it’s time to talk about commercial games, because a few of them are doing something important!
the average player and consumer of games is no longer a child, it’s the adult who was that child playing nes games on a small, fuzzy tv. as the player has grown up, so has the game; d3’s work time fun (wtf, or beit hell 2000) is a warioware-like collection of games for adults, a parody of both the working world and how our collect-a-thon, acquisition-oriented games have come to mirror it.
what work time fun’s “jobs” predominantly do is temper stupifying tedium with the threat of terrible consequences for failure. take, for example, lumberjack: a game that requires you to chop logs, over and over, as a hunched and severe-looking old woman sets them on the stump before you. you have only a moment to press a button and swing the axe before you fail and the game ends, so there isn’t much time for hestitation. set, swing, chop. the echo of wood on wood, the sound of a falling axe, and the clatter of split wood on the pile. tonk, swoosh, clatter. tonk, swoosh, clatter.
you want to fall into a pattern, because these actions take no effort, only repetition. but periodically your supervisor will set a bright-eyed fluffy bunny rabbit on the stump instead of a log, and you will have a split second to stay your axe finger or watch the rabbit be chopped into streaming, bloody halves as your character cowers in anguish to horrible discordant noises, the old woman quietly bowing her head in shame. when you fail a task, work time fun lets you know YOU FUCKED UP. and it’s this everpresent threat of failure that keeps the tasks, dull and rhythmic as they are, from ever becoming comfortable. what is is, really, is a kind of masocore warioware.
it reminds me of eddie gorodetsky’s desert bus, a game that requires the player to drive on a straight, featureless road for a eight continuous hours with a bus that veers slightly to the right - so that if the player simply rests a heavy book on the accelerator button, the bus will eventually veer off the road and have to be towed. at the end of the eight-hour trip, the player gains a single point. compare this to work time fun’s pendemonium, a game where the player taps a button to press caps on pens (which occasionally appear upside-down and must be turned) to increase a counter at the bottom of the screen with thirty-six zeroes. or to chick sorting, a game which takes ten minutes to complete at the end of which you’re likely to earn (after docks for misplaced chicks) three dollars of in-game money.
what do you do with that money? spend it in an overpriced vending machine to earn a useless trinket. these things serve no purpose, but there are hundreds of them and they make up sets - the logic of contemporary completion-compulsive game design, and the consumer culture in which contemporary players are immersed, dictates that they must be collected! catch them all!
(work time fun is a psp game. i played my slut’s copy, on a psp borrowed from a friend that has no battery and needs to be plugged into the wall at all times. it was an appropriate way to play the game.)
game center cx, a ds title from indies zero, reflects on the adolescence of games in a different way. it is a game about playing 8-bit games at your best friend’s house, hearing him cheer as you score secret bonuses and gabber on excitedly about the upcoming sequel to your favorite game. it’s ostensibly a collection of 8-bit games that never existed in 8-bit days, but what it really is is a fictionalized digital history of the experience of growing up with a magic box full of secrets beneath your tv.
patrick alexander, in his review of the game, suggests that game center cx’s major achievement is to preserve context: this isn’t just a collection of games, it’s your friend watching you play on the lower screen, howling as you beat a boss and yawning as you open the menu to heal your party for the ninth time, it’s the instruction manual with the enigmatic silhouette of the final boss, a question mark on its chest, it’s the issues of game fan magazine that sit on your best friend’s bookshelf, full of pro-tips and cheat codes for the games you’re playing right now, and previews for the games you can’t wait to play in the future.
at one point you are forced to play a very hard game a second time (the joke is that it’s a special edition, and the only thing changed is the addition of a ramen license). in back issues of your favorite game magazine, though, are cheat codes that make the challenges stupefyingly easy (invincibility, level select, eliminate all other racers - there’s no way not to come in first place!). i think what the developers are trying to convey is the experience surrounding the game, not just the game itself - this is how it was, this is what we did.
patrick thinks this may very well be because the intended audience of this game is not the people who lived the experience but the ones who’ve missed it: the real next generation, the kids who are playing the new games and just now beginning to discover the rich history of videogames underneath them. game center cx is a record, a recollection, a history and tradition.
as the medium changes it is as crucial to take stock of how where we have come from as it is to understand the ways in which it is changing. these two works, i think, trace an interesting trajectory of our medium from its and our collective childhood to the uncomfortable contradictions of our adult life and the games that populate it.
