farbs.org and deconstructive gaming

Gaming has never really been regarded as an artform. Sure, you have your Myst, your Deus Ex, even your Plasma Pong, but nothing to suggest the canonical develoment as a genre that other mediums posess. Video games have always stuck with stories that provide entertainment rather than interest, graphics that look awesome rather that particularly pioneering in new forms of design. The developments come when you get some new technology that can handle something like that headshot effect in Gears of War; the influential parts come from innovative ideas relating to inventories or other features strictly video-game related.

Yet farbs.org approach videogames like they're an artform, and as such the games push the form to its limits. I spent a good while playing their most recent game, Rom Check Fail, just for its surprisingly durable entertainment. Then I realised how weird the game is. I found it on Jay is Games, amongst hundreds of poorly-executed, weird little indie games that, when you're past the concept and the feel of the gameplay, are ultimately pithy and generic.

There's no reason why Rom Check Fail stood out, from Farbs' homepage, they look like another indie game site in a sea of similar ideas, busting out a couple of freeware games purely for fun. Let's start from the top.

Farbs' first game was Polychromatic Funk Monkey, and yes it is as awesome as it sounds. Farbs tells us: "As anyone who's built maps for tile based platforming games would tell you, building maps for tile based platforming games is fun. That's why I made Polychromatic Funk Monkey, a tile based platforming game about building maps for tile based platforming games." If we're looking at this from a deconstructive perspective, Farbs is basically subverting the very idea of making videogames by making a videogame about making videogames. And surprisingly, it works.
It's less about creating levels than it is a platformer where you build stuff. But I have to say the execution is excellent. The Funk Monkey is a grey blob who can pick up the Polychromatic blocks and place them elsewhere to make structures (expect to build a lot of stairs) , in order to reach all nine checkpoints that allow you to carry more blocks. The whole process takes about an hour, isn't that just a damn nice amount of time to play and complete a game? I'm not sure if I'd play again, but if I did, the map is different every time. Funk Monkey is an inoffensive platformer that takes about as long to master as it does to complete, and I thoroughly recommend it.
However it's ultimately flawed. As each point gets higher up, it also gets further. Which sounds like a difficulty curve, especially as you jump for a platform and miss, falling far away from your beautiful stairs into the sky. But, wait, there's no damage or life system. Press alt and you teleport back up to the highest checkpoint, retaining any blocks you've picked up on your fall. As blocks are randomly scattered in the sky, it becomes easier and easier to drop down onto one of these colourful clouds and pick up all the building materials you need.
At first I thought this was a game about making the most of the materials around you and making the most economic structures possible. Instead it is in fact a game about mastering the gameplay. Once you know how far you can jump, you can get up all your stairs pretty quickly. And you can easily work out a couple of tricks to get wherever you like.
It even looks pretty, stark colours on the fixed black background, efficient and controlled.

Farbs' next game, Fishie Fishie doesn't really do much for me. It's a one-button game that looks like Popcap made it, and indeed Farbs has developed a program that helps create games with a similar interface. So, it looks like you're playing Peggle or something, and similarly you only need one button. Now, I'm not sure whether or not Farbs anticipated this interpretation, but I believe that Fishie Fishie is a straight-up parody of the state of casual gaming.
As it is, I found it pretty much unplayable. Your fish has ADD but in his stomach. If he doesn't eat for like two seconds, he dies. Essentially this means that your average gameplay burst lasts about five seconds. In between these snippets of almost-playing, you get screens showing your points, as well as pointless rhymes that describe the level, which don't skip properly and last (literally) as long as your gameplay does. The one button system is interesting: ON is right, OFF is left, so tapping a button repeatedly makes you go in something like a straight line. I'd already seen it in Mindwinder, a game by Foon that has since been removed, and I doubt it's intentional plagiarism.
GOD Fishie Fishie is annoying. So much that I half-believe it's supposed to be so. Your fish starts spewing out pleas for food when he gets to within a half-second of starving, and the screen flashes red with the word "EAT!" When he dies, he destroys any feelings of relief you may have had by sharing his idiotic thoughts on his situation from beyond the grave ("What the... Oh wow! I'm dead! Weird!" makes me want to strangle the little bugger's bony remains.) Not to mention the godawful graphical choices, like spinning "WELL DONE" signs, etc.
At least Peggle had DIFFERENT annoying animals giving you stupid hints every five seconds. At least Peggle had VARIETY. Fishie Fishie represents what casual games might become if people succumb to these mindless ideas instead of picking up a book or somothing constructive (and what the hell, I actually enjoyed Peggle). This game made me feel bad about downloading it, so maybe it's an antidote? Farbs made a game so mind-numbingly stupid that it has made me feel bad about playing stuff like this to kill time, and in that, Fishie Fishie is successful. God knows if it has more than like, ten levels.

The most addictive of the three is Rom Check Fail. Rom Check Fail deconstructs the elements of your favourite old SNES games that you quite possibly have acquired on those Rom things I hear you can find on the internet. However, your emulator has malfunctioned and spews out glitched versions of the games, mixing heroes and enemies of all your favourite games. Jacques Derrida would be proud. Admittedly I can't recognise like, half of them, but each is unique and offers a variety of different perspectives on the gameplay. Every few seconds, as you're attempting to use your randomly-assigned vessel to kill the random monsters, the screen will glitch, and come out the other side with a brand new layout. Though your map stays the same, until you complete the level, everything else - backdrop, music, block design, enemies, player - changes to something else.
This sounds unplayable. Indeed sometimes it may as well be - like when the x-dimension-bound Space Invaders ship goes up against the ghosts from Gauntlet (apparently). But on the other hand, I always wanted to see what would happen if top-down Link was fighting the gravity-affected Koopas. It works.
The gameplay, expanding on the principles of Fishie Fishie, builds upon the assumption that you are playing videogames because your short attention span won't exactly carry you through War and Peace. It gives you about 3 seconds between glitches, and once you've beaten all 20 levels, delighting in a montage of famous end-game screenshots, well, you go back and do them again. Only faster. The entire game shifts up a notch each time, so that once you're on your 4th run-though (my record), the game struggles to keep up, as enemies fly through walls and go far too fast for you to react. When you restart, what you thought was the fast pace of the game feels like you're playing it on the moon. Here the game deconstructs itself, shifting your perspective of the game while you're playing it, as two things the same seem so much different, like that one optical illusion.
But it's also really addictive. Like Polychromatic Funk Monkey, Farbs nails the pacing of this game, the lives system works perfectly to ensure fairness and challenge, not making it drag on invincibly but not being a one-hit kill scenario either. My main complaint is the lack of a volume control. While I acknowledge that the game works best with sound, it's also frickin' loud, so I usually play it with my speakers muted. But maybe that's another self-conscious element, I mean there could very easily have been a mute button, but Farbs eschews it in favour of SNES authenticity. Yet in spite of the glitchy sounds and colours of a Nintendo eating itself, Rom Check Fail never annoys. Despite using the same micro-gameplay ideas of Fishie Fishie, Rom Check Fail also has brief pre-level breaks which actually don't bug me, like you need to assess how to tackle the enemy on each map and the game allows you to do that.
While I never particularly thought of videogames as art, I never thought of deconstructionism as entertainment. Yet Rom Check Fail can take Pacman eating Asteroids on a Zelda level with the backdrop of Mario and the tile design of DigDug while the Tetris theme song plays, and make it soom fun. We can now truly incorporate postmodernity into the gaming world.