Every Day The Same Dream

December 21, 2009 7:30 PM

"Every Day The Same Dream," via the Experimental Gameplay Project
posted by brundlefly (38 comments total)

I think I've figured out all but one of the "steps."
posted by roll truck roll at 7:58 PM on December 21, 2009

Ditto. Unless it's something meta like turning off the game, I'm missing the last step.
posted by Solon and Thanks at 8:08 PM on December 21, 2009

It's nothing meta, there are five actual things to do within the game. Have you gone everywhere, and done (or not done) everything?
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 8:11 PM on December 21, 2009

Try to catch the leaf. Try to leave your car. Go nude. Go left. Give up. Watch yourself give up.
posted by flatluigi at 8:13 PM on December 21, 2009

There are spoilers in the Jay Is Games thread on the game.
posted by brundlefly at 8:14 PM on December 21, 2009

meh
posted by rebent at 8:15 PM on December 21, 2009

Err... and here. Should have previewed.
posted by brundlefly at 8:16 PM on December 21, 2009

It's possible to beat it, but the ending is...disappointing.
posted by nasreddin at 8:17 PM on December 21, 2009

That was really cool! It reminds me a little of the point-and-click with the deserted town where you have to find birds.
posted by codacorolla at 8:17 PM on December 21, 2009

Ooh, the leaf. I actually killed myself on the second day.
posted by Solon and Thanks at 8:17 PM on December 21, 2009

I love when a sophomore with a philosophy minor decides to make what is only in the most technical sense a game.
posted by kafziel at 8:18 PM on December 21, 2009 [1 favorite]

that was a bad game
posted by Greg Nog at 8:22 PM on December 21, 2009

Hmm. I was thinking there'd be a bit more to the ending, but I did like it. The music wasn't bad, and I liked the design. I was thinking the end would have something to do with the crosswalk, but sadly, no.
posted by Ghidorah at 8:22 PM on December 21, 2009

This is brilliant. LOVE LOVE LOVE.

From an interview with Derek Yu (creator of spelunky)

Have you noticed like any kind of trends in indie games like that, or any idea why things are coming about the way they are? Do you think about that kind of stuff?

DY: How do I want to put it? It's interesting because I feel like there's sort of this idea that you can have games that are almost like the equivalent of sketches in drawing, or something like that. I think it's the result of tools getting better and more freely available, that you can actually doodle with a game, in a sense. I think that's part of it. And also just being able to put something up, sites like Kongregate, Newgrounds...

TIGSource.

DY: ...TIGSource, and IndieGames.com, which are promoting these games. All these things just enable people to essentially doodle game ideas.

Kind of games vignettes.

DY: Yeah, yeah. These games, they're almost like prototypes that are a little more complete and polished. And I think for sure they deserve to be recognized alongside what I guess you might call "fuller" game experiences.

I think that the direct result of people being able to do these sort of sketches with games is that you can touch on sort of raw emotional feeling, and stuff like that. Try to just hit a nerve that's hard to hit if you're working on a game for months as opposed to weeks or days.

This is exactly one of those 'doodles' that he's talking about, and I love them. There needs to be a word for them. They're basically poems written in flash.

See also:

Passage/Gravitation
The Majesty of Colors
Today I Die
I Wish I Were the Moon
posted by empath at 8:37 PM on December 21, 2009 [13 favorites]

I guess in my opinion this isn't on the same level as any of the other things empath linked to. The ending was not actually.
posted by Caduceus at 8:44 PM on December 21, 2009

Interesting premise, somewhat clever. Needs more FPS action & zombie werewolves.
posted by Saxon Kane at 8:53 PM on December 21, 2009

I thought the ending had a real emotional punch to it. My one complaint is that it went back to the title screen too abruptly.
posted by roll truck roll at 9:23 PM on December 21, 2009

This owns
posted by Damn That Television at 9:29 PM on December 21, 2009

HURF DURF THE INAUTHENTICITY OF MODERN LIFE WHICH DIVORCES US FROM THE NATURAL WORLD AND ALIENATES US FROM OUR FELLOW MEN IS SPIRITUAL SUICIDE AND SO IT IS ONLY FITTING THAT WE SHOULD COMPLETE THE PATTERN THROUGH PHYSICAL SUICIDE
posted by Pyry at 9:39 PM on December 21, 2009 [8 favorites]

Is this the thread to bring up "The Path"? It's not free, and I have yet to play it, but from the demo and related material I've seen about it, it seems to fit into the "game as an experience/story/vignettes rather than to win or achieve goals" mold. Anybody played it? Worth it to plunk down the cash to download? As much as I like atmospheric horror and fairy tales referring to the precariousness of ladies coming to age, I'd still like to hear a recommendation of sorts...(oh, "The Path" brought to you by the folks who also made "The Graveyard"; download here. Choose if you want to pay money for the option to possibly die.)
posted by kkokkodalk at 10:10 PM on December 21, 2009 [1 favorite]

Did anyone get Andie MacDowell in the end?
posted by maxwelton at 10:10 PM on December 21, 2009 [2 favorites]

I took all five steps, but then left my guy standing in his underwear next to the crosswalk hand for a few hours. It's going to change any minute now.

Alternately, I call it "Waiting For Don't Go." I'm so sorry.
posted by sysinfo at 10:25 PM on December 21, 2009 [6 favorites]

Pyry: "IT IS ONLY FITTING THAT WE SHOULD COMPLETE THE PATTERN THROUGH PHYSICAL SUICIDE"

My ending was not the character's suicide, but rather him watching someone else jump. I also went and wandered around when I should have been going to work and got myself fired and a guitar was strumming the whole time. And yeah I jumped a few times rather than sitting down at the cubicle but it's not like that is the end of the game or anything.

Computer games are a fundamentally alienated medium, so I don't really think that alienation is what this game is about.
posted by idiopath at 10:43 PM on December 21, 2009

I managed to watch the shirts and suitcase blink at epileptic levels while the buttons did nothing until I turned the game off.

Do I win?
posted by Navelgazer at 10:43 PM on December 21, 2009

Computer games are a fundamentally alienated medium, so I don't really think that alienation is what this game is about.

I think the 'stuck in traffic' scene and multiple shots of lines of identical workers in cubicles suggest otherwise.

My ending was not the character's suicide, but rather him watching someone else jump.

At the end everyone except you disappears, suggesting that you are watching your own suicide, and perhaps that all the previous experiences were simply your thoughts just before you jump, the decisions you regret not making.
posted by Pyry at 11:13 PM on December 21, 2009 [1 favorite]

It's a shame there's not a 'stay in bed all day' option.
posted by iamkimiam at 11:18 PM on December 21, 2009

"Jobs are boring. Kill yourself."

What a great game.

I think Canabalt beats this one on pretty much every level, from gameplay to music to the layered and interesting meanings which can be drawn from it.

Someone needs to explain to these people how to wield a calligraphy pen instead of a freaking baseball bat.
posted by Scattercat at 12:12 AM on December 22, 2009

The best part of that game is that it forces you to walk at the pace of a snail. "Oh yes, I've decided to radically change my life, pet cows, and come to work naked. Run? Jesus man are you crazy!?" *jumps off building*
posted by Peztopiary at 1:06 AM on December 22, 2009 [1 favorite]

Don't be bored at work, be dead!
posted by Juicy Avenger at 1:31 AM on December 22, 2009

Oh man, I LOVED the music. Game got tired quickly though.
posted by AzzaMcKazza at 2:02 AM on December 22, 2009

I am 51 yrs old. There were two huge culture-changing phenomenons that were a minute "after my time:" hip hop and gaming. These are the things not embedded into my psyche as a child, like say, television and rock and roll which the generation before me had to struggle to comprehend and appreciate but for me were as natural as air.

Hip hop I came to understand and appreciate through Tupac, "3 Feet High..." and a myriad other expressions.

Gaming has been a much tougher climb. A friend of mine used to say "if it's not spitting out 20s at the end then I don't get the point" and it's been a struggle to suppress the dismissive urges and break through to an understanding of what the medium is really about. My 20yr old and 17yr old sons have only been helpful in helping me weed out the superfluous pop/poop trash of corporations.

Then I discovered Jason Rohrer. Here is someone who was speaking the language of art and expression in the context of the gaming medium. I needed, badly, someone like Rohrer to help me understand what the core of the medium is - someone to strip it down to it's equivalent of John Lee Hooker's your-career-is-an-E-chord to where the medium is barely there to hold up the emotional impact.

With works like "Same Day" I inch closer to the understanding of how powerful the medium can be (and how many opportunities have been missed in the last 25 years by game developers). Here's another game with the absolute bare bones - the I-IV-V, 12 bar blues of video gaming where the idea of "beating" the game makes about much sense as "beating" Abbey Road or Deadeye Dick because you ran out of things to hear and see without repeating.

We can argue about the meaning and message of this particular game (I happen to like my art on the nihilistic, dark, unresolved side) but I appreciate the essentialism of the execution and had several moments throughout it (like going without your tie) that kind of delighted me, in the exact same way as reading a cool passage of Vonnegut.

I might have liked this game a little better if it picked a side between the quiet rebellion (cow, leaf, naked) and dark (cemetery, jumping) but I still enjoyed it overall and I'm glad I played it.
posted by victors at 2:23 AM on December 22, 2009 [13 favorites]

I enjoyed it. The music was fantastic. You can call it sophomoric philosophy all you want, but it's something different from SHOOT THEM IN THE FACE IV which what flash and mainstream gaming is mostly made out of.

If nothing else, I find it thoroughly fascinating that I get to watch an entirely new artform trying to find its voice. This is what cinema must have felt like in the beginning.
posted by slimepuppy at 2:41 AM on December 22, 2009

I can't find the double-jump power-up.
posted by lekvar at 3:34 AM on December 22, 2009

I wanted to stay in the graveyard longer!
posted by HopperFan at 3:36 AM on December 22, 2009

Guess this is as good a thread as any to finally join Metafilter and start rambling.

I like this game's visual direction a lot. I think it's a bit silly to complain about the inability to run: A part of the game's narration, particularly the part that's told through the gameplay rather than through the stilted dialogue, relies on that slow-moving atmosphere. Without the backed-up cars, for instance, I wouldn't have thought to get out of the car to begin with. (Is that a spoiler?)

That said, I do agree with some of the people who were complaining that it's not much of a game. The comparison to Canabalt is a little unfair — this was an attempt to say something more than it was to make a playable game; it was part of a specific project to make a game very quickly in the "art game" genre, which means that both pretension and unfinishedness are a part of the system — but the art games that work best for me are the ones that are somehow capable of conveying meaning directly through the gameplay, and making that gameplay somewhat meaningful. There's Passage, of course, but I think that Gravitation, Jason Rohrer's follow-up, was in many ways more successful as a game, because it gave a more meaningful gameplay system and gives you a twist rather than one consistent emotional flow. It loses its effectiveness the second time you play, which is an artistic problem games haven't even begun to deal with, but for now it's my favorite short example of the form.

Is this the thread to bring up "The Path"? It's not free, and I have yet to play it, but from the demo and related material I've seen about it, it seems to fit into the "game as an experience/story/vignettes rather than to win or achieve goals" mold. Anybody played it? Worth it to plunk down the cash to download?

If you can get it in a bundle — I got it in Steam's "ten games for $30" package — then it's nearly worth the first playthrough. It's got the same problem as The Graveyard: It's interesting that they're trying to tell stories, and create atmosphere, but at some point they need to acknowledge how long their gameplay is and figure out how to give a meaning that's worth the time you put in. When you spend an excruciatingly long time walking through the woods as one ten-second loop of music plays, it stops becoming fun. Particularly when they didn't do a good job of hiding the gameplay mechanics much. When you start and the world is magical and mysterious, then it's exciting because what's happening is so unlike what's going on in other games; but when you've figured out why they designed the game like you did, suddenly it becomes as bareboned and unplayable as any other game lacking gameplay.

If you're looking for artsy games, can I recommend Blueberry Garden? That one stunned me in how it combined a simplicity of gameplay with an extremely complex world. For all it won an award, it never got much popular attention, which I think is a real shame. I'd also recommend the two games by Ice Pick Lodge, Pathologic and The Void. Pathologic spellbound me for a solid two weeks when I first discovered it — it's so unlike anything else, and in the best way possible — so I recommend it despite it's being admittedly a shitty game. I'm still going through The Void, but so far it seems beautiful, pretentious, and harder than I'd like it to be, so I guess it's worth the rec.
posted by Rory Marinich at 5:36 AM on December 22, 2009 [9 favorites]

up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, b, a, enter

Nope, does nothing. Conclusion: This cannot be a game.
posted by schleppo at 7:42 AM on December 22, 2009 [1 favorite]

Rory Marinich: Oh god, I'm soooo fucking happy you mentioned Pathologic. I found out about that game pretty recently (funnily enough, the "underappreciated games" thread on SA). I'm really itching to play it, but I'm on a Mac. For those who don't care about possible spoilers before playing this game, I highly recommend this review/explanation of the game. Especially part two, where the writer talks about how the game affects the way you think, and in particular the argument he had with his friend who was playing the game with him around the same time (the game isn't multiplayer, they were playing separately), but as a different character.
posted by kkokkodalk at 9:45 AM on December 22, 2009

schleppo: "up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, b, a, enter

Nope, does nothing. Conclusion: This cannot be a game."

However, I - D - K - F - A does give you unlimited ennui.
posted by brundlefly at 9:59 AM on December 23, 2009 [1 favorite]