CATMITTS'S PROFILE

actually those last two posts were kind of missing the point in that they didn't really distinguish between bad and deliberately bad games like the OP did. basically i think there's always a distinction between bad-bad and good-bad. good-bad is just so awful and perverse and inexplicable that it has its own weird charm to it, like the fried shrimp boss of monster world or those choose-you-adventure games where every decision leads to an arbitrarily horrible death or even the fact that Bubsy Bobcat shrieks out horrible grating one-liners every couple of seconds. bad-bad is just dull and unimaginative stuff. even in unintentionally bad stuff there's always a split between this stuff! for every troll 2 or the room there's mountains of grinding unwatchable stuff which is just absolutely meritless. most of it wins oscars.

the point of bad game design is recognising what makes that stuff so appealing and then trying to capture that. that makes it sound more calculated than it actually is but i thik everyone has some idea of what makes some bad stuff worthwhile so. it is still bad by the humourless and awful standards of VIDCON CONSUMER MINDSET but who even cares?

the concept of quality in relation to videogames is a direct result of the latecapitalist tendanciestowards a blurring of the real and the imaginary which jean baudrillard referred to as "hyperreality"; it can also be seen in the success of james camerons avatar, of the fake towns and theme-park rides in disneyworld, in wax museums, in hdr imaging, and other products which attempt to be "more real than the real thing". it is a focus on immersion and experience above all else. videogames began to follow this pattern when advances in graphical and musical technology, combined with a more thorough knowledge of game design, led to more and more focus on this same immersive aspect. games were no longer external objects to be decoded and eventually 'won'; they were experiences first and foremost attempting to immerse the player in an entire world.
hyperreality, the cross-product of technological advances with debord's "society of the spectacle", is not only dangerous in that it creates a sense of alienation and distance from the real (see: those people who got depressed after watching avatar because they couldnt frolic with catpeople irl, those people who starved to death playing WoW) but also in that it is facist, or at least conductive to fascism, in the sense that this distancing from the real in favor of immersion in a spectacle is exactly the basis for fascist fake politics.
in order to break down this hyperrealist tendancy it is necessary to destroy all notion of game "quality" in favor of a deliberate badness and clumsiness which not only breaks the vampiric immersion with the gameworld but also in showing games as a direct product of human intelligence or lack thereof gives rise to a new area of vidcon dialectics: rather than becoming sluggishly absorbed in an electronic toy, the player finds his or herself frustrated and denied at every turn, leading to a deeper questioning of the societal conditioning inherent in the act of playing games and inspiring them to enter the field of discourse itself and creating more games because if those clowns can do it, etc. this is the ultimate challenge for videogames in the 21st century....



actually i just really like the weirdness and imagination of horrible old unplayable commodore games!

all the greatest music of the 20th century was made by girls who couldnt play, no joke

edit for proof

psychosomnium

hey, thanks for the review! "perversely fascinating" was what i was going for, although i sorta wish i had spent a little longer on interactions and things: part of the idea was that i liked running around rpg towns and things and didn't like battling endless green slimes to do do, but in retrospect some more varied puzzles/sidequests could have helped remove the feeling of endlessly pressing z to talk. also i approve of dada-based rating systems