Muffin Films

April 16, 2012 by Leave a Comment

My sister showed me muffinfilms.com when I was very little. It’s mostly a bunch of short, cute videos featuring muffins. There are a couple of games where you can interact with the video and create different outcomes. The videos are also created in flash, so they have that sort of game quality to them.

Muffinfilms was created by Amy Winfrey for her MFA thesis project at the UCLA Animation Workshop in 2000. She also has a couple other websites of flash animation to explore, including Makingfiends.com, which sparked the short TV show, Making Fiends.

So many muffins!

There is story going on in this mini films. All the muffins are drawn together in her original final film, Muffinale, where the muffins all gather to convince a girl to like muffins.
One of the weird things about this whole project is that muffins frequently speak or do things (and even kill people). This feels a little like Maus, where humans were shown as different types of animals, including mice (Jews), cats (Germans), pigs (non-Jewish Poles), frogs (the French), dogs (Americans), and so on. It makes you reconsider how to view these different characters as a reflection of what they are. It’s a muffin, why should I care about it? Why should I listen? Why should I think about threats? Why should I like the muffin? After all, if I like it, shouldn’t I feel bad about eating it?

Maus II

That’s one of the creepy things about the Muffinale. At the end, she picks up one of the singing muffins (yes, they sing, too), and takes a bite out of its head. And then there’s cheering. I was in Elementary School when I first saw this and it creeped me out. I didn’t run away screaming, but it still creeped me out. Imagine a hunter shooting Jasmine’s pet tiger in Aladdin and then turning his pelt into a floor rug. On-screen. That’s what it felt like.

When I thought of this, my first feeling was that a) it could be Elit because it’s flash-based, and b) it’s not Elit because it’s a bunch of films.

But then I thought back to The Graveyard and I thought about the differences between that game and muffinfilms. The Graveyard is mostly a piece that is designed to make readers/players think about what’s going in the story and what an audience could get out of such a story. Themes like loneliness, sadness, growing old, living in a busy/loud world, enjoying simple pleasures, simple beauty, and so on, appear. All from watching an old woman walk into a graveyard and (possibly) sit down. If you purchase the game, you get to watch the woman die, which brings up other concepts like how our society views death as entertainment and also how we view it as a story. The disconnect between viewers and news stories comes up as a concept: people just don’t care unless it directly affects their lives. And, even then, the idea has to be thrown in their faces.

All of these ideas and more come out of The Graveyard, which one of the simplest “games” I’ve ever heard of.

Then there’s Lexia to Perplexia, which is also a concept-heavy work with a relatively simple user interface. You click on or scroll over things to make stuff happen. There’s no real “puzzle solving” or discovery. There is exploration (to get all of the readings). But the work, for the most part, is just reading and analyzing what you got from that reading. What do you see in the word/symbol mixes? What does that say about Internet culture, social networks, relationships between people with the digital age, and so on? What does it say about our abilities of comprehension and intelligence, and our ability to see more in simple things?

All of THAT is from a (relatively) simple work.

Yet neither of these are “simple” works. It is extremely difficult to create the rather highly detailed graveyard scene the old woman is in. To add the sounds in the background, the song, make the woman look life-like, and so on. Creating a work as complexly written as Lexia to Perplexia is also extremely difficult. That is a lot of time in design and writing down story concepts.

So I thought about these and looked back at muffinfilms. Designing a flash video that is GOOD and ENJOYABLE is not easy. There’s scripting, story concepts, dubbing (since the majority of the videos have voice parts), music, sound effects, coloring, effects, and so on. I don’t mean that “time taken” makes something a piece of Elit. I just mean that all of these works share levels of creation difficulty.

All of these works are also meant, primarily, to be watched. Lexia to Perplexia creates a reflection on the frustration of randomly clicking things for results on computers, but it’s principally meant to be read, which requires watching the screen and not following some sort of game story. The only thing to DO in The Graveyard is to watch, and the majority of the muffinfilms are, well, films. To be watched and enjoyed. It is our final analysis of these stories that matters most, and what thoughts the works bring to mind. What they make us think about. What they tell us about our culture and society. What they tell us about ourselves as people. What they tell us about technology.

While Amy Winfrey’s primary goal was most likely to make something that looked good and was enjoyable (as well as experimenting with different ways to use flash), I find it hard to believe that she didn’t want her viewers to THINK about things when they were watching the films. The films are too creepy or pointed or strange at times to NOT make a viewer think about it. Analysis also makes them more enjoyable. What do you get out of Muffinale? That it’s interesting. That kid shows are rather terrifying when viewed through the lens of experience and what they’re actually saying (didn’t someone do a Dora the Explorer article on here that was rather terrifying?). That singing is a great way to end a story as well as creep people out A LOT. That the little things in life can still be important. And so on. So much of Eliterature and literature as a whole matters because of what the reader brings into it, and not necessarily what the author originally intended. That’s why discussion over work is on-going. I think that a discussion of muffinfilms could last for some time, like any of the works we’ve discussed in class.

I am overall uncertain whether or not this counts as electronic literature, although it is online, there is story, it is original, it’s made in flash (like a number of the games we’ve used throughout the semester) and there is some play-along capability. There are also a number of snubs towards movie tropes and some of the limitations of flash creation. These are films (even if they are extremely short) and, at the end of the day, they’re just interesting things to look at online.

I hope you enjoy them if you take a look!

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Initial Covetous Exploration

March 29, 2012 by 1 Comment

For our upcoming analytic paper, i have already made the decision to do a critical study on the flash game Covetous. While this blogpost is not the most in-depth analysis, it is a creative outlet in order for me to explore the not-so-organized ideas in my mind and maybe figure out a few things to have a veritable direction in which to disseminate and succinctly argue.

Screenshot of which the entire game takes place.

At first glance, the picture above might give the impression this flash is a happy–albeit with a visceral twist–game. We see green bile as a portion of this body of a smiling person that has clearly been ebbed away maybe in a Operation board game style. As a white blob in the center can be seen as your avatar within the game. You might even be saving this man from something.

Hardly the case at all.

Newgrounds has infamously been around for quite some time after Tom Fulp embarked on creating a website dedicated to flash of which i am sure he never intended to become the ever-evolving beast it is today.

While the site began as a place more commonly known for hyper violent and over-the-top games, over time the site and its users have matured. Much like video games, flash entries have been created with the intent of making art. Indeed, Newgrounds is still a haven for ridiculous and perverse flash to be exposed to the Internet, but the site has expanded to include not only flash games but movies, user-created music, an art portal, forums, and a site of free exchange of ideas. Every now and then something more artful and thought provoking will appear, quite shockingly when compared to the majority of muck one can find on a daily basis.

The author, programmer, and overall creator of Covetous is Austin Breed. He has posted several pixelated flash and flash games that tend to err on the side of art. Covetous made its debut on July 18th, 2010. His brief and only description of Covetous is that he quickly made the work in 48 hours for “Ludum Mini-Dare 20, with the theme ‘Greed.’”

Ludum Dare is, as the sub-heading says, a “Rapid Game Creation Community” of which to share and display ideas. Clearly after playing Covetous there is more to Austin’s simple Newgrounds quick explanation. Our main insight are the tags Austin has posted the game with (thank you, Professor Whalen!): “cancer; creepy; greed; chestburster.” Austin did directly say the primary theme of Covetous is the topic of greed, but only until a few days ago did Professor Whalen point me toward the tag of “cancer.” Creepy, greed, and chestburster i understood, but cancer–wow, that changes the whole ballgame up rather quickly.

There is very much an existential vibe to this ominous game; much like Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, we’re immediately put into a grotesque out-of-the-blue situation having no full idea of how or why the situation starts the way it does. En media res we are put into an absolutely strange circumstance of genuine absurdity. Again, like Nikolai Gogol’s The Nose, we are found in an insane position with no explanation and no justification but to simply push forward in existence.

The fact that this game is made using the most basic of digital art, the pixel, makes the work all the more creepy, as Austin puts it. Surely, had the game been drawn using a more hand-drawn style, the overall feel may have been even more disturbing.

Oh, God, why?! -- Courtesy of UrbanLyra

But something about this truly basic computerized art style gives this unsettling aura of something much more primal. Even the music is a disturbing lo-fi de-rezzed 8-bit spine grabber. Everything about Covetous just exudes and oozes gruesomeness. Considering the short length of the game and the most simple of control schemes, the game can be a stimulus-overload with sound, sights, and nasty ending despite the simplicity and the rock-the-one-level aesthetic.

The brother-to-be somehow given a second chance at life is clearly quite and angry and selfish and misunderstood. It’s even more eerie to note that this…thing is not quite human:  beginning as a single cell somehow simply born it becomes human shaped; it has a human-like intellect; it has a human-like affect and spectrum of emotions; but it is not fully human. i always refer to the movie Jacob’s Ladder or the Silent Hill series (of which was directly inspired by the movie) when discussing relatability to monsters. Silent Hill’s Masahiro Ito fully intended to make human-like aberrations that were not so much beasts as deformed parts of bodies with a human base. Somehow this sort of vibe is ingrained into Covetous and it makes you downright uncomfortable to play as this growing cancer while having a certain level of knowledge at the injustice of the circumstances.

As a cancer, things move slowly. You as a cell start small and work your way of infecting or taking in other parts as a manner in which to grow. As you grow, you notice your brother/kin/host’s smile start to fade; clearly something is amiss with pain. But you begin to take form as a pixelated fetus that goes more and more. No longer is the music the same drudgery but a sirens call showing how anxious you are to have life. The whole situation is only more complicated as the cell admits an affection for the host, but ultimately and with ferocious anger demands death of its host and in the fashion of Ridley Scott’s Alien, chestbursts to life as this bipedal monstrosity.

Chestburst is another tag there. Pop culture was really given that gift with the movie Alien, which thrives on twisted sexual imagery and distorted births and deaths. Your covetous life is the death of another with this second birth. Not so much a child as a parasitic invader whose parental relationship is disgustingly tangled. Suffice to say with Covetous there’s this underlying asexual yet incestuous goings-on setting.

The final part i have to figure out for this upcoming analysis is whether or not this work falls into the category of art. Indeed, Newgrounds did not start as a creative outlet for intellectual gratification. But as the site evolved, an actual collection of art games has been established. Reading Ian Bogost‘s articles and regular postings on Gamastura sheds some light on my direction, as well as taking into account Roger Ebert’s aphorism that video games cannot be art. There are a lot of conflicting views but it also presents to me and other players a dilemma: how do we perceive art? What is our subjective definition of art?

Such a vague notion of art and what is and is not and everything going on in Covetous, i have a lot to work with but am trying to not hang myself given all the facets of this work with which to focus. i think ultimately it will come down to defending this unsettling work as whether or not it’s art and have to describe more in-depth the allusions and ideas floating around in the game and my jarred head. Thankfully i have Professor Whalen’s guidance and direction and having done this blog has provided a little more introspective insight into where i want to go and what angles i want to focus on.

It’s all there, jumbled but there. Now to organize, formalize, and wreck shop in the literary sense. Go team.

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Cage

February 23, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Chris Palko, known by his stage name Cage is a rapper from New York City. Born overseas the youth began his life  on a military base. His father was a drug addict, and his mother divorced him, only later to marry an abusive man named Frank. Palko had a troubled youth and was eventually kicked out of high and by that time was abusing many hard drugs. After several minor run-ins with the law, he was sent to a psychiatric institution where he ended up staying for 18 months. While there he made several attempts to kill himself, and was part of a test group for the drug “fluoxetine.”

When he was released at 18, he pursued a career as a rapper, then going under the name “Alex” reminiscent of the character from A Clockwork Orange who endured a similar plight. During this time drugs were still a large part of Palko’s life and much of his early work is reflective of that. Palko has led an interesting and fairly depressing life, and it is my belief that his flash-based website tells a digital story of these roots.

The first image has ominous looking clouds in the distance which darken when the mouse scrolls over them, as shown on the left, and this foreshadows some unpleasantness in the future. The argyle looking lines that intersect the “C” in Cage, denote a rap-group by the name of Weathermen, of which Cage is a founding member.

 

 

 

 

This is the second screen you’re taken to. Here the clouds flash and the light in the window flickers. The red cloud seems to look like the upper part of a face. The house is old and decrepit. I’m not sure if this place is simply metaphorical or has historical significance for Palko. Either way the creepy effect is achieved. Clicking on the house takes you inside.

 

 

Now you can see the inside of presumably the above house and as you explore it Cage’s music starts to play. The symbol on the wall links you to the aforementioned rap group’s Myspace. The newspaper takes you to press articles, while the garbage takes you to Cage’s merchandise store. I’m sure this is no coincidence. The picture takes you to a newsfeed. Out of frame on the right is a refrigerator, and on the left is a stairwell.

 

 

 

I won’t go through any more of the house so if you’re interested you can experience it firsthand. His music, with the effects of the flash animation create an atmosphere very representative of the experience one gains when listening to Cage. A lot of his lyrics are graphic and explicit, so if that kind of stuff offends you — heads up. There are more details in his biography, and pages from a journal he kept while institutionalized can also be found. Have fun exploring and if you can stomach it, you should listen to Cage, he’s pretty neat.

**Screenshots taken from his website. I own the rights to these images**

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