i went to now play this last weekend and had a good time! there was a flatgames room, and a panel, and the latter made me think about some nightmarish circumstance where someone was questioning me about what the point of these things was. the three posts below are all pseudo-answers i sketched out.

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have pieced together some of the writing abt vgames from my notepad drafts less because they’re good than because i change my mind on this stuff all the time and should really keep a record, most of what i wrote or thought last year becoming wholly unintelligible to me as i forget all the weird minor piques or enthusiasms that sustained them.. here are forgotten crankish halfthoughts 2016 edition.

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a fairly frequent if not in fact the ur-example of the “weird videogame” is what we could call the content delivery mechanism: a game using inherited, unadjusted and unproblematised stock fragments of gameplay (familiar systems like the mario games or being able to fire pellets) but which effectively reskins them to contain new and less generic resources - strange paintings or collage, musical experiments, found text. the art is the content, the game structure is the delivery mechanism, and there’s consequently also some embarrassment around the way videogames so immediately unique can also be so conservative in this respect, in exactly the ways that they’d be expected to “use the medium” - an embarrassment which has tended to be warded off either through dismissal (“who cares, consider the total effect”) or halfhearted moral critique (“it’s… it’s parody…”). and which is also expressed through the obvious challenge: why make it a game when those game elements are the most seemingly vestigial, why not choose a different and perhaps more suitable delivery mechanism? “more suitable”, particularly, in the sense that the awkward manipulations that a videogame requires so often seem unsuited to the way visual art is read or music is listened to.

since i’ve worked on games like this i don’t particularly want to defensively argue these ideas away - rather comparing them to own experiences i think suggests a basic difference in readings which could lead to less stark models than the form'n'contentbee divide. for me less interesting than the question of whether space funeral, say, “should be” a game is my own sense of deep aversion at the idea of it being anything else, and the strong sense of how totally insufferable those other forms would be: like a bad, embarrassingly overdemonstrative deviantart page in the early 00s style, or depending on your opinion of the game even more so than it is already, since the basic elements are not really too far off from a goofy old sprite comic (non sequitors, mspaint blood, etc). but if it doesn’t tend to be read in that way i believe it’s because all those signifiers become somehow less significant when implemented as part of a system, particularly a known, generic type system. they stop producing meaning in themselves; what were previously their most immediate elements become something like optional second attributes of the structural place they come to occupy in that system, and become fresh again through the contingency of this double meaning.
this isn’t meant to add some retroactive layer of meaningfulness to that game, but i think it explains why it “works” a little better than its component parts would suggest, and this possibly also hints at just why the content delivery model has continued to hang around as such a persistent (and frequently very effective) tool. the role of the game here is not just to passively reproduce content: it’s more specifically to absorb and diminish the meaning of that content by displacing it into the black box of some underlying system. the overdetermination of art, the way each quality can so easily be mapped back to its place in the social system (mspaint->deviantart->mall goths or whatever), is dissipated to some measure as those qualities are assigned secondary roles in a new and more explicit one. and this interchangeable quality, the fact that one picture can be replaced by any other one without changing the structure in which it nestles, itself opens up a different kind of realm of experience - that of the product, infinitely reproducable and replaceable to the extent that its exact features and specificity become slightly blurred and uncertain, which trails associated levels of meaning (the mysterious mythologies of those cartoon animals on the cereal boxes) that can only, somewhat haplessly, drift in and out of view within this network of relations.to make this connection isn’t necessarily to claim an explicit or even unconscious political or economic dimension to such works so much as it is to imply that this strange twilight world, of reproducing commodities which seem to drift out of the focus of any particular usage or attribute, is entwined within currently lived experience to the extent that even the most termitelike art practitioners will draw upon it in the effort to pull up and develop upon intriguing and non-ossified new experiences. consider the cavernous train stations of yume nikki, the buried fast food franchises of crypt worlds, the chattering and eerily self-contained looping animations of soft & cuddly playing out by themselves inside a vacuum, the administrative zones in jake clover games… the list could go on and i suspect i’m only picking the most obvious examples, but less telling than the distorted reflections of contemporary spaces here are the nature of those spaces, both familiar and alien - we live and move through them, but they’re not “home”, even if we know them better than places we call our homes. they’re cold spaces, and a certain level of coldness seems to me a common factor in this type of videogame: no matter how individual and creative the art, music, worldview, etc, it comes to us through the void of the computer screen forever waiting for input. less interactivity as any form of self expression or actualisation than a kind of second-order utilisation of the conditions for that interactivity - the waiting screen, the mediation through controls and through the history of this consumer form - as a means of capturing, for a variety of spaces and experinces, something of the half-light quality of contemporary perception.
the coldness that haunts game development, that emptiness that seems to absorb human energy without giving anything in return, shifts from the perpetual bane of computer games to their secret motor: no longer something to be pushed away through increasingly elaborate forms of player feedback it becomes the medium through which the imagination functions. the critique of such games as hamstrung by their own formal clumsiness into wasting their own potential - what beautiful paintings these could be if only they hadn’t been fed into a platform game - now becomes instead an analysis of the way that this very wasted potential, this absence of warmth and this leeching of aura, becomes a condition of the new ways in which they’re to be read.

obviously this is a line of thought which can be extended indefinitely and without discrimination, was that mysteriously purposeless mall from vice city really just a cry for help etc (ans: probably), and we can be wary of “justifying” such a breadth of different experiences and methods in this self-exculpatory way. but it does seem to me to bring these games a little closer to us in capturing a certain recurring note and mood, and to allow us to think about them as things other than inexplicably functional chimeras which dog behind the true syntheses of videogame history - to re-cast (or just to re-claim) them as part of an alternative tradition, where rather than the constant struggle in game development to give game systems the same warmth and significance of their content (the old question of how to make a dating sim that doesn’t become an affection gauge manager) we have something closer to the inverse - one which would seek to inscribe various forms of thought and of content with the ambivalence and ambiguous character of the personal computer, of the train station, of our lives.

1. hard to tell what games are used for until people start complaining that they don’t work as intended, thinking here about some of the back and forths around what content people didn’t want to see in ladykiller in a bind as well as, more dopily, that older fuss around the apparently insufficient ending to mass effect 3 and the furore it caused until the developers went back and changed it. which always interested me because i never played the game and not caring much for either bioware or angry gamer types felt highly neutral about the entire enterprise, on one hand the same hateful idiot rage stirred up around the same trivial nerd shit it always is, on the other, well, frankly all those arguments about aesthetic autonomy and the right of the artist to step outside expectations looked a little uninspiring in this one particular context. faced with the “aesthetic autonomy” of a multimillion dollar space captain rpg franchise it was hard not to root a little for some use-value-based demystification, particularly given videogame culture’s predilication for the mooniest  reach-me-down romantic notions of the Nobility of Art at  particularly those moments when it feels most under attack.

so obviously this is a glib reading of the whole affair but something of same back-and-forth still sticks with me: the emphasis on “use”, on something not fulfilling the role it’s being used for, the emphasis on “aeshetics”, on the right to evade or deny that immediate use for another maybe less obvious one (or, not infrequently, a more obvious one). use can acknowledge material conditions more directly: these art-products are neither produced nor consumed in a void, they can be adapted and re-read for other purposes than those the author intended, the claims to a work do not begin or end with a particular person, to ignore the ways it’s used can be to also ignore or obscure the network of social  relations that allow it to be produced to begin with. on the other  hand if something is produced according to a certain set of conditions it will already, unmistakeably, bear the stamp of those conditions, and hence any departure from them must by necessity take the form of a kind of negative depiction rather than pure omission; in this way estranging us from those elements and allowing us to glimpse the possibility of difference for those elements that a use-based approach would tend to ignore as fixed, as given, things perhaps to be navigated around rather than confronted head on. and in this reading the “individualism” of such work changes meaning, rather than the artiste snootily distancing themselves from the crowd it becomes the instance of isolation which helps the crowd identify itself as such through reversal and comparison. but this itself ignores the question of how the “artist” gains the special insight which the “crowd” lacks, a question with an inevitable class component, and on it goes. and there’s an indeterminate, and maybe opportunistic, back and forth which we can see mirrored in the opportunistically indeterminate attitude of the videogame industry around these matters, art when it suits and a business when it doesn’t, blizzard in the streets and konami in the sheets unless that should be the other way around, who really knows.

2. if neither view is fully convincing by itself i think there are still ways in which they can be useful - specifically when one is used against the other, not just to criticize but also to develop on and use the blind spots in each other’s range. if aesthetics can return to us all those derided z-grade games of days past that utility can find nothing to do with, and identify in them qualities worth exploring, then utility can help us think about all those things which seem to escape aesthetics entirely, like all the children’s youtube videos where spiderman performs oral surgery on elsa from frozen. maybe more interestingly this can also pick up areas of stress - those areas where one or both explanations are particularly unconvincing, where the rote ideologies seem to turn brittle and crack along unsuspected pressure lines, where they haven’t quite caught up with events.

3. to be honest what’s got me thinking about this stuff is the question of genre, which i feel more and more is central to the question of sustainably making the kind of games i feel interested in. i’ve written before on this blog that the games that most excite me at the moment are things like fangames, horror games, those million variations on a theme emerging in the depths of gamejolt. and i think part of that is because these new emerging genres, or at least while they’re still in the process of emerging, lie squarely in the middle of the two questions above. is this a case of an emerging social formation (unity, youtube, more kids online) producing a new kind of aesthetic or is it that a new aesthetic (the particular experience of certain horror games and the new types of affect they give access to) has given rise to new social formations as previously disparite groups find new commonality? obviously the answer is some mixture of the two but the very ambiguity of that mixture seems to me a positive thing in that the boundaries have not quite been locked down. quoth pere ubu, “a song has three things. you got three things, you got a song.” how many things does a horror game have? how many does an rpg maker game have? what happens in between? these questions seem entirely up to grabs to me and the exploration of them far more valuable than anything in a crepsucular “art” tradition permanently hamstrung by that ossification of social role it strains against but can never break from. things both determinate and indeterminate which can perversely move more freely on account of this dual nature.

how do genres form? something appears which people didn’t know they wanted, and they want more of it, maybe without knowing why. i don’t know if this means being forever doomed to work in the shadow of the sleeper hits, having your course set for you by whatever’s popular at the moment - i think an advantage of the internet, of the kind of short-term historicism that it imposes, is being able to see the ways that formats don’t really die, that the universe of formats remains much broader than anything people are currently talking about and that a lotn of older ones just lie around waiting to be reactivated - stuff that worked quietly, or used to work and might work again, or never worked but might work now, or just things it’d be funny to see lurch awake again. “CD-Rom art” is an entirely dead genre but a lot of the work done in it (in the early space of content-driven digital media, stuff that could take advantage of the new amounts of free space available on the disc) is still relevant and maybe more importantly it’s still a shape in people’s consciousness - a certain thing, a certain type of experience, a certain chain of associations, a certain price point or method of distribution. computer entertainment, road warrior edition.

Key to what’s there of the story is the word “negation” mentioned by Percival in the moon cave - the magic wand grants wishes, but mostly the inchoate wish for things to be different in some unspecified and unanswerable way. The different groups perpetually squabble for it and keep changing things which is why the world is so garbled, why the same characters keep popping up in different places without knowing why, why Hamperdan doesn’t recognise you on the train and why everyone’s memory is generally so bad, since everything keeps on getting retconned (Bigdug into Big Doug, etc). The magic wand is kind of an emblem of fantasy in general and videogames in particular, inscrutable trinkets animated by vague yearning. Radiget finds it in the end through his totally aimless wandering which is sort of the game’s attitude as a whole, that whatever is valuable about these things is less some hard core to be excavated from the genre than a sort of mirage you only glimpse peripherally while moving through it. There are different other things which tie into the idea but for the most part the core of it is never really handled, I wanted it to be in there as sensibility rather than a narrative lesson, but maybe it was too confused or tenuous a metaphor.  In a way the game is a sequel to Space Funeral which ends with the prospect that the continual switching back and forth between affirmation/ denial would result in a confused mixture of both (the head in the RPG Maker grass at the final credits). This is all what’s in my own head rather than what the game consisted of. There were so many rough drafts and changes that I honestly can’t tell what’s even in there anymore, but maybe that’s appropriate…

a bunch of scrappy shorter pieces to clean out my drafts folder for the new year!

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