The Slow Game Club Report 1
I got a membership for Slow Game Club this year, as a way to engage with games more intentionally; anything to lengthen that ol' attention span! It's a charity fundraiser that funds games careers workshops for kids from low-income backgrounds in the UK, and in return, you receive 12 indie games, without knowing in advance which games you'll get throughout the year. As part of your membership, a game key lands in your mailbox at the start of each month, there's a Discord server to discuss the games as you play through them during the course of the month, and you even get a Q&A with the developers where they answer the server's questions!
The game for January was Thank Goodness You're Here!. It's not the kind of game I'd pick up myself, so it was great to have an excuse to try something different. I enjoyed playing with a different kind of humour and going "oh god no" at the silliness. I'll spoil a bit of the game below so be warned!
While some gags might not have landed as well as others for me, it's such a compact game-- 3-ish hours, or longer if you're me and slowww-- that it doesn't feel like any gag overstays its welcome for too long. Playing this alongside a couple other games around the same time made me realise how much good pacing affects my enjoyment of a game, to the point that I can handle middling writing or writing that doesn't resonate with me much better than okay writing that Just. Drags. On. Maybe that just makes it not good writing in the first place tbf.
I realise this sounds like "Vaida realised pacing is a key part of narrative design", but I genuinely believed that I was more unforgiving of mid writing than I actually am. Turns out good pacing makes me go "okay the story is functional, it's there to move me to this next bit, fair enough. It's not your strength, and you're not trying to convince me that it is".
A few examples of this, I dropped Wargroove 2 because the introductory narrative sections were so boring to get through, and I'm not one for skipping story outright; in comparison, a game like EARTHLOCK has a pretty classic story and characters, but it's funny and lets me get on with playing the game.
As my friend Lisa told me when I shared these thoughts:
"If you're going to be uninteresting, at least don't be boring"
Lisa (who always says it best)
But back to Thank Goodness You're Here!. It did have some excellent jokes, and a richness of details in each scene, so there was always something that worked for me in a scene, especially the ramping up of situations that you keep revisiting. I'm still laughing at "Closed due to smacky bum bums :(".
It's also so confident, and doesn't mind people discounting it as "oh haha funny game" at first and then surprising you with the direction it takes with the ending sequence; it's happy to lose some people by not revealing its cards too early.
It's cool how rooted in a specific place this game is, that makes for a much more interesting experience than a generic (probably American) Town in Game, and the fact it very much is spoken in a dialect of that place. The authenticity being more important than understandability or a watering down, and something that players appreciate and can engage with. There's an interesting article about how the game's regionalisms and humour got localised that I've yet to fully read.
Also, how "slap" as the main verb frames every single interaction with the world.
Also also, one of my questions got answered by the devs! Fun! I asked why the Scottish plumber, who spoke with a heavy Scottish accent, spoke Scottish English rather than speaking Scots, as my Scots-speaking partner watched me play a bit of the game and had remarked that it it'd feel more authentic that way, especially with the vibe the game was already going for.
Reflecting on Slow Game Club overall, I find Discord communities overwhelming when they're too active, so I'm glad this server isn't super busy. I think it's because it's gated by a donation, so skews towards an older demographic that doesn't clog up the server with memeposting; a lot of people just lurk and play the games. There's lots of thoughtful, evolving discussion over the month, and that's exactly what I was hoping for. I've been really worn out by social media, and trying to increase prolonged engagement with media I consume rather than jumping around to the next thing, so it's nice to have an outlet for that.
I didn't finish the game, and initially I felt like I should do so ahead of the dev interview to "make the most out of it" but then I snapped out of it. I got the enjoyment I wanted from it! I can both enjoy a game and also decide I don't really want to see any more of it at this point in time! I find it really hard to leave things "unfinished", so learning how to drop a game or how to return to it without frustrating myself are things I want to practise more. There's a channel for discussing the game with spoilers and one without, and I kept myself from reading the spoilers channel as I wanted to finish the game first, but that meant missing out on conversation. I think in future months I'll let myself "give up" on a game earlier, so I can read the spoilered chat earlier. So I'm really treating this as meta-learning of how I approach games and being more chill with it.
February's game is Sorry We're Closed, which I loved playing through in December (those character portraits, oof) and I'm not one for replaying games much, especially so soon, so instead I took the chance to try out one of the bonus games (we got some unused keys from the previous year's edition), Paradise Killer. I'm really surprised by how much I'm enjoying it! Mixing visual novel sections with 3D world traversal works like a charm for switching between two different modes of thinking and resting your brain, and give you a chance to form theories. I kept thinking I'd get stuck or disengaged, but things kept moving and a really satisfying mystery was built up. I've just got the final bit to go through. Paradise will be saved... or will it...
This month, I watched a video about the Dialectics of Go that someone from the server recommended; it was an excellent watch, with the joining up of theories across various fields. Meanwhile, someone else said that after a conversation we had and watching some dev interviews, they'd changed their opinion on an aspect of Sorry We're Closed. People engaging with each other over time, coming out changed! It's what Jenny Odell said would happen...
"Sensitivity, in contrast, involves a difficult, awkward, ambiguous encounter between two differently shaped bodies that are themselves ambiguous — and this meeting, this sensing, requires and takes place in time. Not only that, due to the effort of sensing, the two entities might come away from the encounter a bit differently than they went in."
Jenny Odell, how to do nothing (I've read the book when in university and have been referencing it everywhere since)
I was thinking of looking up alternate endings and checking out the artbook for the game; the dev interview is next week so maybe I'll do it before then or maybe I won't. I think I know what next month's game will be as a few games are revealed due to being in the advertising material for the club. If so, I've already played it as well (woa watch out, hashtag indie games nerd over here!!), so I might dig into some more articles that the game studies person from the server linked to, or something else.
You can join Slow Game Club and still get keys for these first two games, if you're interested!