went to a live performance of asses.masses, which sounded weird and intense in a way that made me surprised i’d never heard of it before: an experimental, vaguely oikospiel sounding political videogame about talking donkeys undertaking a labour dispute, meant to be experienced in a single 7+ hour long multi-person on site playthrough. they serve lunch and dinner on site and the website mentions “there are no instructions”, that “it is up to the audience and their self-elected leaders to make decisions and play out their version of the game”, that you can move around a little but are meant to be there for the whole thing rather than drift in and out. which all made me semi excitedly and semi fearfully expect some kind of, like, relational aesthetics group discussion as relayed through a punishing 4X game about agricultural collectivisation, or something.
so when it kicked off i was furtively a little relieved that it turned out to be more of a traditional linear artgame with some scope for crowd interjection. you walk around rpgmaker style maps and talk to other donkeys, there’s a story that plays out. i think viewing it all live as an audience does change the effect a little - both for random little choices that people turn out to feel strongly enough to yell about (“grunt” vs “bray”) and also like a version of that uncertainty from playing a game for the first time and not knowing where the limits are, how hard it might punish you; i think the feeling of being in a “live art event” with an explicitly political theme gave people a heightened sense of stakes, an uncertainty where things might be headed. even after the first two acts (of 10) finally make plain that it’s gonna me much more on the forgiving walking sim end of things, it’s fun to see things like abrupt changes in gameplay / perspective, sudden veers into 3d or donkey sex rhythm games, thru the new eyes of an audience with different levels of familiarity with this format. and i did feel interested in the story and where it’d go, to what kind of argument might eventually be advanced via these characters that seemed to represent brisk position points (stalinoid donkey, antisocial hacker donkey, depressed pessimist donkey etc).
it sort of felt like things went downhill in the 3rd section, when you get a shock transition to 3d open world to depict hedonistic donkey heaven. which is fun but like.. it’s a 3d open world. it’s overscaled and boring to actually roam around, because it’s a 3d open world. there are minigames and npcs. there are orbs to collect. any initial sense of discursiveness is sorta put to one side for a bit. and when you get through that section it’s like, oh, these characters who i thought were gonna be the starting point for a narrative with the twisty structure of the first two chapters are just like.. the actual ones we’ll be following through the game. some of the donkeys get a job in the circus, which means many more minigames in service of a kinda bland joke abt creative careers. there’s a section where the donkeys wander around a newly human-free farm and talk abt being bored, which like, i presume is something abt idk “actually existing socialism” vs “world revolution” or whatever but just felt so disappointing, why are you telling this story if you have no interest in what even marginal changes in autonomy would look like for characters who’ve never had anything like it before? how they’d change under it, what it means, if you’re not interested in that in a game abt “politics” then what are you interested in? i guess the jrpg style discussions abt whether machines are evil or neutral, which turn from sidenote into the main thing.
and then the next sequence is the circus donkeys being sold to the automated meat factory and like… not to downplay the undoubted real horrors of the abattoir but this is the last set of levels in the fuckin ps2 game A Dog’s Life. conveyor belt puzzles and having to hit switches as someone is carried haplessly into the dogfood grinder and hissable girlboss ceo and all. the factory is also an abrupt difficulty spike where the game suddenly goes all in on like, “three increasingly difficult levels” indie game schlock, where you control 1 then 2 then 4 donkeys who each have their own abilities to solve puzzles, there are guards and moving spotlights and switches and stuff. what are we doing here? a lot of stuff starts to feel like an rpg maker game where you can tell the dev was really excited to show off this neat tutorial they found for how to add a block sliding puzzle or whatever, and the sinking feeling of knowing they werent able to hold it back from devouring the rest of the game.
and it takes so long, and is so gruelling. and as fun as it can be live to be part of the crowd cheering when someone survives the bullet hell sequence to hit the ceo the exact 3 times required by the gospel of nintendo boss design (is this still an artgame??), i kept feeling like it was the exact same feeling i’d have cheering for friends to make it through some bullshit quarter munching arcade boss, or watching a random episode of gamecenter cx. are you using the medium or is it using you?
after that there was another afterlife walking sim part, with a long corridor of glossy ps4 shaders and particle effects… and then you go into the circular hub from crash bandicoot warped and have to solve four spirit world minigamess, and the minigames are things like “how many balls of this colour are there?” and “the card matching game from mario 3”, and then you meet god (3d model with emissive shader and particle effects)… then there was the fourth intermission, which was when i went home, having experienced by proxy 8/10 of the acts.
so i can’t really speak to it at the end, maybe it comes together, idk. i’d be surprised bc it felt like after a while it just stopped having ideas and started having ever more numbing forms of gameplay/gamestuff instead. the donkey god says something abt how violence and peaceful protest both being unsuitable, you will be returned as “a prophet”, and i would have forgiven all slights if the ending turned out to be about inventing Islam 2 or something, but this seemed unlikely. idk. it was fun, i’m glad i checked it out, but a warning to future art ppl looking to snag some of that sweet sweet funding for immersive on-site interactive theater: the first time you suddenly switch into a turn based battle it’s an event, the third time it’s a statistic. when you look into the dark heart of videogames they look back into thee.
