But That Was [Yesterday]

I really enjoyed it. But I agree about the multiple endings. Guess some googling is in order.

...interesting.

Okay, I'm in the "not-a-game" camp. Care to make your case?

Personally, I'd rather have watched an edited version of it. The interactive elements were repetitious and mostly got in the way.

Very curious now. Looking forward to trying it.

According to Rules of Play by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman:

I feel the same as Salen and Zimmerman, and would classify ... But That Was [Yesterday] as a game under such a definition. Granted, the gameplay is basic and rather shallow, though used to good effect; shallow nonetheless from a gameplay standpoint, though. But to better discuss, I have to ask why you don't feel it is a game?

I'm a bit surprised to see as much dispute over whether this is really a Game or not, as if a Game must meet some strict codification of guidelines before Game status is bestowed upon it. I thought Today I Die was a Game. Even though I wasn't a big fan of it -- at one point, I believe I even called it "broken" in its Fringe Busters thread -- I thought Every Day The Same Dream was a Game too.

And this Game actually has more Game-like elements than either of those, to tell you the truth. Startlingly, there are moments where the player is not only asked to learn a mechanic, but to demonstrate their understanding of it through a sequence of tests. Some archaeologists have taken to identifying these interactive phenomena as "levels."

Are the mechanics that drive those interactions elegantly implemented? Not really, no. The responsiveness (or lack thereof) of one mechanic introduced later in the Game came dangerously close to ruining the narrative impact behind a couple of moments through sheer tedium. And another mechanic, introduced much earlier in the game, seem to jam up the proverbial opera behind the Game's primary metaphor.

(SPOILER: If I'm looking back to look away from my past, then why is my future -- where I want to go to -- in the same direction as my past? Is this like that Star Trek: The Next Generation episode where Picard is an old guy out in some vineyard in France?)

But we never have these conversations about whether a Game is really a Game with terrible mainstream Games, do we? To offer the context of another Game for consideration, I humbly present the following comments from various YouTube scholars in reference to Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, a NES tie-in release to the 1992 movie:

These people are incapable of spelling [color=purple]MUSIC[/color] and even they recognize that Home Alone 2: Lost in New York is a Game, albeit one of the most awful Games that has ever been played by anybody.

And yet, the entry that is presented here, which has mechanics and a narrative that are easily more satisfying than one of the worst NES Games of all time, isn't called a Game quite so naturally. Why?

Is it the length? ("That's what she said," he says.) I guess it's certainly possible that the twenty minutes of playing and finishing But That Was Yesterday resides in a similar part of my brain as the twenty minutes of playing Back to the Future 2 And 3, exorcising the foul cartridge from my NES and then jumping up and down on it with golf shoes until it started making a delicious crunching sound beneath my heels.

Is it that it's presented to you in a web browser? Well, everybody keeps saying that FarmVille is ushering in The End of Gaming As We Know It and, unless FarmVille is part of some transcendent super-medium that exists beyond all passive and interactive forms of expression, that means that one's probably a Game too.

Ultimately, I feel like we have a hard enough time talking about whether Games are Art or not. Do we really need to complicate things by arguing whether Games are Games as well?

By that very broad definition, yes, this is a game. It's a low bar to set, but it won't serve the discussion at all to go down a rabbit hole of trying to define what is and isn't a game. My apologies for getting that started.

I should have rephrased my request to be for some further justification as to this game's quality. It's neither intellectually nor physically engaging and proffers at best a trite and juvenile emotional experience. Whether this is a game or not, it's not very good.

For instance, I'd like Pyroman to justify this statement:

In what way? What great feeling or meaning is conveyed by asking you to press left, right, or up? Do you ever have an option to advance the story without pressing a button? There's no more meaning in being asked to press a button in this game than there is in any other. It's just input.

Also I would say it's not fair to criticize a game like this for having controls that don't feel good, or at least it's not as relevant a criticism. The goal of the old NES games you mentioned was to give the player an enjoyable experience, so its fair to criticize those controls as being unenjoyable. But clearly this game, and others like it, don't share the same goals. The controls in this game serve to reinforce the metaphor, it doesn't matter whether or not you feel good while running and jumping as long as the metaphor is being communicated to you. Personally I found the controls pretty good for an indie project like this.

_______________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________

Attributing "goals" might as well be the same thing as discerning creative intent and that, in itself, is a pretty tricky business. Rather than trying to decide whether bad controls are bad because the creator secretly wanted them to be bad or not, I'd rather evaluate that facet of the game at face value.

Or let's put it another way: all communication between the game and the player takes place through some form of interactivity, so I don't think it's really out of bounds to criticize the quality of that player/game conversation when the game places unnecessary or undesirable constraints or difficulties on that interactivity.

I played this one a few weeks ago.

Something that really strikes me with this game is how I felt playing it. Shame. Sadness. Belonging. These are emotions that console-budget titles have failed to pull out of my cold, calculated nature. I find that previous attempts have come off as cliche', uninteresting, or unconvincing. It's funny you mention Heavy Rain it's the perfect example of a game that tried to pull me in emotionally that flopped. Yet, here is this game that was probably made in a month using abstract art combined with a great adaptive soundtrack that wrung my heart like the opening of Up or the end of WALL-E. I really connected with pieces of this story and as far as I know, that's a first.

Spoilers obviously, but that bridge has been crossed.

Pyroman brought up the funeral scene, and I agree with him, but I would also say that the initial challenge of figuring out how to deal with the wall was a crucial bit of interaction. The player needs to realize, just like the character does, that the only way to move past this wall of emotion is to turn away from it and let it recede.

Literally throwing yourself against it repeatedly until you figure out that the only way to fight it is NOT to fight it - while also being IMO a really lovely metaphor for how that frequently works in real life - was much more effective as an interactive exercise than it would have been just watching a video of the character coming to the same realization. I thought it was a great way to emotionally tie the player to the avatar they control.

I found this game extremely refreshing, this is a beautifully crafted flash game with a great theme behind it. It involves something that everyone has and that's human emotion. It revolves around memories both positive and negative and the affects they have on our lives. I will be honest, I kept throwing myself against the wall waiting for it to let me pass, not understanding that my dog was trying to get me to turn my back on it. The experience shows us that all we have done is in the past and there is nothing we can do to change whether it be for the better or worse. The game shows us the relationships we all have had. Man with their dog, our best friend growing up, the loss of someone close, and our first intimate relationship.

I admit i've just skimmed the comments here, i'm thoroughly frustrated cuz i just keep banging into the wall and falling down. for 15 minutes..i'm done.