likes you, but how much people with access to wealth and/or control do. In that sense the power of popularity is actually an idiotic collective sensational power in how incredibly suboptimal that 'build' is. Wanting to be popular is in itself a markedly hilarious and absurd task in the same way playing an Action RPG game as a pugilist for example would be.

As it is right now, there's too many people in the world to sift through them all meaningfully in almost any community system schools have thousands of students, websites have hundreds of thousands of users, etc. It would make much more sense, rationally, to gain and maintain the favor of relatively well off actors and then ignore the opinions of the public afterwards. That said, they often disguise their wealth in a system by design. So there is an initial rationality to wanting to at least not be unpopular (especially for avoiding scorn), but not after a certain point, especially if that wealth and information access function has already been maintained. For me those metrics have been filled, but I still write almost in opposition to this fact more. We can't fully know why we do the things we do but I don't think this fact is out of some marked insecurity I have that others don't. When I call fame a 'fools power' I don't do it disparagingly. Fame fulfills a drive of knowing you are a satisfying person to interface with on a massive level. It's a foolish drive but in the same way a literal town fool, jester, clown, stand up comedian, 'youtuber' etc. is. There's something intensely satisfying for some people in knowing they are continuing to be massively appealing and socially useful to anonymous/random listeners. It's so satisfying that such a desire can actually fulfill out more private life in being able to display our public thoughts to those who love us with a marked and specific pride. There's a selflessness to it that can be deeply satisfying to perform.

Popularity Mechanics

In the same way popularity is not a cynically selfish act. Nor is it true that authentic popularity is something that is ordained by any cynically clear metric of charm. Instead, it's a disparity in attention that is simply thrust upon people based on 2 main factors of assessment:

1. Affability: How friendly or generally iconic someone is within a social system

2. Passivity: How long a person has gone without engaging in disruptive behavior

Here's the kicker: Passivity matters far more than Affability to Fame. After all, most people by the results of their own idiosyncrasies and ways of speaking are affable. Even if somebody is the most boring person in the world there's something about the deep uniqueness of human speech that pulls somebody to seem worthwhile. Put another way most of us aren't really that picky, for most people everyone is charming enough not to be bothered by I think especially if keeping company with supposedly 'boring' people means access to certain levels of observation or not. It doesn't take anything linear to maintain charm on an individual or mass level. Sometimes there's simply a mesmerization you build with the understanding of a speaker over time that stops the need for affability to be fulfilled.

Meanwhile passivity is a much easier thing to assess. Are there any examples of violent tendencies, has the person done anything emotionally disturbing recently, are there any abberently alienating character traits that have earned the speaker has some resentment. Often these questions have much more clear answers, for example anybody in high school who got caught up or had a friend caught up in an emotional outburst in class knows that this has probably decided your fate for popularity. If you get in a fight in school, as this text suggests, that pretty much dooms not just your ability to be popular but how much scorn you're going to catch in passing.

It's especially this perception of 'scorn' for the unpopular that causes feelings of resentment over the disparity in power. This is one reason I tend to believe it genuinely makes more sense to let queer people have this 'idiot power' because our entire history has been marked by scorn, meaning that we should be able to more easily assess when things have gone too far and try to do something about it. So far this has proven to be the case in my life. Queer people are much quicker to own up to indiscretions than most straight cis friends I've known who would rather hold onto grudges for years.

The Progression of Sitcoms

Okay, now with all the mechanics of the social constructs that make up popularity have been assessed. I have a question for you: How do popularity metrics deal now with the issue of both the actions of queerness and the actions of queerphobia as almost equally disruptive to popularity? It's easy to reduce this question to a simple holistic answer that probably needs more clarity, so to illustrate what I'm actually asking here, let's get out of the realm of thinking about social media and high school for a second. Let's think about sitcoms.

Sitcoms are unarguably the public metric for assessing popular thought as it combines humor and social norms for the purposes of a mass (TV) audience. TV sitcoms have dominated TV since its inception, with the only meaningful competitor being celebrity host entertainment shows for, I hope, much more obvious reasons. Popularity here is able to be assessed on actual terms, retention numbers and approval ratings. Well all that aside I want to make a sort of unusual point here: Since homosexuality has been tentatively accepted over time, you can see the desire not to be disruptive reflected in how sitcoms portray 'taboo' love. Lets take three separate reference clips from popular sitcoms to see what this looks like:

All in the Family Judging Books by Covers (1971) That Fairy! (Warning, F Slur dropped) is denial and suspicion of homosexuality, and instead of the family protesting on the grounds that queerness doesn't matter they instead protest that its unfair to clock that over stuff like glasses. Of course Archie gets commuppence for this from finding out his football friend is gay, but he's still given room to deny.

Seinfeld Season 4 "The Outing" (1992-93) 'Not That There Is Anything Wrong With That' is Cautious normalizing of homosexuality, but still making it the butt out of it for a joke.

Rick and Morty Season 2, Auto Erotic Assimilation (2015) Morty Dating Unity depicts a liberated Pansexuality on Rick's part and doesn't make the relationship dynamic the butt of a joke. In fact, the episode takes the relationship extremely seriously beyond their relationship dynamic as 'inherently problematic' on any terms for Rick.

For all the people ready to protest a lousy metanarrative when you see one let me do that bit for you. This is not a completely stable narrative of sexual acceptance in conventional audiences by any means, there's blatant homophobia in popular shows like Friends and Big Bang Theory, but those shows are generally treated with less critical acceptance over time in a way where reruns of most of these shows are treated with generally more Timelessness. If I told somebody that Seinfeld still has a somewhat regressive approach to homosexuality I would be catching flack from a critical audience receptive to a conversation. Not to say people who watch Big Bang Theory and enjoy it are bad people, but they don't approach their own entertainment with that same degree of indispensability. It's trash TV in the same way Disney Sitcom's like A Dog With a Blog and That's So Raven were for many of the people who are reading this. There's no sense that memories or iconic moments matter much with these sitcoms, its something thats just on. More importantly though, you can refer to [How Sitcoms Handled Homos in the 70s and 80s]
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpuJb9MnZDE) for a more in depth explanation of that argument of the slow 'voicing' of queer people (special thanks to John Harrelson for this).

So at least a little libertine sexual acceptance is now normalized as not deeply disruptive. In fact if we think about the popularity and success of Rick and Morty as a whole for a moment, the degree of acceptable disruptions for a population in the convention sense is now pretty high, most fans don't care much about positive role models in the way they used to. A lot of the issues around R&M are instead about a sense of dissatisfaction with the overall narrative, disrupting through cliffhangers and unresolved conflicts. So this is another point worth noting here what is disruptive depends on what audience you're talking to. Disruption depends at least in part on teasing at an edge with the benefits often being to keep out people who wouldn't care for the message in the 1st place. So how is queerness vs. queerphobia balanced? It decides ultimately on what audience you're writing towards. There's a lot of queers nowadays and they tend to care about indepensibility in their entertainment, so if you plan to write something indispensable you have to plan your statement in respect to us and the people that ally with us (to a certain extent). When I was young in my time and place, high school was hostile to LGBT people, the word gay (derogatory) was thrown around like it didn't matter. Now, people are realizing they can't become the top kid by being a queerphobe, its caused a 2nd round of considerations on this.

Back to Saying 'Good Morning'

So while we have some basic understanding now of that the plot of Good Morning and thereby its central conflict, how it does reflect a genuine concern in our everyday lives. The followup question is how does it resolve it? Well these social repressions of both queerness and queerphobia leave everyone in a really weird place of fundamentally not know if any action they take should be queerphobic or queer accepting, nor what people up the social chain think. This is again why having queer people up that social chain that are out matters, it sets social precedent. However this confusion on the ambiguity of a statement on sexuality as supportive or diminishing is the point that Good Morning I am interested in exploring. The protagonist is ruthlessly depressed and trapped in her own head with feeding thoughts of self loathing but none of them are about being a repressed lesbian, the person who teases this idea is her friend Hina but the idea she is a lesbian doesn't even enter her head. While there are a lot of stories of queerness that focus on the idea that people instinctively always knew even on a subconscious level, that's actually far from the norm. For example, I'm a trans woman, but in middle school the idea I might 'be a girl' or 'be gay, bi, etc.' were not even considered. Not because I hated or liked gay or trans people but because the matter just never came up. Nowadays everyone knows about gay pride, sexuality, trans identity, etc. at those ages, so there's a lot more ironic conversations where you have somebody teasing that you might be a certain way. The reality is that confusion on unexplored desire always starts out in at least a somewhat ironic fashion because you're considering something that your present consciousness never even considered. It's by design funny. In the same way it would be funny if I sat down with somebody before I started writing about 'videogames' and I fantasized with them about the idea I'd be good at it. I'd likely give it some thought before discarding it, there's an irony in considering the unexplored in that way.

That being said, the issue in queerphobic societies is that there's a deep uncertainty in what the purpose of the ironic questioning is. Hina actually does have a fujoshish supportive side, but she's also a clout chaser and poser that's interested in social climbing. There's a double meaning in her support and suspicious parties of any kind are always nervous of that double meaning. This is something that a lot of great high school fiction actually explores, is the ambiguity of intended actions. As you dwell in adulthood there's a sense that you're supposed to know your own intentions pretty well and act with 'good faith'. This expectation is often stifling and deeply reductive of the double meanings in life, but unfortunately when those double meanings of decisions are explored by adult characters in a fiction they are often seen as immature. Young Adult oriented fiction imagines a more fluid world of double meanings where there is not some clean easy ideology to satisfy a sensibility for desires and intent. Not only does Good Morning agree, but it also sees a case to be made that sometimes the best way forward is to sacrifice on the altar seemingly poor intentions and to forgive them after the fact.

What I mean by this is found in the genuinely romantic and loving ending in the text of Good Morning which I don't want to spoil to you. However it would be terribly unsatisfying to end this on such a blunt so allow me one further saccharine abstraction.

All Apologies

A lot of people make mistakes by letting the nastier part of their double meanings disrupt the communities they are in. I'm one of those people in this space. The fact of the matter is I don't think I'm some linearly good or bad person, that's not what really matters. What matters is that the only way I was able to bond and get closer to the people I was upsetting, was by first having upset them more. Not out of active malice of course in my case, it's the side effect of a double meaning I wasn't aware that my bitter impulses got in the way of. With that said apologies and caring for those you've hurt as a form of connection is important and often the only way to do that is to actually fuck up when trying to be vulnerable.

The failure to perform graceful vulnerability is a vital piece that keeps our humility in check. There is a salvation in everyone where recognizing the infliction of wounded emotions and spirits has to be found often through wounding them before things can settle and rebind. Miya had to pass out from Sara, who felt tricked, to freak out on her and cause her to faint. The good ending would never have happened if it wasn't for this failure to share vulnerabilities. This is not to justify poor behavior or imply that it should happen again, or that people should active upset those they care about through pushing their buttons, but buttons will be pushed and often they need to be in order for a closer understanding to happen. The question might be out for whether Hina gets salvation at the end of the story, it ultimately depends on how resistant she is. The reality though is that the text was smart to leave this upon a number of other concerns open ended. It begs the player to genuinely consider the ambiguity of Hina's actions and the complexities of queerphobia and discontent, of whether they would. I don't know how to deal with these double meanings and the reality is you probably don't know fully either. This is absolutely why we should not let this art shroud in the misery of being a shitty high school traumafiction. Behind every authentic action is a web of tormented self interests. How we decide to navigate that comes down in part to what fictions we consume and consider, I think that this is a really damn good one for doing that.

I want to thank you both, Detchibe and Appreciations seperately, for the hand of forgiveness here in allowing reconciliation through a series of disturbances. I want to make clear that this was 2 distinct apologies on 2 seperate matters that intertwined so I'm not bundling them in with each other. With that noted, I recognize we probably won't truly get along in the long term because I'm certainly an unpopular (or at least infamous) figure, it's also quite possible I alienate this shared audience in general to the point of unreadability, and if so no hard feelings there (I've gained enough popularity elsewhere in a different niche not to be too crushed). However, I do hope that this reflects a graceful vulnerability even in spite of the potential 'double meanings' that could cloud the intention of a post like this. As also if the day should come I hope to find a graceful way to leave both of your presences with respect as well. If it puts yall at ease, knowing that you've both accepted my apology has allowed me to not consciously dwell too heavily on this. This came out just through a close pontification of the narrative here in and I've certainly made my post 'disposable' by confronting this vector of it in this way. I feel a lot of guilt over my words, not just the deleted ones but all of them, I fear the double meaning in them all. There is an inherent guilt and insecurity in utterance itself for me, I'm always thinking of ways I can be misconstrued so when I inevitably am, it feels like a deep personal failure that can be hard to vault back out of, all of my sense of pride drops out from under me and I often go into either an 'overcorrection' or 'vindication' mode. I could have just looked past both of you in a frenzy for fame as I truly didn't know either of you well but it wasn't about that. I really do care how I consider and display the thoughts of others, to look past the cynical part of the double meaning, especially for other queers, should be a #1 consideration. This isn't really about me though I know that if I'm dealing with this stuff than by golly others damn sure are. The only way out is through but perhaps this functions as some guiding light for those worn down.

The fact is I'm an adult and I made these mistakes, it would be foolish to think that its an issue of personal immaturity. Seen the internet lately? No matter how much people disparage 'high school drama' a lot of us still get caught up in the functions of it. It really is drama, an illusion on the wall of how we view popularity vs. what we obtain from it. We get caught feuding over sandcastles, defending ourselves as emperors, as the waves slap up and erode the show back into the absurd squabble it is. With that said there is a lesson to be learned after everyone packs up the beach umbrellas and returns home. It would be a shame to miss it in passing by this VN.

Plus, the art style looks great :3

P.S. Me and Detchibe are unfortunately no longer in friendly contact due to the immense pressure of ongoing disagreements over Public Relations, but I still stand by what I said at the time as a historical moment of compassion. Me and Appreciations are closer than ever and has made it all worth it in the end c;

13 Likes

Open review

Pokémon Black & Blue

2012

Erato_Heti

Completed

Accompaniment Song I Guess

The leading opinion on why PETA's digital satire projects are terrible focus primarily on both the intensity of the argument, and thereby the vindictiveness the satire has towards its target. The charge on the first claim primarily focuses on how ridiculous it is to put depictions of animal cruelty in a game franchise this cute, both for the digital representations and its real life animals. I find this preposterous and unfair. Most upset would probably find the premise funny if it was presented mainly as comedic in the same way plenty of newgrounds satires of mario in extreme violence against the koopas is seen as funny. Or the violent reinterpretation of Back to the Future in Rick & Morty is seen as funny. Hell people were playing that edgelord crap Cards Against Humanity openly at my old community college years ago, we are not nearly as sensitive as we make ourselves out to be.

You might be saying 'the digital blood, needles, and skinning doesn't bother me, it's the slaughterhouse videos!'. Well, even though their more brutal documentation videos are edited only to show you the worst parts, no doubt about it, that animal cruelty did happen somewhere and there is a point in raising awareness about how unregulated the meat market tends to be in the sense of warning people it can lead to this. Upton Sinclair's great socialist critique The Jungle got utilized as as a call for sanitation, ie regulation of that market for the interests of the common people. Recently I wrote about multiple meanings and how they are awful, but this is a very clear example to me of how double meanings can actually have a positive effect. In a post-covid world it would be nonsensical to care about the wellbeing and leisure of working class people but also believe that sanitation is a corruption. Anyway moving from a point of humor to a sudden sentimental moment happens all the time in art, hell its a volatility that Undertale is built entirely off of.

The 2nd claim is that it makes for mean spirited satire. I agree completely here. In this one, for example, they reinterpret Ash Ketchum as a vindictive asshole who only desires to keep pikachu in a poke ball despite the show itself speaking heavily to the opposite and all of the trainers as acting maliciously. In their previously outsourced title Mario Kills Tanooki (2011) they depict the world of mario as a world of hate. There's also an irony in there work that in order to change the minds of people you have to shock, upset, or even fight them first. There's no case where in the pokemon satires you solve a problem in advance purely through a non-violent discussion when even in Pokemon itself this does sometimes actually happen, you dont have to fight the shop keeper to buy items, and the pokemon center is free. However just because I agree that this is a mean spirited satire which misses the appeal doesn't mean that I think robs a narrative tale of its impact. A racing title I haven't discussed yet is The Zoo Race (2007). An utterly repugnant work of christian nationalism where every level ends with flags and humans have been warped against their wills in a hollow desert race. This 'satire' of racing games mainly exists for the purposes of appealing to the player to jesus and the story of Noah. Make no mistake its also very mean spirited, the very conceit of it is mean spirited. Yet in its ignorance and cruelty I found myself so distressed and nauseated I actually ended up enjoying the piece in an esoteric way. The ignorance and the fact it so effectively represented a message opposite from the one it was trying very clearly to convey made it endearing in a sort of fucked up way. I think people actually have a sense of appeal here to because of the love for 'so bad its good' films like The Room (2003) or the work of Niel Breen. Or hell even christian films themselves already bring this unique lust and love, and so to give a work a low appreciation only for the crime of ignorance is silly when you regard that.

No, what makes the PETA satires poor are much more specific. For one, all of their oeuvre is outsourced. The person behind the pokemon satires is not the same person who worked on Kitten Squad. PETA is just a publisher, and while the devs are probably sympathetic to the organizations' messaging that publisher relationship means their relationship is far more hands off in terms of talent. Implying that nobody within the organization proper has the ability to put something like this together or make development input, making them come off incredibly out of touch when you work through the works published under them, being ancillary to your own message is lame. Furthermore, there's a bite missing how agency is applied. Without jumping around from each too much, in the Pokemon satires, the pokemon do not have a voice of their own, there is still a prompt that asks the player what they think the names of the liberated characters should be. The player actually has too much autonomy and power across their entire work, they choose the names and the fights are always terribly easy. The conflicts are nonexistent, it's just a way to get from one moral message to the next.

What's my point here, why am I even talking about this? Well this is the endpoint of giving the player too much agency in their seamless experience and applying no friction beyond your moral 'arguments' that could have just been posted in a blog post like this. You died? It's ok we had a checkpoint autosaved for you because we really wanted you to see that message. These satires are completely lame and disposable, they are frictionless and don't test the player at all. However this is just the norm really, stories that preach at the player endlessly is the endpoint of 'gaming' if the friction of an experience is not centered in any way. If the only friction found is in a series of literally skippable cutscenes then whats the point? I shouldn't be able to skip your own message, literally take the skip cutscene button away from me, at least that some friction. I think less of your piece if you don't do this. There are so many AAA titles that are just Pokémon Black & Blue, to a tee but it's fine, and I guess you could say that that trickles down into how everyone else makes their titles frictionless. Anyway I'm not mad definitely c:

14 Likes

Open review

Blasphemous

2019

Erato_Heti

Completed

Song

When I had initially played Blasphemous (2019) I had thought it was incredible. Mainly the reason why I had thought this was due to what it most clearly mimicked from the Souls series. Most particularly a checkpoint system and echoing audio design during voiced dialogue. I still believe that Blasphemous is really good, and I don't particularly mind its lack of mechanical iteration in the way others do. What it seems to lack in tight level design for example is made up with from its other more artistic iterations. In particular its application of spanish folklore into the realm of the religious gothic with grace. This guy goes into that more if you're interesed but for me, the flamenco nuevo soundtrack makes it all worth it alone. I can excuse a lot of mechanical flubs if the art and sound is good, so for a long time I had hyped this up in my head as an ignored masterpiece.

Sadly though Blasphemous is not a masterpiece, it's just good. I have a couple really weird arguments for why this is the case. However before we really get into that, you will have to accept some terms and conditions first. Similar to my Tunic and Hollow Knight write ups, I will be taking this and blatantly drawing comparisons to FromSoft's souls design. I know that on first blush such a comparison may seem tedious and I agree that in many cases it is. I hate the term souls-like more than anybody because of how constraining it is. Simultaneously, though, Hollow Knight actually feels great to play in part because how derivative it is as a souls title in terms of its design space. At some point we have to admit to ourselves that one of the reasons why Dark Souls (2011) feels as refreshing as it is, is because of its smart mechanical design decisions that push against the player. Dark Souls and to a lesser extent Demons Souls (2009) introduced through experimentation design decisions that simply make sense. For example autosaving, checkpoint systems, stamina systems, currency on death, etc. These all introduce friction to a player probably used to save scumming and throwing lives away at a problem without risk. So that's why everyone is obsessed with it and why comparisons are drawn. These elements and how they play together function as 'mechanically rich' design that constantly tests the player.

Every action based title probably should be considering the design of the Souls titles at some stage of development because its sensible design. That being said, I don't think that these elements should lock a title that is deriving from them to a sensibility of being derivative because everything derives off of good design from before. It's why I prefer the term 'search action' over 'metroidvania', its good to find the common denominator in my view rather than constraining the future of design in a medium to its past.

With all that said blasphemous and Hollow Knight are actually more derivative of the souls titles in particular in a few nuanced ways that deserve that point of comparison. Most notably hidden 'good endings' through obscure actions the player has to follow. A point of discretion that many of the Souls games involve in and that Hollow Knight, Tunic, and blasphemous follow in stride. Along with weird ways of shrouding its content through esoteric access points. For example the DLC content of Wounds of Eventide for blasphemous and Godmaster for Hollow Knight are both performed through strange and easy to miss access points that are nested away. There's no beating around the bush with this, this esoteric design is something I'm not particularly fond of and I think these titles need to cut this shit out.

For what it's worth I like when it's done for characters having them move about and being able to miss their sidequests that's all fine. It's legitimately cool that I had thought for example Petrus from Dark Souls was a cool dude for literally years, because I didn't know about his sidequest and its implications that he's a terrible rapist. I think this can add an extra allure to a story that justifies its position in the medium of 'videogames' because it makes sense that being able to hide secrets and offpaths through discovery is something this medium naturally can take advantage of. So I understand the appeal there. I don't think the novelty of hiding special good endings through weird actions is great though. blaphemous has an ending accessible through breaking the healing statues but theres nothing to indicate that they were breakable. These design decisions don't need to be imitated or used because instead of making the player feel like they 'found' something they are instead just obscuring content which will be unimmersive because it's going to be found through a walk through. It's not actually testing the player its just a marketing gimmick. Yes it 'feels cool' but its genuinely unsatisfying in retrospect. By comparison anybody who knows Cruelty Squad (2021) probably knows how obscure some of the endings and content is. I wont spoil it but Cruelty Squad is justifiable for this because if you replay the levels and talk to the NPCs they actually do tip you off about it, the aspect resolution reveal is a great example of this. Even aside from that though none of Cruelty Squad's secrets feel tidy. They feel disturbing, which in my mind is how secrets typically should feel. Portal has the ratman secret, a secret so great and so disturbing that it has become an iconic point for appreciating it fully. There's something to be said about secrets as a form of disturbing the player rather than rewarding them, something that Cruelty Squad has so successfully realized that I genuinely hope people obsess over the design of that title soon before people just forget about it. Along with this, Cruelty Squad also suceeds through not making its endings typically triumphant, I won't say more than that because of spoilers but this sensibility of rewarding players with the groteque is an important element. By comparison the endings for Tunic, blasphemous, and Hollow Knight are binaries. Either 'you didnt do enough, play again' or 'you did it, you found everything'. Do I really need to explain why this sucks? Let's move on.

The other place blasphemous flails is when it ironically doesn't derive enough from the frictional design of Souls. Some of them are obvious I think. blasphemous doesn't have a currency on death system you lose no tears in it when you die, probably because of its tree progression system of leveling. In order for the tree progression system to work you'd need to not punish the player via that risk system. However that risk system is there to stop players from simply throwing bodies away. All you have here is a minor diminishment of the mana bar when can be fixed so easily as to trivialize them. Small aspects like this I imagine these developers don't want to borrow from because of that fear of being derivative but yeah I think that not only should designers shamelessly borrow from them they should realize why they are even there in the first place.

There are more nuanced examples of this to. For example in contrast to the esoteric access point system, which everyone seems to like but secretly sucks. There is an inverse: A system everyone claims to hate but is secretly pretty good. That system is the boss runback. Dark Souls does not present a bonfire right before its bosses where blasphemous does. Now on paper that should mean that blasphemous made the better design decision right? You allow the player to do the challenge they want to do, you don't mess with them with a tedious run through to the boss allowing them to focus. This misunderstands the point though, Dark Souls has these runbacks both for immersion and to keep the player on their feet. I'm legitimate when I say that one of the reason Orstien and Smough is an iconic fight is because you do have to navigate and run past those giant enemies on the way in. People forget this part obviously, but Orstien and Smough would feel like a different fight if the bonfire was right next to the fog door. Elden Ring on the other hand takes this 'straight to the boss' approach via the Miraka statues, and if you ask me I think it makes the experience a little more lame. Feeling a small thrill of being chased and distanced from the action reminds the player to prepare and creates just that extra bit of friction making the issue of 'losing' have a bit of impact. If you lose against the boss this run up is your punishment. To me as long as there's some enemies chasing you that you have to navigate in the run up this is a good design decision.

Boss run backs are one of those aspects that nobody wants to defend and I wont warp this whole post into a defense of boss run backs aside from what I already said. However the point of this illustration is that there are nuanced design decisions like this everywhere that due to consumer pressure is often removed. People only vocalize hating these aspects of design. Saying things like 'X old game would be better without a loading screen' or 'fuck live systems they just artificially make the game longer' but I think extrinsic frictions like this are actually a motivator and a title that extra character. In retrospect we always want these frictions to not exist in part because of how memory and replay actually function. Nobody is consciously thinking about the Loading screen or fetch quests, we 'fast forward' our minds to these cool moments and as we age and our time becomes more precious we want games themselves to 'fast forwards' as well. Part of the reason for this is quite depressing: Even without the Hedonic Treadmill involved, playing Megaman as a kid and as an adult are functionally different due to both the abundance of other titles and our relationship to leisure. If other games exist that have no loading screens, why the hell would I play one that does? Not to mention that even in terms of enjoyment, games that get too frictional actually can alienate because you simply aren't being dripfed the amount of joy you are used to. Developer wise, there are a couple work arounds here, two that come to mind are either just ignoring that alienation and slapping 'retro' or 'masocore' on the title, or making the frictions only very slight (I choose the O&S souls example on purpose here since it's the easiest run back in the game). However, its not so simple from a critical consumption side because we have to say stuff beyond just pure enjoyment. I am maybe one of the only people that defends a static load screen and want to see it, because to even promote this idea is patently absurd. However its not that functionally different from what the risk of a currency on death system does. They are both Systems that slow down the player.

To turn back finally to blasphemous I'm not saying that its actually bad. It's a great experience to 'feel' again for its best boss fights through listening to the soundtrack, and generally its a fantastic experience from the audiovisual direction. It's just that it doesn't 'stick'. To paraphrase friend Femboygenius said that Cruelty Squad, something that only came out 2 years ago, is one of the only 2 games worth playing. Obviously this is a take meant mainly to enrage but I do think its interesting. FemboyGenius' favourite games all are from the past 10 years, and really stick to frictional design which means it's not an issue of something needing to be a 'classic' or not, just need to obey the principle of frictional design. I agree entirely that Cruelty Squad is probably one of the best fast FPS shooters since DOOM (1993). The reason I think this is because I have a similar flavor for so called 'masochistic' design, design that is constantly testing me to make those standout experiences matter. blasphemous and Elden Ring are both great audio visual experiences and to a certain extent this is enough. However there is something to be said about the aspect of what makes something iconic and really stand out, and that's putting obstacles in the way of the player rather than servicing them, Winnie the Pooh's Home Run Derby for example is a browser meme classic because startled players with its difficulty, this is what everyone remembers when the dust settles.

The good will please us, the great will test us.

13 Likes

Open review

No One Can Ever Know

2019

Erato_Heti

Completed

again

Song Accompaniment

I feel like I should come back to analysis on this one now that I'm in a relationship with the developer and this is probably the game I reviewed that perked her ears up about me. Before I get into it proper give me three paragraphs to notice something and I'll talk about the game.

As of the time of writing this, only 8 people have marked this game on the site as played. Despite the fact 3 prominent users have written large and thoughtful posts on this piece a year ago, and one, the developer wrote on it twice. It may seem sensible to shame people for not doing their due dilligence in trying out a work but we need to be fair here. A lot of this is a result of, writing that's inwards. People really took to Heather's other title Quantum Bummer Blues because all of the writers focused on what was distinct about the experience as something you play, and not just something you look at or how you personally felt.

This aspect of inwards writing, writing that focuses on the purely experiential, exists for a few logical reasons. One is that this is the expectation for social media. The other is that it feels too difficult to write constructively about a videogame because a game has several different elements its borrowing in design from other mediums and so writing outwards on those distinctions gets incredibly unwieldy and often shows ones ignorance on at least one subject. The last is the most interesting tho: Writing outwardly is cynical and carries with it a feeling of free lance marketing to people 'products'. Heather had to avoid avoid talking the game experience because if she assessed the formal elements of her own work it would come off as an advertisement, which means that writing outwardly can be thought of as proxy advertising or worse a 'consumption review'. To defend against these 'ugly' elements of writing its best to turn inwards and show the flourish and character of the writer themselves, its a buffer effect.

That said, I think if I've learned anything from writing on games, its that this understanding of outwards writing, which focuses on formal qualities and distinct comparison as crude obscures one important note: It's hard to get people to care about a game if you just ramble about your life or off topic observations first. I had to literally prime potential readers about these first 2 paragraphs because it makes it really hard to actually care about the relevance of it to the game. It's harder to get people to care about the game itself, if they stick around at all they end up instead caring about you. This creates a feedback loop where all criticism of a game is in relationship to you. My initial review isn't bad, but it branches off topic fast.

So here's what's distinct about No One Can Ever Know that you can't get almost anywhere else: It's a 1st person narrative that exposes internal thinking as an unhappy place. It's easy on the internet to forget this fundamental unhappiness because when it happens too much we see it as toxic (see: twitter). Besides, the idea of telling someone over text that something they did hurt your feelings doesn't really work that well. So instead positivity is centered and all the whinging thoughts are quarantined to a 'venting' channel or a private twitter, etc. The problem with this is its fundamentally unrealistic, unless you are a maniac (in literal terms) most of our thoughts are critical ones by design. No One Can Ever Know reflects this authenticity of the mind which is phenomenal, especially if you're a writer. No One Can Ever Know intervenes in reminding us that there's nothing spoiled in having bad thoughts. There's a lot to be unhappy about in the world and so for 1st person stories to ignore this fact misses a pretty great part of characterization and how to attach a player to that character.

That being said, Disco Elysium also notices this. See the difference here though is that No One Can Ever Know has no visual depiction element. Earlier I mentioned that its hard to express to people negative emotions over text, this is partially due to systemic patriarchal values which dont center emotional vulnerability almost at all. It's also just really hard to do tho because of how blunt text is as a format so it's fairly easy to go overboard. If somebody asks me how my day was in person they can get a read not just through my reply but through my face and my eyes. I usually say 'it was ok' and then let my face indicate what 'ok' means. In text I don't have access to that timing or the faces, all I can do is post this ---> ':/' which is also hilarious in how ineffectual it is. The complexity of negative thoughts, especially if they are slight, are hard to convey so we often just dont. Legitimately No One Can Ever Know is a game that reminds people that there are internal thoughts and feelings of the other user in a digital age without even relying on visual expressions at all. That minimalism is absolutely worth the price of admission. Which is nothing, by the way. This is free. Short to.

That's it. So writing outwardly is not hard at all (I wrote this in literally 20 minutes, its a shower thought), and contrary to perceptions it can be done more easily and more effectively than internal writing. It's possible it still feels like an advertiser's approach although I think this can oversimplify. At this point though I'd rather prefer people focus on the content of my assessment and on the game itself rather than focusing on me so if I have to be labeled a marketer to do it that way, so be it. I'm really happy that I've strayed away from those initial habits and I deeply appreciate all my other writer friends for helping me out here but I hope maybe you can find your own sense of comfort and solace knowing that there's dorks like me out there that prefer the outwards writing approach over the inwards one for displaying whats great about a game. Smiley face.

11 Likes

Open review

Liar Liar 2

2016

Erato_Heti

Completed

Accompaniment Song

Story written for the feminist murdergirls. Girls that were into fast paced shows like Invader Zim or Space Patrol Luluco but want a lesbian version peppered in pastel. People ate up the first one, became a cult classic. Murder as a zany comedy episode with a bit more characterization then you are used to. The first one isn't gorey, its very light on its violence and playful, the 2nd, taking place in high school gets a lot more graphic with 2 of the endings being about sexual fetishization of torture as sadism from male characters (only mentioned not depicted). In a violent world where murder is a barely concealed expression killing takes on a romantic meaning, the killing of or with people performs as a form of gift giving. Mainly protecting people via murder, sometimes killing them to Capture them. All the same Liar Liar treats this whimsical world with appropriate geriatrics preferring for jokes and over the top exchanges than anything serious or forlorn.

Liar Liar 2 does something that I've also noticed in the game Bad End Theater (2021) where a game is created out of having to sift through a bunch of bad endings for a good one. I recently complained in my blasphemous review that action titles shouldn't hide its best ending behind a bunch of obscure operations. However it makes sense for a Visual Novel to do that because typically the most 'challenging' a Visual Novel gets is having to choose a branching option, with Bad End Theater simply tweaking the optionality ahead of time. Since there's no action inputs and thus its incredibly easy to get all the endings Visual Novels are not burdened by this design limitation although it can still cause the player to focus less on the journey and more on a fixed destination. Thereby abstracting them from immersion in the story. To a large extent this is fine though as if you view it from a player agnostic lens it allows a rich story of potential motivations. Visual Novels with multiple endings are very similar to plays with actors and moving parts, 'set changes', etc. and so its really telling a story about those potential motives, Shakespeare move over because visual novels are stealing your job and making it better! This is also something that unlike a chose your own adventure novel visual novels can do with the grace of its visual design and expression, game books often have issues making its various endings feel fulfilling through how brief the depiction is.

Something else that this story does as a sequel to the original Liar Liar (2014) is change the perspective. The first story was first person, the sequel goes for a third person omniscient approach where an ensemble of motivations are displayed. Which feels like a surprise since you end up embodying the characters rather spontaneously. It's a pleasant surprise but this rather extreme shift decenters the protagonist Yukari which kills the 'episodic' feeling set up at the end of the first one. In fact it feels less like a sequel and more like a high concept fanfiction of the original story written by the same author. I pin this on the more intense tone that comes from disempowering the protagonist Yukari and the perspective shift but it's neat to do this, though it constrains a 'local' space of the fiction to work off of, people were probably disappointed when this came out due in part to those and how it ends, implying there wont be a Liar Liar 3.

Aside from all that the game and its prequel also have instant text appear and this works really well. Although its sudden this allows the player to get into the 'speed' of the murderplot and not feel constrained from the action via scroll text. We Know The Devil (2015) a much bleaker but also fantastic work also takes this approach and I really appreciate it as it allows my eyes not to feel distracted by movement (and even worse scroll text sound) when I'm trying to read. This effect only works if the music fades from track to track because otherwise it would be too abrupt, luckily tokimekiwaku recognized this. The music is also very fun, feels like a bouncy ball.

Particularly I like how killing is gendered, the men all tend to be really gross and slow moving about their killing, often obsessive. The girls on the other hand are distanced and straightforward they just focus on protection. Makes sense in a world where having to kill men to stop them from stalking women is a necessity. This gender binary is not put in flux all that much, and I think that does hurt the piece a bit for me. The original Liar Liar implies that only weird specific girls kill, so the application of social classes of murder on gendered lines does feel a bit awkward to the established chivalry of the first title, one that also gives the women empowerment. It's probably just that the dev wanted to present a complicated and ugly world of maturity, relationships not working out etc. to their young audience. I have no issues with this honestly, but I would have preferred more 'episodes' of liar liar before this 'finale' sequel. The world really felt fresh and easy to write in but it ended before it could even get off the ground. I suppose there's no issue in passing off the pen early but there's only and hour of story between both games so the next writer might not know what to write. It's a step down from the first but not by much. Oh I don't have much to say about the first one, its adorable and iconic play that one for sure. Yukari is also very cheeky and hides her hands and I love that for her.

10 Likes

Open review

Frog Detective 3: Corruption at Cowboy County

2022

Erato_Heti

Completed

Song Accompaniment

I consider my last three posts as meditations on the function of 'disposable' art in relationship to memory construction, and characterization. They have been partially about uplifting generally 'disposable' artistic experiences. Consider this the final raid boss post on this topic.

I'm going to be as blunt and straightforward about this before I move on. I think the Frog Detective series would have been much better if it adopted a full on episodic approach before popping its 'finale'. I said the exact same thing about Liar Liar 2, its good but a bit too soon for it to be a capstone.

This is a very bold and startling view of mine but I think if we look at the popularity of Sherlock Holmes in the 1920s, western cartoons, and radio shows we get a different picture. Two of my favorite western shows are My Little Pony and Home Movies. The Frog Detective series taps in to a similar pro social approach to solving problems that MLP presents, and the slow social awkwardness that Home Movies depicts. These examples are all popular and memorable, with MLP still having a strong aspect of memory within it's creation. All of these example build up their audience over years, presenting them with specific charming social dynamics that really flesh out their cast before finally after many episodes freeing them via an ending. Yes it makes sense to free them at some point, The Simpsons and Family Guy are great indications of the inevitable flanderization that happens if you never do, but if you have an enjoyable world you should be free to explore it for a while.

That said, we shouldn't pretend that this has never been done before in videogames. The defunct Telltale had a lot of examples with this with their successful Walking Dead series and, more endearing to me, their 3 season run of Sam and Max. With that said nobody has reference a scene from the Walking Dead episodes in years and I can tell you immediately three really amusing gags from the Frog Detective series and only like 2 across the 2 seasons I played which is like 10 (I didn't bother with the 3rd season it looks pretty bad) games to Frog's 3. This is probably in part because of how forumalaic and quip focused the Sam and Max style by design is. Regardless, low overhead 'episodic' games have been a process in hibernation ever since the liquidation of Telltale, but if anything the excitement people had around those titles should cause people to be more interested in taking up that mantle and running with it.

Any dev is free to abandon their own series or patterns for whatever reason. That said it should come as no surprise that the first 2 games in the Frog Detective series were development projects mainly with the goal of getting used to the engine. This is obvious once you take into account the size and number of internal spaces in each episode. Episode 1 has no buildings and is small. Episode 2 has buildings but no way to enter them. Episode 3 has several quite lush internal spaces. Frankly the introduction of internal spaces in this episode was incredible but I think effected the writing and puzzle design. Since this was the first game with an internal space I hadn't really thought to explore around and look for things to pick up, this is partially probably a result of Detective's highlighting aura for interactable objects remaining the same despite the slightly more complex poking and prodding for items. On top of that, what made some of the dialogue work was the fact the characters were so clearly isolated as clear outside actors so the humor didn't quite express properly (though I think there are less lines during the case overall to with a stretch towards environment ambitions and a lush finale which makes this feel like the least funny of the 3 episodes overall).

Yes, I thought Frog Detective was good, I thought Liar Liar was good to, but they both ended abruptly and early. My friends have made remarks before about how I seem to over consume games, the reality is that I'm often replacing the 'comfort' of a long running show with an interest in the authorial penmenship of a specific developer or how people mod around a game that came out (various interpretations of Undertale for example). While this for the most part works for me, this is in part because there's no long running episodic games at the moment. A lack of reiterating on your own characters in a followup piece is going to cause a chain reaction of people to go back to MMOs and other online multiplayer games instead of being able to see comfort in individual smaller episodic games. It's hard to make this point stick forward but people often take away comfort best from small individual experiences that build over time. This is one of the reasons why television has been so successful to begin with.

You could say that maybe I'm a little too frustrated with this but the other issue here is that this is part of why remakes have been churning. What we apply as nostalgia is instead just having a comfort memory where we want to grab that pattern again and explore a tale through it. Gamers have been mainly taught to care more about gameplay than narrative, meaning that they will just play the same old tune with better graphics (hence the commercial popularity of remakes). The only reason this is the case though is that games like Frog Detective haven't been done more and don't go on for long enough. I would like to have considered the Frog Detective series as a wake up call to devs that people will long for episodic cozy experiences, but unfortunately the fact that this is likely the last game in the series makes me believe it'll take a while until that's fully realized.

I was genuinely excited about Deltarune Episode 1 when it dropped because I was under the impression over the next couple years, that we be seeing an episode spontaneously ever year or so. Not the case, apparently its now closer to every 2 years which I imagine is in large part because of how the overhead on the development side has bloated.

I recently made a list following the Wholesome Direct releases that you can find here I realized after I was done that sure a majority of them look endearing. Even Frog Detective was on there. How wholesome can you be when you show me a small world and then don't take advantage of everything that can be done with it? When I remember A Short Hike a game I genuinely love I smile over how much I liked it, but then afterwards I get kinda sad. I don't have a lot to work with on the characters or the story. It gives me the incredible world and treats it as a 1 time resort I can come back to be never shows me anything beyond that. It creates this sense of futurelessness, everything that I experience with the characters is momentary and I wont know them well enough when its all over.

I didn't get that with MLP, while the show ends in a way I'm not fond of, MLP gave me a rich historied world with a dynamic cast that I got to know in depth over the course of 70 hours across 8 years of production. With comparatively little overhead for each episode. I remember and could tell you more about a character like Fluttershy than a lot of novels I've read. It's not all about me and what I want, but I think there's something to be said for the idea that there is something being squandered both financially and emotionally by not sticking to a great cast for at least a little while longer. No wonder Nintendo is so hyper dominant, they have the good sense not to mess with their cast too much but they have large overhead so they have to make concessions towards mechanical iteration. In my view the best way to attain indispensability for 'comedic' or 'lighthearted' art is to take this and just make the characterization a little more rich and develop something ongoing beyond just mechanical depth.

Give me Homestuck, give me Yakuza, free me of the crushing abruptness of videogame characterization. We don't need any more mechanical depth, good writing is lagging out hard under the weight of ambitions. When am I gonna feel like I've been around a character long enough that I feel I know them? I'd rather jump the shark than hop out of the pond early.

8 Likes

Open review

Fucker Gamer Scum Get Stabbed

2014

Erato_Heti

Completed

Accompaniment Song

Truthfully, in comparison to most of my write ups, I have to come clean about personal ignorance in my experience here. The speed at which I initially played this and when I did was either before when Detchibe wrote their piece highlighting more of the ZX Spectrum John George Jones titles it was deriving off of, or with such little attention to this fact I might as well not have noticed. I played this without context originally, so of course without the context I enjoyed it. After a replay with some context I still really like it though and since I'm in the minority on that I feel like I should unpack why.

Beloved trashart explorer Detchibe notes that the appeal of go to hell (1985) and soft & cuddly (1987) was not per se the edginess or the tedious game design, but how games of this booming 80s microchip technology allowed for more vibrant texture work for independent artists which was a huge step up. Stating that its was 'functioning as a showcase for the creative liberties allowed by the microcomputer boom of the early 80s' you can definitely see that in the intricate detail of the monster design setpieces from those titles. Those two titles were an inspiration point for the forwarding of independent digital game art primarily.

Cadensia in her grace follows up that historical note by agreeing to this appeal and then, in her own post highlighting an interview showing its a product of blatant boredom of the developers part.

"For John George Jones, the development of his games was a way of killing time: according to the strange interview he gave to Sinclair User, he was first and foremost a disillusioned musician who wanted to amuse himself with people's reactions to the violence of his games before returning to other activities that would interest him more. There was no big project behind it, no real desire to push the boundaries of video game design, just a feeling of boredom."

It makes sense that if you're going to make a game out of boredom as a way to illicit abstract sensations and practice animating doodles, you wouldnt make a tight narratively driven title, you'd make a labyrinth. So we need to turn our attention to game design philosophy of the labyrinth for a moment. Firstly we can see a level of similar maze abstractions in several iconic Atari 2600 titles that were the rage only a few years before. Adventure (1979) has no explicit story or map keeping the player in a state of the unknown. This style of abstract player discovery based design was the go to for any game on that system that wanted to try to produce a dynamic experience, rather than a static goal oriented directed one like say Pacman (1980). Only 3 years later the infamous licensed game E.T. (1982) is where this lack of clarity in purpose and exploration upset players, its because it was too abstract and unclear what the goal is. A rift happens here, do players want a clear goal or a hidden one? It probably depends on how long a player is willing to put up with feeling lost. Put another way, all maze games that dont show the entire maze like Pacman has to deal with the potential fatigue any player might have until they rush for a map. Back then there was much more patience with being lost, we rush for maps all the time in games now but back then there weren't so many options. Nonetheless the failure of E.T. should show that technocultural analysis only takes us so far, at some point every player is going to get frustrated and upset, especially if the sound is bad or overbearing.

This top down obfuscation of a goal via only fragments devise by design a feeling of disorientation, allowing for the images themselves to be treated with added novelty and with difficulty arising from how large the hidden mazemap actually is. In this way within the limitations of the time we can think of George Jone's games as haunted house experiments, early attempts a more expressive spookhorror design. I don't think this is too far a stretch, after all people decorate for Halloween out of a similar sense of boredom and desire to amuse themselves as much as freak out other people and both games show creepy medieval symbols that tend to get associated with this more stylish horror.

The issue here for me is that these 2 George Jones titles are, frankly, unplayable. Mainly because what it achieves is done more slowly and rudimentary than the massive surplus of haunted house titles after it we now live within. This is the inevitability of artistic technologies in how they will snub older design applications. Beyond that, the large labyrinthine game is now in a state of arrested development both because that 'player unease' is now much more effectively explored in first person perspective horror games, and where it doesn't Yume Nikki (2004) and its seemingly endless inspiration works has now cleaned shop. Whether a player enjoys or even finishes Yume Nikki its no doubt a masterpiece in the emotive ambiguity of maze design. Its effective dream diary feeling and its establishment of a 'home' is such that the player can always feel infinitely lost without much immediate distress or compulsion to find the exit, often wanting to stay lost in many instances. The sound and music helped here to, the ambient soundtrack of Yume Nikki is immaculate and warms the player towards the feeling of being lost. A lot of games really do live or die on their music and sound design, honestly.

Anyway, this represents a distinct philosophy towards the maze entirely where its exploration for its own sake rather than for an explicit exit or goal. This may seem like a counterargument to the out of history comparison here, as I acknowledge they are functionally incomparable right? Let's take to it absolute extremes before you decide that. If the appeal is to be so horrified I want to leave rather than explore, I have at my power something that in a physical cornfield maze or haunted house I dont, I can leave immediately. For digital mazes, I can just shut off the console, thereby 'leaving the maze' and origin of discomfort immediately. Of course people still play games that 'scare' them, but the point of my illustration is that these old titles by their rudimentary design only have symbols towards an endgoal so the momentary symbolic collection loses its historical value without something other propulsion to play, I can just leave by just turning off the machine which trivializes merely objective or museum based gawking, there needs to be some other internal set of systems to keep me around. The character movement in these John George Jones games so that symbolic collection of historical items first hand is slow, which kills any 'masocore' reason for play, it doesn't help that there's no save function I know of so turning off is the only way to reset the maze without dying anyway. Which begs the question, why bother? Like, why collect these experiences with my eyes through direct hand input if I'm not even enjoying it when I could just look up somebody else doing it online now? If the only thing here is a bad maze with some good art I can just watch a video instead. More ruthlessly, absolved from its historical context, what value would these titles even represent to me now being as outdated as they are?

Well Fucker Gamer Scum Get Stabbed (2014) actually has a rather blunt answer: The art style is pretty cool and worth updating and reusing in a modern context. Consider FGSGS for a moment as a discursive attempt at updating the appeal of ZX for a modern audience. FGSGS gets rid of the large map design, instead going for a tight few rooms, but leaves the disorientation still intact. There's a fluid sense of constant movement, not just from the floaty player character but the constant dripping of needles and running of player monsters. Along with the midi industrial song hunter killer by Smersh. This is all a modernization, the lack of music and ability to have several fluid animations on screen at once makes the original titles feel like literal molasses. FGSGS expounds to us that there's much in its bright neon framework we can borrow and use now, it shows how exciting it all is and does it with a novel sense of style, replacing the mideval iconography with more 21st century anxieties like hospitals and anarchism.

When you add it all up it repurposes the original elements of haunted horror unease for a short industrial retronostalgia of the forgotten technology for a new audience. That audience, if signposted to at all, is likely other internet game designers at the time. 2014 was still fairly early in itchio's platform development, originally coming to the public in 2013. The rudimentary nature of it is probably intended to make an appeal that this stuff even exists to other designers in the same way the popular trading of Playstation graphical design style via 'PSX' is (itchio as a platform has a rich amount of cultural exchange that make these actually active decisions, but thats a topic for another day). Seeing the history of the microcomputer itself having the notable outbursts be much the same makes this as a rather 'fitting' interpretation do you think?

That is not to say that this wasn't made for public showing and viewing, and that you can't get anything from it and shouldn't talk about it. Rather, we are a secondary audience, the primary audience is people who didn't already know about the ZX spectrum and found immediate sensual novelty in doing so. As a more informed secondary audience, I think instead of prodding at Fucker Gamer Scum Get Stabbed with our dissatisfaction for not meeting our various expectations, its worth appreciating it as an digital memory that tries to compound this old artsyle of to that of the present because I know that what probably happened here is we found out about ZX spectrum through this and just went to look them up first. Much more preferable I think to having some studio buy out go to hell give it a bit of extra movement and then upcharging it on a cultureless store page like steam. People say a lot in defense of remakes and remasters but I much prefer the more down to earth approach of just making your own inspired derivative work that calls back to those older works. You can think of it like just a nonverbal 'remember X?' blogpost in that sense.

Sure there's something to be said for how hollow it feels. It's short and doesn't have that same creature design, the soundtrack feels hollow with the number of political visuals on screen. Hospitals, people tied to anarchist books, the death of 'punk'. Rather than seeing this aspect as a failure though I see it as what a contemporary and chronically online set of fears is. The longer you spend online the more you get nervous of whats happening in the margins and how those are and should be amplified. I think Fucker Gamer Scum Get Stabbed is just poking a bit of fun at these fears by centering them as a 'new' haunted house. The game reads a bit more reactionary or at least politically stunted with its needles and hostile hospital designs in a post covid environment but this would be an unfair to place on it, in america at least there were larger healthcare concerns by this time that justify this. As for the 'death of punk' stuff, that old trope, I think that it's such an obvious fear that it would be foolish not to include in 'digital funhouse' mirror of fears. One that even Cadensia touches on in her conclusions on in the game, that it would be a poor decision not to use it to unease the player. I think that's plenty thrilling enough, if you asked me.

I write so extemporaneously and in such excruciating detail here for such a nothingburger of a work for many because this approach probably explains why I like more games than I don't especially on itchio. I'm not thinking about them in terms of satisfying a set of explicit design rules (weak level design or movement ability) or sociopolitical aggression ('not punk enough'), so much as what there is to be charitably remembered from each piece I spend time with. As long as the memory isn't offensive or upsetting I think it's worth keeping around and giving a respectful nod to, personally.

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Thanks to Detchibe for keeping me remotely updated and involved in the Backloggd Discord Game of the Week during my exile, along with all the attendees for the thoughtful criticism so far (If I haven't quoted you its out of respect for peace of mind, my new policy is to only quote people I'm following or who express comfort with being quoted). This was a fun exercise. I hope to do another one of these soon :3

7 Likes

Open review

Platformer Toolkit

2022

Erato_Heti

Completed

Song Accompaniment

This post-silicon faux introductory approach to platform character programming design, well meaning as it is, obscures information in 2 ways.

1. The toolkit here gameifies entirely around you the player being able to tweak towards a working character slowly through the introduction of new information rather than give you a top down understanding of how a good character looks and plays and working backwards from there. As such the useful part of the information is put at the end rather than at the beginning. I believe this is probably because Mark creates his videos in mind for an audience constantly in burnout so he has to 'slow cook' his observations rather than lead with information. You don't want to risk overstimulating the player with information so you give them 1 thing at a time but the player character themselves is going to feel like shit until you have all the functions to tweak open to you.

2. This corporate silicon mess doesn't feel good no matter what you do, because games are actually more about their visuals and music than they actually are about their 'movement'. As he explains, all the movement is completely up to what style of game you're trying to make, and as such its about the audio visual design. You can't make the character feel good to play when you have a horrible non-progressing mallsoft B-Side trumpet song playing in the background and with the visuals all looking like Paper Mario: Sticker Star put through a smoothie blender. It will always feel like chemotherapy that way. Yes you first start by prototyping the movement with simple pixel art and usually throw the sounds and music in last in these projects at the end, but before you start designing at all you imagine a world you want to externalize, is it a fluffy pillow or an industrial nightmare? You can't make a game with just a base awareness of mechanics and free art assets like this. You need to have an idea of what you want it to look and sound like. It would be remarkably less glamorous but this should have been made with simple pixel NES style limitations, possibly with a black background like how Metroid (1986) or Ice Climbers (1985) looks.

There's a lack of firm data, for example the acceleration and deceleration seem useful but they don't give you frame data of the stop and start points (or even just a second timer). Everything is styled to be interesting but not informative. As an actual toolkit, this is worthless. Like yes the preset for mario is slow, but that's because in mario you run and there isn't a coded run button to oscillate the speed.

Anyway, even if we ignore all that, there's just other functional issues that get in the way. For whatever reason run input information on the controller buffers data so your character always turns with uncontrollably slippery lag after changing inputs. I gave up playing this twice because I didn't realize this was just because of poor coding. The input keyboard controller is the arrow keys and the space button which is also a terrible layout.

This is the part where I'm supposed to say something needlessly snarky about how GMT should stick to making videos or how essayists should stay in their lane. I'm not going to say that. I think information simulation games are great, Balance of the Planet (1990) is an information game and it's one of the most ambitious and informative titles out there. I think Video Essays about Game Design are great, people can have great information without even having a hands on approach with the numbers and coding. Xator has a fantastic video/essay on the Mario bounce, which is relevant here, and from my understanding that's all gathered from historical data and reviews. To his credit, I don't know GMT that well and he seems to make shallow stuff but apparently his Boss Key video inspired one of my favorite levels in a game, the esoteric sky dungeon from Yo! Noid II: Enter the Void (2018).

All I'll say is that good observation comes from thoughtful consideration and research. Not out of being performative or hitting a production deadline, nor by babysitting readers/players with a series of continuous priming statements. Historical comparison or Breaking down a graph goes much further. Even without that, just get to the point, you really don't have to tutorialize the audience constantly. It does help to have a good taste in non-verbal music though because otherwise people will get sick, faze out and click off :3

17 Likes

Open review