Attempting to characterize a website with a diverse community is always something of a fool's errand, as by definition you are making a broad generalization about a very large group of people, which is usually not a good thing to do. However, I don't think it would be remiss of me to observe that, at least among the writers I follow routinely putting out wonderful pieces, there is an interest in examining friction in game design, games that push back against a player rather than yield to them. It's a subject I've been interested in for years, and in my time on Backloggd, I've been absolutely feasting on these perspectives.

Which is not to say I always agree with them. One game I was disappointed to find myself somewhat let down by was perennial backloggdcore crown jewel Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days, which was a game I found to honestly be a little trite and vapid. As an aesthetic achievement it's wonderful, and I have nothing but praise for that side of the equation, but I found myself really disappointed by how ultimately unadventurous I found it's play. It reminded me of Spec Ops: The Line, another game that has much I find praiseworthy in it's presentation, but kinesthetically unsatisfying because of how the game's presentational and narrative ideas failed to transfer over to the play experience.

Despite the claims of many purveyors of the most profoundly annoying and vacuous "critique" ever made of a game, Spec Ops doesn't think you are evil for playing it, and it does want you to finish it, to see the end, which is partly why it remains an interesting but unsatisfying game for me. The same is true of Kane & Lynch 2: while I don't think that game wants you to finish it, exactly, as the basically nonexistent narrative has no direction or payoff and neither does the gameplay design, it doesn't really resist you either, beyond the initial culture shock that comes from trying to get to grips with this presentation. The thing that let me down about K&L2 is that I simply learned to deal with it, and play it like I would Spec Ops or Binary Domain. I think it's a fine game, but I don't really find it terribly remarkable in the same way that I don't get a lot out of A Serbian Film. It's an important step in the development of video games as an art-form, in that it's one of the first mainstream video games to successfully make me shrug and move on the same way I do at a lot of empty transgressive art.

While I am sure there are some artists who are able to derive fulfillment from the act of creation alone and have no need for an audience, I imagine that most artists are like myself, in that they need an audience for their work to come alive. Certainly, when I was making (excruciatingly bad) games more regularly, I wanted people to play them, wanted people to see the end, even when I wrote awful dialogue about how, actually, by playing this game you have fallen into some nebulously defined trap and how you should have simply stopped playing, blah blah blah. If I didn't need other people to see my work, to share my thoughts and ideas, then they would remain in my own head, where my words are immune to the cold gaze of time and the imperfect translation process of thought to word. Most of us make games because we want people to play them. It may be harder to work out why, exactly, we want people to play them, but I know that we do. And those of us who write and post do so because we want people to read what we have to say.

None of this is written with a shred of condemnation. It's natural, and good. But it presents a problem when it comes to making truly frictional art, games that actively do not want you to finish them, games that do not push back a little but eventually relent, because ultimately, most people care about their art, and most of those people want people to see it.

What then, would a truly repellant game look like? A game that truly did not want the player to finish it, to see it through to the end, a game that, in every aspect of it's construction, repelled enjoyment? Let me introduce you all to Taz-Mania: friction embodied, and the ultimate Backloggdcore video game.

I'll save you the trouble of regurgitating in detail the ways in which this game sucks, partly because it would be identical to a list of things that are in this game, but mostly because every other review for Taz-Mania have accomplished that task better than I ever could. Instead, I'd like to draw your attention to the GDQ run of this game where one of the co-commentators claims to unironically love this game. Before I sat down and actually tried to play this, I thought this was just hyperbole, but now...I think I'm with them. I think I love Taz-Mania too.

Preemptive apologies for the navel-gazing that is to follow here, but I've been thinking a lot lately about writing, about why I do it, and specifically why I write about video games and how they tell stories. Professionals in the industry are exhausted individuals who lead thankless jobs and who inevitably try to seek succor elsewhere in the industry or beyond it rather than continue to write guides for Horizon Two Dawn or whatever for GamerCum Dot Com. Why do I aspire to this? Why do I aspire to write my own games, when all around me people who write and talk about games assert wholeheartedly that games are just bad at telling stories compared to films? What worth is to be found here?

What is it for? Who is it for? Is it for me? Is it for you? I don't know. I genuinely don't know. Sometimes I fucking hate this place. Believe me, I have often wondered if I would be happier if I hadn't posted a stupid mean Xenoblade 2 review last year. But it's also given me a lot of joy. Sometimes I want to pack it in. Sometimes I want to write more. Sometimes I feel proud of what I've written, and sometimes I feel deeply embarrassed about it. And sometimes I feel all of these things, at once.

I thought about all of this as I tried to play Taz-Mania. Why was I here? Why was I pushing myself forward through a game that was hurting my eyes and was actively miserable to play? For the sake of a joke? For the sake of a meme?

But I kept going. For a good bit, anyway. Sadly, Taz-Mania defeated me because it just became too frustrating to master. But still, for a good while, I persevered. Partly because I went to the trouble to find a Master System/Game Gear emulator, something I was sure I would never use again, but also because, well, someone wanted to know what I thought about this game, and no matter how much of a joke that was, no matter how serious or why they did that, they still did it. And others did the same and wrote reviews I got great enjoyment out of reading. In this barren wasteland of thought, these people found meaning. They made something out of nothing.

Taz-Mania is not just backloggdcore, Taz-Mania is video games. It is amateurish, barely functioning, and devoid of the qualities that prescriptivists about "quality of art" extol in other mediums. And yet it lives, lives in the words and in the minds of others, breathing life into a collection of pixels held together by tape and code and hope. More repulsive than Kane & Lynch, and providing a truer test of the meaning and worth of video games than Ending E of Nier: Automata could ever muster.

To a certain extent, I do agree with many of those why say that video games struggle to reach the narrative heights of other mediums, but I also acknowledge that those heights are there because we put them there: regardless of the theory and thought behind it, sound as they may be, ultimately things are considered good because we like them, and great literature and great filmmaking and great game design is considered such because we've, consciously or unconsciously, come to some kind of a general agreement over factors that are desirable in a work of art. And to be sure, Taz-Mania doesn't meet any of those factors. But I like it anyway. Because I choose to. Because that's really all it comes down to, isn't it?

Why do I write? Because I want to. Why do we like and care about video games? Because we do. Why do we find profound meaning in Kane & Lynch, in Paper Mario, in Ocarina of Time, in Persona 4 or Kingdom Hearts? Because in play, in investing in these dumb things wholeheartedly and earnestly, we create that meaning. And Taz-Mania is here - will always be here - to remind us that that deep down, no matter what else we might say, this is the truth at the heart of it. Video games are stupid, broken, vacuous, often ugly and repellant. But we love them anyway, and because we love them, they come to life.

Now and forever, we're gaming.

Thanks for the recommendation, LetsHugBro!

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“Life does not have inherent meaning; to say that our lives are pointless and our achievements meaningless is to state the obvious. No matter how grand our achievements or how broad their scope, time turns all to dust and death destroys all memory. But that does not mean we cannot ascribe our own meaning to what we do. It is because nothing has meaning unto itself that we are free to create meaning, to make metaphor, and in doing so reflect on ourselves and our world.

Leveling to 99 in the first reactor is pointless and meaningless. So why do I do it? I do it to express my hatred, and more importantly my disdain, for Dick Tree. I do it to express the camaraderie I feel for those of us who have followed this topic for years only to be disappointed by Dick Tree. I do it to prove to myself that I can persevere. The act is meaningless; I give it meaning.”

- CirclMstr