Beyond Play Forever

Right at the top of this year, I got covid for the first time (as far as I'm aware). At some point in that illness, I decided two things: I was going to quit everything I was doing, and I was going to fucking buy UFO 50 and play this thing that sounded cool as hell. I managed to quit a handful of things (the comp and the youtube channel mainly). And now I have over 1,000 hours in UFO 50 according to both Steam and the in-game clock.

A portrait of a healthy year, for sure.

I think UFO 50 is a phenomenal achievement and it is the first game I can think of in I don't know how many years that I would even consider putting in a top 10 games of all time list. I initially played it along the lines of how it's presented: There are fifty games listed in chronological order of their release over the course of the 80s, so I dipped my toe into each one in that order, played it until I was satisfied I had an idea of what it was, and moved on to the next one.

On those merits, I thought this game was really neat; each game had its clear genre precedent, they got more or less complex as time went on, there were, importantly, three distinct win conditions for each game (the garden gift being generally "touch this game for a little while or in a specific interesting way," the gold being "hit credits," and the cherry being "get credits with some sort of stipulation that either has you play the game against the grain or very very seriously;" more on the garden later). Little things like that immediately helped guide my own play without feeling overbearing. Given that it's a game that's fifty games, the small ways that the structure of the game helps it get out of your way is a huge part of what makes the whole thing work.

There were two outside factors that came in fairly early, also. One was in the Nextlander podcast, where Vinny Caravella mentioned that there was an idle game that generated resources while you played the collection called Pilot Quest near the end of the fifty. I launched that one out of chronology and picked at it as I played the rest. It's probably my favorite game in the collection; more on that later as well.

The second was that Patrick Klepek, on some podcast or maybe stream? mentioned that there was this show called The Eggplant Show and they were doing this project called A Year of UFO 50. One game a week for a year, with an intro and outro to round it out. I was like: Cool. I listen to a lot of podcasts, and once upon a time I kind of did that with Kingdom Hearts and this show called Got It Memorized? and I found that really edifying. So I started following Eggplant's Year, having already touched most of the games.

That meant I ended up with a sort of two-track experience with UFO 50: on any random off day, I might jump in and continue hopping through my own chronological touching and assessing, getting hung up for a month on the brilliant little 30 hour RPG Grimstone or torching through three games in a sitting that just weren't hitting for me, while popping back in for my fourth or fifth (or fifteenth) playthrough of Pilot Quest. Then an episode of A Year of UFO 50 would drop, and I would generally sit down, put the episode on, boot up the game, and poke around in it until the episode ended, and maybe a little longer (mostly a lot longer, if I'm being honest).

An unalloyed positive: spending the time listening to the designers that make up the hosts, the guests they talked to, and the voicemailers that became as integral a part of the project gave me a more robust understanding of each of the fifty games, often making me appreciate even the ones I kind of hate playing. That is the bread and butter of a critical appraisal project, in my opinion, and it turns out making bread and butter are both hard to do.

The fact that they accomplished that broadening of my interest regardless of their take on a particular game—if Barbuta or Party House are half as good as the games they described, I never experienced it, and, well, like I said before, we'll get to Pilot Quest shortly at this point—is, I suppose, the avocado on that buttery toast. And hey, while we're here, let's talk about stretching similes.

The hosts of Year repeatedly referred to their approach as the "book club format" of tackling the game. That is, each week then went in as sight-unseen as possible to the game, played it, then discussed it on its own terms and in relation to the things that came before, with variations on how strict any individual host was on any individual week. The spoiler-aversion makes the most obvious book club relation—going chapter by chapter through Capital or A Thousand Plateaux or The Écrites or Beyond the Boundary—a non-starter; those big non-fiction tomes benefit from context that would be considered spoilers in fiction. I've been in a Proust book club for a couple years where spoilers are being avoided, but In Search of Lost Time—or Discworld or Shannara or The Human Comedy—doesn't fit this approach either, being (allegedly) narratively-coherent works from the jump.

The analogy in books would be, I think, to read a short story collection one story at a time with the aim of finding what threads can be used to scaffold something of a unity together. I've written about how the construction of a short story collection can be as impactful as the individual stories themselves a few times, and I think for A Year of UFO 50 project that critical lens ended up paying dividends with the secret fifty-first game.

As anyone who has worn glasses for any length of time can tell you, though, the lens never magnifies the periphery.

I said near the top that there were certain paratextual aspects of the collection that were crucial. In the short story book club format, it makes a ton of sense that the paratexts that are most heavily relied upon are the ones that enhance that style of engagement without revealing what's next. Year heavily relied upon the Description ("Mortol: 1-2P, Platform, Puzzle; How many people will lay down their lives to save Mortolia?") and History ("March, 1984: The first game in the Mortol series. Conceived by Benedikt Chun, but directed by Gerry Smolski.") of each game in introducing them. There are some obvious breadcrumbs here, but perhaps most is the next paratext that Year most often returned to: analyzing the credits sequence to find out what powerplays or collaborations or departures were happening behind the scenes in this fictional development studio. And when you beat Mortol, the credits end with a particular sequence: BENZ-MODE, an obvious terminal code if you've been poking around.

There's that whole triad of win conditions, though, that I mentioned earlier, and the garden, and how I started playing Pilot Quest basically right off the jump. If, instead of prioritizing the Description and History tabs in Mortol you beeline to the Garden tab, you see this instead: "To give a 🏠 gift… Beat level 2-C." Mortol ultimately has 10 levels, so 2-C is the sixth. Credits come after 4-B. Mortol is hard as shit, or at least it was for me. I got the garden gift months before I was able to come back and see credits on it; I'm pretty sure I had spent about a hundred hours in Grimstone and got the cherry before I managed that.

The paratext I was touching was pointing me to this cute little garden where a pig-like creature wanders around a house and lazes near a pond or under a tree. And each time I got something for the house, I wanted to check it out. Not because there were some new fun buttons to push—the entirety of interacting you do with the garden is to tab into it or away from it—but because it was cute. And then, also, there was this other thing: Pilot Quest was farming resources in the background.

There's another piece of paratext within UFO 50 that fits inside the things you might be incentivized toward by letting Pilot Quest idle and disincentivized toward by the short story book club format: the attract screens. If you let UFO 50 idle for a couple minutes without picking a game, it will, like an old arcade game, pick one of the games seemingly at random to show you a snippet of gameplay of. Spoilers abound.

These attract modes—each fifteen seconds long, some seemingly always the same and others having multiple variations—grew alongside me as I started appreciating each of the games in UFO 50 more as I spent more time with them and with Year. There were small, obvious things (there's a run in Mooncat? You can photograph the backgrounds for bonus points in Caramel Caramel?) and bigger things (I doubt I'd have ever had a grasp on Star Waspir's upgrade paths without that attract screen or the episode, but watching the attract screen meant I was able to see the whole screen rather than trying desperately to bob and weave to live even two minutes before getting frustrated).

My visits to the garden and the attract screen have long since surpassed any need I have for accumulation in Pilot Quest; you max out the roguelite progression after beating it twelve times and I'm nearer three dozen. And yet that remains the real core of the game to me, those moments where you put the controller down intentionally.

Eggplant's A Year of UFO 50 ultimately comes down, I think, on a particular dichotomy, and one that is well supported by the work itself: that between work and play. The game's tagline is Play Forever, a statement both joyful and insidious; the myriad references to Aesop & Suits' grasshopper, the hidden frame narrative of Miasma Tower as a game about the making of this collection all point in precisely this direction.

Inside it, though, lensed through different paratext—a lens I in no way intend to convey does not have its own unmagnified periphery—is something else. Including an ahistorical idle game points to it; the garden points to it; the progressive ability to read nuance into what in the arcade amounted to advertisements points to it.

In my experience, UFO 50 actively points to the refusal of this binary. Neither work nor play; turn the screen on and watch. Think, if you'd like; read the screen for the fact that you can kick that Abobo-looking bastard in Fist Hell out of its charge, or the windows of the house for the ghost you gained in Night Manor. Is this work or is this play? Is it narrative or gameplay? Is all of this better if Ian Spinzer hit Chiffon Bola with a car, or is that itself only useful insofar as it goes beyond work and play entirely?