Bad Games / Not Games

This post is about some thoughts that have come out of my participation in the retroremakes.com Cassette 50 compo. I've put up a separate post giving the context of that competition here, but a brief summary is that the theme was essentially to make a bad one-screen game in celebration of a very old compilation of very bad games.

At first I didn't think much about my participation in Cassette 50. I was looking for small projects and Rob (@retroremakes) mentioned it on Twitter. The theme tickled my nostalgia bone and that was about it. I spent a couple of days writing Kramer vs. Kramer, which I'll write about some other time, and posted it to retroremakes. I was pleased with it and I got a few bits of appreciation from the forum, which was nice, but that was that. Right at the end of the contest I entered PieRim, which I'll write more about later in this post.

Since I entered KvK I've been going back and dipping into the other entries to see what other people have done. At the same time I've been doing this there's been another cycle of the "what games are/should be" debate, mostly driven by the Steam tagging beta resulting in tags like "not a game" and "walking simulator" being applied to some Indie titles. Somewhere along the line I ended up reflecting on the Cassette 50 entries in light of that issue and I've come to think that this odd little competition might offer more than just the silly nostalgia of some middle-aged kids. Or I might be fooling myself.

Meteor Storm by Ian. You either recognise this as the most common type-in game ever, or you weren't there.

The Waffle Commences - "Not A Game"

Disclosure to start: I don't have an issue with "not a game" as a comment. I've said it and will no doubt say it again. I don't see a problem as long as it's understood that it's referring to a narrow definition of "game", i.e.  a system of interaction rules with goals etc. I'm not a card-carrying game formalist, but I get why formalists feel the need to add precision to the terminology in the same way that physicists need to be strict about the difference between weight and mass. I think it's a useful tool for analysis and in talking about what sort of experience a "game" provides.

Of course there's endless room for misunderstanding. If I'm in mixed company and state that "Proteus", for example, is not a game then I'd be unsurprised if someone reacted as if I'm making a negative value judgement and suggesting that it should be banned from using the label. The fact is that some do hold such opinions and people love to pigeon-hole and polarise discussions to avoid thinking too hard. Also, "No, I'm okay with it being sold as a game, but it's not a game. See?" isn't exactly crystal clear.

Sometimes, when I find myself unwisely involved in these discussions, I try to differentiate between videogame as "electronic entertainment experience" and game as formalism. I'll say something like "I agree with formalist approaches to game mechanics and art/zinester approaches to game experience" but it rarely helps much. Occasionally I have tired of someone insisting that things like "The Graveyard" must be included under all definitions of game or you're being exclusionary at a market level and let fly with something like "Well if you insist then it's a spectacularly shit game" and that helps even less.

For me a lot of the combative responses to "not a game" seem misplaced. They're aimed not at what is actually meant by most formalists but at a group of noisemakers who aren't really formalists at all. The target is the "Not On Bloody Steam!" crowd (or NOBS for short) whose idea of "gameyness" is only loosely aligned with formalist definitions. I don't believe the NOBS are arguing from a position that "games have goals" is a useful definition for some analytical purpose. They seem to be arguing simply from an "I like playing the games that have goals and I want the label to only apply to stuff I like and not to have to look at these other things" stance.

A Russian Valentine by Empty Fortress. A game about homosexual love in Sochi.

Anyway, what does this have to do with the Cassette 50 jam? What do a bunch of bad games have to do with whether "Thirty Flights Of Loving" gets to be called a game or not? Well, I'd make the argument that many of them tip the "this shouldn't be called a game because it's not a formal game" view on its head. Many of the Cassette 50 entries meet the "games have goals" definition but they're not games. Alternatively: "It's a game [formally], but it's not a game [experience]."

Jesus Christ, What The Hell Am I On About?

Okay, as an example, here's PieRim from the Cassette 50 compo. I chose one of my own entries so that I can at least speak with authority on intent but a lot of what I'm going to say could apply to a lot of the other Cassette 50 entries.

So it's a game, right? It's a system, there are rules and a goal with a bunch of sub-goals. You guide your little hero avatar around and complete the tasks and then you win. Hurray!

Except I'd argue that, as an experience, it's not a game. It's certainly not a game that the NOBS would like but its not-gameness goes beyond just being unenjoyable for those people. Even to non-NOBS this isn't a game experience. If I intended it to be a game experience and then went about making that experience horrible... well, I can be a git on occasion but that would exceed my rated arsehole envelope.

It's Not A Game. It's A Joke. (And Also A Game)

PieRim is a parody. It's a piss-take of RPG quest structures wrapped in a layer of schoolboy humour and 1980s references. After the full twenty seconds it takes to absorb PieRim's complexity if you walk away thinking about it as a game then something has gone wrong -- you didn't get it. I suspect that's the same not getting it that applies if you play "Dear Esther" and say it's a rubbish FPS.

But there are plenty of films that are parodies and they're still films, right? "The Colour of Magic" is a parody of fantasy novels and still a fantasy novel. Weird Al Yankovic songs are still songs. Yes, but these things are intended to remain appreciable in terms of the form. They're mostly parodies of theme and style. PieRim sacrifices the actual game experience in order to comment on the form. It is a game with goals only to demonstrate the flaccidity of goals as a game mechanic without the experience elements. If a film, book or song did this they'd be unwatchable/unreadable/unlistenable in the same way that PieRim lacks any semblance of gameplay entertainment.

Most of the other Cassette 50 entries also seem to be made with similar intent. They're jokes. Sometimes the joke is just that they're awful, many times the joke is almost purely referential, others are satirising things outside of games. The common thread is that there's no apparent aspiration to provide a game to enjoy as a game.

Dare To Win by Empty Fortress. I found the interpretation of Who Dares Wins' graphic style hilarious.

Again, I'm not claiming that you can't define PieRim or the other entries as games. They fit both a reasonable formal definition and the wibbly inclusive "interactive electronic experience" definition. What I'm saying is that it requires an obtuse approach to consider formal gameness as their primary quality and to judge them by how good they are in that regard. It requires an even more obtuse approach to look at something like Proteus, which clearly isn't attempting to offer a formal game experience, and consider its gameness as the correct criteria for judging its validity.*

So, to sum up:

Some videogames are games.
Some videogames are not games.
Some videogames are games but only in the same way that tomatoes are fruits - don't put custard on them.

Enjoy your videogames.



* Although I maintain that it's perfectly okay to point out that it lacks that gameness and that you'd rather have that gameness.

Cassette 50

Sometime now-ish the retroremakes.com Cassette 50 games compo/jam will have a line drawn under it and become a very modest bit of history. It's a tiny event in what has become an endless parade of game jams. It doesn't have the cachet of Ludum Dare or the topicality of the FlappyJam. Hardly anyone will ever play the games from it and most people who play one of them probably won't want to play another. The output is intentionally unapproachable to pretty much everyone.

So, I joined in! Here are my two entries:

Kramer vs. Kramer - a heartbreaking rendering of the Academy Award winning film starring Dustin Hoffman. Playable Flash Version

PieRim - an epic quest to rescue a nation from making do with a cheese sandwich. Playable Flash Version

What the Hell?

Some explanatory context for those not familiar with the reference: Cassette 50 was a games compilation for 8-bit home computers published by a company called Cascade back in the 1980s . The compilation was heavily advertised in back pages of home computing magazines and offered fifty games for £9.95. Considering the average game cost £5-6 each at the time this was quite an offer. Eventually they juiced up the deal with a "free" calculator watch. Surely there was no way to lose?

Cascade's most evolved trap... I mean advertisement. Note the glowing praise quoted for Frogger.

Of course nothing is that good a deal (well, Steam sales and Humble Bundles have spoiled us but, back then, nothing was that good a deal). The truth behind the ad was that the games were all throwaway amateur projects written by teenagers for a tenner a piece. Those unfortunate enough to persuade their parents to write a cheque received in return a couple of hours of misery working through the tape and having the youthful optimism beaten out of their heads one shitty game at a time.

If you didn't buy it you knew of someone who had and the curious would borrow it. That's how I got it. The owner/primary victim, a school friend, tried to persuade me not to bother. Being too stupid to take his good advice I kept asking and he eventually agreed to lend it to me. The tape was handed over apologetically on a Friday lunchtime.

"No, really, they're all shit. Here, have Wheelie for the weekend too so you've got something decent," he said, trying to protect his game swapping credentials. It was a good move and I still lent him Scuba Dive the following week. Smart guy. I should have kept in touch.

I don't recall how many of the games I played. I doubt it was half of them. I just remember being amazed at how bad the games really were. They were all written in BASIC and mostly worse than the type-in listings in magazines. (For those too young to remember, tape duplication was too expensive back then to put a tape on the cover, so magazines would print game code for you to type in yourself. And we did. I'm not kidding.) I also remember, thanks to not having wasted my money, finding it quite funny.

Needless to say the Cascade Cassette 50 became a sort of touchstone for those who grew up playing videogames on those 8-bit computers, at least in the UK. Which brings us back to the jam/competition theme - write a game celebrating the awfulness of Cassette 50. There was also an optional sub-theme, which was to write a one-screen version of some bigger game. A bad one.

Why Write a Bad Game?

On its face it seems like a bit of a waste of time writing something intentionally bad and I made my first entry, Kramer vs Kramer, on a whim without thinking I'd get much out of it. It turned out to be great in a number of ways though:

•  Having the freedom to create something terrible is liberating. I spent very little time worrying about decisions and the whole thing had a great creative flow.
•  It didn't take very long. With the mentioned flow and the freedom to not polish KvsK took a couple of days (even with a fair chunk of non-game effort) and PieRim took less than 2 hours.
•  I used both games as a testbed for a simple framework for prototyping and jams I'm putting together.
•  It was a huge giggle. I mean I was literally laughing out loud while implementing things like the Billy tantrum code. I don't care if anyone else finds them funny. I found them hilarious.
•  I got to join up with the bunch over at retroremakes. I've swung by there many times in the past but never signed up to the forum. It seems like a great little dev community. 

So, all in all, it was a great success. If you've got a nostalgic twinge from the advert above or just fancy playing a bunch of terrible games then head over to retroremakes.com and check out the entries here.