All in the Timing: "Queers in Love at the End of the World" & "Where the Goats Are"

I doubt it's solely a modern metric, but there definitely seems to be a trend in contemporary art criticism: the exultation of "getting lost" in artwork.

Living in the era of binge-watching television means that television must (natch) be binge-watch-able. Good books are "page-turners." I've lost count of the number of times I've heard theatre-goers lament the show that feels too long. ("Two intermissions? Who needs two intermissions??")

This metric is equally applied to video games, and I know it well. Whether it be my childhood obsessions with The Sims and Age of Empires, or my more recent dives into Dead Cells or Stardew Valley, it's really no challenge for me to log dozens (if not hundreds) of hours in the world of an especially immersive video game. Indeed, all the games I listed have been lauded as "easy to get lost in." It is seen as a positive virtue when you are so enrapt in a game that you forget how long you've been playing it.

However, this metric assumes an antagonistic relationship between art and time. By the above criterion, art is good when it surpasses the oppressive weight of time, allowing people to feel -- however fleetingly -- that they are removed from time's binds and limitation

This relationship doesn't need to be antagonistic. It is much more interesting to think of time as one of the many components a work can use to influence a viewer.

Recently, I played two games that use time as a calculated storytelling mechanic in their game, rather than an antagonist: Queers in Love at the End of the World by anna anthrophy & Where the Goats Are by Memory of God. 

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"Everything" & Nothing

OReilly's 2014 game Mountain has a website with only one quote, from Youtuber "Total Biscut" who says

it's fucking nothing

It's only natural that OReilly would follow this up with a game called Everything. It mixes the metaphysics of Alan Watts with some good ol' 2017 existential dread to make something that is, at once, a conversation with itself and an invitation for the player to reexamine the way they interact with the world.

Also, you can fill the entire universe with snakes.

Read the full review here.

Portal & "Feminist Games"

Why talk about a game that was made ten years ago? Why talk about a game that has been talked about to death?

Because I played Portal again for the first time in a long time, and I think it's an exemplary example for women in games, but not for the reasons I used to think it was.

It's a game about and for women, but not entirely for the reasons that male game reviewers seem to think it is.

Portal speaks to something darker, more private, and deeply intimate. 

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Stardew Valley

In 1999, I got Pokemon Red for Christmas for my gray brick Game Boy (which, at the time, seemed like an appliance that ran due to a sustained act of magic). I dug down into the corner of a couch and started playing. I kept playing. I took a brief break for dinner and then went back to playing. I played for hours and hours and hours. I played for so long that, when I turned off the Game Boy, I could still hear the music playing. "That can't be right," I thought. Even after I double-checked that the Game Boy was off, I could still hear the music. It wasn't coming from the game; it was playing inside my head.

Being eleven years old and never having experienced an auditory hallucination before, I quickly panicked, tears welling up as I realized that the cheery loop of the Pokemon battle theme was something only I could hear. After pacing around the room for a few minutes, I composed myself as much as I could and ran to find my mom. Sobbing, I yelled, “I CAN STILL HEAR THE MUSIC.”

My mom thought it was hilarious.

You would have thought this would be a lesson for me, a reminder that my personality leans towards the obsessive. I would like to believe that I've learned moderation over the decades since that Christmas evening. But I know that's not true; I'm a sucker for a good game cycle.

So, when a friend recommended Stardew Valley--the farming simulator developed by Eric Barone that took Steam by storm last year and is purportedly the gentlest of games--what she didn't know was that it has been on my Steam wishlist for months. I avoided buying it (instead sticking with games that promised a tight 10-hour play-through at the very most), sensing that doing so would toss me in the middle of a time-suck that I wouldn't be able to crawl out of. "I can't go through what I went through with The Sims again," I told myself, like a weathered sailor who has promised never to return to the sea. Squinting into the middle distance, I mumbled, "I can't go back."

But my friend's off-hand suggestion came when my partner just happened to be bored, and that was all I needed to shrug off my gut instinct.

It's been two weeks since I downloaded Stardew Valley. I've played about 60 hours, which averages to about 4 hours a day. Old habits die hard.

And here's the thing: though about 30 of those hours were spent making friends with villagers, figuring out crop price points, and plotting out time management strategies, the other 30 hours were spent in genuine bewilderment about whether or not I like the game. There's almost nothing to it, but I feel continually compelled to play it during any down moment. I think it might just be the most perfect construction of the addicting game loop that I've tried to avoid all my life. And in that way, I think the game might be a critique of itself.

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Undertale

It's the truism of our time: the internet will find a way to ruin everything you like. This has the same steadfast reliability to it as Rule 34 (the invented--but nonetheless utterly true--idea that, if something exists, there is smut dedicated to it). And it makes sense: the internet is vast and deep and, ultimately, if you stare into the void, something unpleasant will come bubbling to the surface. Or sometimes it's less subtle than that. (See: your fave is problematic)

For example, you: 1) play Portal; 2) think: "Oh man, this game is awesome;" and 3) decide to do a quick Google search about the game and BLAM, suddenly you're neck deep in "The Cake is a Lie" jokes that go on forever and ever. Inundated with so much garbage, it becomes easy to forgot why you liked the game in the first place. The subtleties are replaced with one joke repeated ad nauseum until the words don't even seem like words anymore.

I'd argue that the same thing happened to Undertale, a 2015 game put out by Toby Fox and lovingly styled after Japanese role-playing games ("JRPGs") like Earthbound. If you were curious about the game and decided to do a quick search on Tumblr, I'd guess that your reaction would be, "How did an 8-bit skeleton in slippers become a sex symbol?"

But, despite all the grey noise that now exists about it on the internet, there's a reason Undertale reached Portal levels of internet adoration: they're both unexpected things of beauty in the simplest of wrappings.

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TWO DOTS & "REAL GAMES"

I've always loved fantasy. In middle school, I worked my way through Dragonlance, Dealing with Dragons, and Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern. (There was a definite uniting trend to all of these. See if you can guess what it was.) I gobbled up books by Philip Pullman and Garth Nix and Tamora Pierce. I wrote my own fantasy series, and handed it in to my poor fourth-grade teacher to read. I think she gave me a gold star sticker, which I assumed meant that she wanted to read more. So sorry, Mrs. Brock.

So, when my brother started playing World of Warcraft when I was in high school, I thought it would be a natural continuation, an exploration further into the wilds of one of my preferred genres, And it was! Right up until the moment that I left the land of computer-controlled non-playable characters ("NPCs") and had to interact with other players.

It was just a different side of the same internet-world I encountered during my foray onto music fan forums: when I signed up for the Dandy Warhols board, I made the requisite introductory post, and was immediately greeted by a "Tits or GTFO" reply. Since my screen name was "BlueCanary," I posted a picture of a blue bird, with a big red arrow pointing to the bird's chest. Then I never logged in again.

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THE WITNESS

First things first, a confession: I have not finished The Witness. I don't know if I'm even an eighth of the way through. Heck: I don't know if I'm ever going to finish it, the way things are going. (I might tear out all my hair first, and I don't really have that much hair to spare, to be honest.)

The Witness was put out in 2016 by a development team headed by Jonathan Blow, creator of the beloved indie platformer/puzzler Braid. I was planning to skip The Witness. Something about the Cult of Jonathan Blow doesn't appeal to me: there's a dude centricity to it that feels alien and like I'm not welcome. It's a mostly baseless feeling, though perhaps fueled a little by Indie Game: The Movie, which was such a boy's club that I almost shrugged myself out of existence while watching it.

But a couple of friends I trust recommended it to me. Maybe I have retroactively imagined it, but didn't they had a certain desperate gleam in their eye? Wasn't their bag brimming over with graph paper, scrawled with lines and notes? Didn't I ask, "Isn't it just a bunch of puzzles?" And didn't they respond, "OH, YES, IT ABSOLUTELY IS."

And goddamn if I've suddenly found myself in the same boat. Goddamn if it's not me buying up graph paper like it's going out of style and thinking about puzzles literally all the time. Even if I never finish it, I feel confident in saying that The Witness is infuriating, beautiful, surprising, stupid, and genuinely smart. In short: it's excellent.

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PAPERS, PLEASE

March 8 was International Women's Day. I went to the San Francisco Gender Strike, a feminist march against US Immigration and Customs Enforcement ("ICE"). Speakers went up, one by one, each with their own personal way of encouraging our community to take a stand against mass deportation, xenophobia, and policies that threaten and affect members of our community.

One speaker came up and, in the middle of their speech, directly challenged law enforcement, ICE agents, congresspeople, etc. to stop following orders. It was a clear directive: stop enforcing policies that are hurting real people.

It seemed such a simple thing when it was stated like that.

 It's easy to imagine what I would do if I were one of the people being addressed by that plea: I imagine myself standing up to some boss, quietly stating, "No, absolutely not. This policy is wrong." I imagine the accompanying swell of music & the shift into a more technicolor world. I imagine the resulting biopic where I am played by some Hollywood up-and-comer hoping for an Oscar nomination.

Like I said: so simple.

But I've played Papers, Please, a 2013 "dystopian document thriller" game put out by Lucas Pope, and I'm afraid that I know something a little darker about myself: how easy it is for me (and you, and all of us) to follow rules. And how that choice isn't extraordinary or even intentionally malicious, it's the most mundane thing in the world.

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NIGHT IN THE WOODS

I, like many, was waiting on Infinite Fall's Night in the Woods for a while.

In the reliable pang of Kickstarter-backed-game patience, I watched delay notification after delay notification come from Infinite Fall headquarters. But I'm used to playing the waiting game. I'm not gonna gripe if a game coming from a three-person development team takes a while to come out. The fact that such a small team can make something at all seems like a blessing.

So, I played (and fell head-over-heels for) the mini game Infinite Fall put out in the interim. I kept my ear to the ground. And, about a month ago, Night in the Woods finally came out into the sun.

It wasn't what I expected at all. Or it was. And I loved it. Or I didn't.

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LOST CONSTELLATION

A few years ago, Infinite Fall ran a (very, very successful) Kickstarter campaign for a game called Night In The Woods. Like many Kickstarter games, it took much longer to come out than they first promised.

In an attempt to allay some frustration, Infinite Fall put out a few short auxiliary games to let folks know that, yes, they were working on something and that, yes, it would be worth the wait.

Since then, Night in the Woods has come out (and it's good! I think! I'm going to write more about it later!), but it's one of those short auxiliary games--Lost Constellation--that stands up completely on its own.

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KENTUCKY ROUTE ZERO

Anyone who has known me for any length of time has probably heard me proselytize about Kentucky Route Zero, an episodic point-and-click "adventure," put out by Cardboard Computer.

It's a game in five acts. Although only four acts have been released so far, even if act V never comes, I'll continue to hold it up as a stunning example of how much innovation can occur with even the simplest mechanics and most familiar stories.

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