Mon/Fri: How Do You Deal With This Week?

I tried to put a video here, and then something really unexpected happened.

The thing about being peripheral to someone else's tragedy is that it feels really lousy to say that you're okay after having been through it. Because it wasn't my father that died, it was a stranger's; the stranger just came to me for help, because he had found his dad in the bathroom, on the floor, not breathing.

I helped how I could, but it didn't matter, because you know what some smells mean when you get them up your nose, and while death has a smell, so does dying. I'm pretty sure that guy might have died as I was rolling him over, with his son taking his feet.

I needed some time to deal with being involved in this. So despite there not being the video that I wanted for you, there is this script. I don't like that I had to give it to you as concession, and that it has a sad story attached to it, but I gotta be blunt: I needed some time to think after this all happened.

Despite everything, I'm really proud of it, I actually think it's some of the funniest stuff I've ever done. So I'm going to use that energy, to do all that I can to bring it to you all as soon as I can.

-G

--- 

Gamewrecks, Episode 2: Tender Loving Care

Cold Open

The early 90s were a busy time for videogame development, in more than just one way. It was a time where games that are now considered bedrock, precursor genetics to more recent and more advanced titles, were new, and hot, and inspiring members of a young generation with what new possibilities of what a well-developed game could play like. But it was also a time where computer tech was rapidly evolving, despite the relatively constrained and frankly, outdated by comparison console hardware. Games on cartridge originally happened because quite literally jamming a circuit board into a hardware slot made just for that was one of the better options for safely transporting data in media. Not to mention that the much vaunted 16-bit hardware of both the SNES and Genesis? 16-bit tech is vintage the mid 80s, it was in no way the leap in power they made it out to be, Blast Processing or no.

Bit numbers, as they were used in marketing, were always bullshit.

So alongside these older, now venerated systems and their established hardware, new consoles began emerging, with new features and new capabilities. Many of these new systems used something that was, at the time, changing the way we engaged with our technology: the CD-ROM. This was the time when the term MULTIMEDIA was the hot buzzword, the signifier that your thing, whatever it was, wasn’t simply A Thing, it was An Experience. Look out, more than one of your senses will be engaged by this thing. Try not to be crushed by the majesty displayed on the talking Wall of CDi as you are challenged to both LOOK and LISTEN and TOUCH all at once.

In this new frontier of technology, innovators did what they did when handed a new tool to work with: they explored it, to see what it was good at, what the capabilities of it were. Some folks took the long route to try and really understand the sort of power they were working with under the hood. Others had their own idea of what this physical medium should be used for, and that’s movies, except movies that you play. Movies where you are the boxer, in first person; it’s like Raging Bull, except an .avi file of a southpaw, and no self-destruction subplot to drag down proceedings. Don’t say it didn’t turn heads, because it straight up did, entirely on the fact that games didn’t commonly do this sort of stuff until this technology happened. Myst sold because of what CDs could do, the degree of experience they could provide artists to players. Sewer Shark gave a lot of people their first ever experience as being directly addressed in a human voice by a game, with objectives to accomplish. And for demonstrating the potential of a creepy game about exploring and solving puzzles in a haunted mansion, the makers of the 7th Guest brought home bank and reputation.

Which they later spent to create a softcore psychosexual thriller involving an emotionally disturbed woman mourning a child, her fuming squawkbox husband, a live-in psychiatrist whose intense need for scandal-fucking is severe in a way that would suggest some form of brain parasite, and John Hurt issuing you flash psych evaluations in various rooms of your house, several times a day.

Because hubris and innovation walk hand in hand, and if you walk along the edge of advancement, you’re only one single bad step away from being made to forcibly 

HUG

THE

SHAME

BOY.

ONE - The Context - Control, Set the Trap Code to ROM

Full Motion Video is one of those terms that no longer means anything to anyone contemporary, because frankly, it’s sort of an oxymoron with what today’s tech can do. This is where we get FMV from, because it’s easier than saying a clunky old term for something nowadays seem readily apparent- you see video, you assume it’s going to be actually fully moving, and not just sprite layers interacting in unison with static or sequential pixel art assets to create What All Videogames Used to Look Like.

That’s the thing: Full Motion Video is nothing but a buzzword, and always has been. It was something executives used to dress up the fact the games they were burning on disc and selling as the latest hot technology were very little more than low budget movies, chopped into clips, with a UI and player input used to create the illusion of actually doing stuff in a campaign or narrative, instead of just watching files just get pulled off a disc and played. You’re basically navigating a filesystem in these games, more than any other. You don’t notice it, because here’s Michael Dudikoff to tell you that you’ve walked into a minefield, so your brain goes “oh, wait, there’s some sort of scenario I’m involved with, vaguely.”

First off, though, let’s focus our terminology, because FMV was used in a lot of places, but not everything that had FMV could be called an FMV game. Command and Conquer is a series known for its use of FMV in its story and briefing scenes. Mechwarrior 4 used it for interactions with NPCs. More recently, Remedy’s Quantum Break attempted to mix modern 3rd person shooting action with real actors and the sort of style and direction you’d see on a prestige format drama. None of these are what I’d call FMV games, and my reasoning is straight up because the FMV is not the main thing occupying your time in these games. Kane just tells you to burn out Capitalism and replace it with Tiberium and the mighty Technology of Peace; you don’t then play the front view camera footage of a little NOD Flame Tank navigating a miniature practical set lighting GDI goons on fire, there’s no Bad End clip of you getting blown up with an Ion Cannon strike if you take the wrong turns. You play a strategy game. Wreck structures, mine resources, push through and conquer.

FMV games, on the other hand? The video is the main attraction. And this is straight up and self evidently why you don’t see them any more. Because there’s only so much you can do with a single, nonlinear movie that people are then supposed to play, like a game. You can certainly tell a story with these, absolutely you can. But if you want to make one nowadays, you better come with a plan and some major charm, because the FMV genre is the byproduct of a certain time and place in entertainment technology. And just as it always has been, flash carries just the same weight as substance in this time and place in terms of creating a buzz.

It’s just that in retrospect, the flash itself seems really dumb.

Now to be clear, this idea for games isn’t new. It didn’t simply spring forth from the forehead of Read Only Zeus, fully formed, but was rather innovated by two men that made a big splash for themselves with their videogame. The game? Dragon’s Lair. The men? Programmer and hardware specialist Gary Kildall and animation giant Don Bluth. The game Dragon’s Lair could be described as the proof of concept for the Quicktime Event as well as the FMV game, because what playing it entails hitting the right direction or the attack button when the game prompts you, then seeing whether or not protagonist Dirk the Daring prevails or dies horribly. Usually, it’s the death one. Like I said last episode, arcades were a business, and to make money at an arcade meant both getting games that would draw people in, and getting games that would empty out pockets. Dragon’s Lair was both of those in one laserdisc-equipped cabinet, and people literally lined up to spend their money on it, one quarter at a time.

This was why when the CD-ROM drive became a more standard piece of kit in home technology, this concept for a game was just there, waiting in the wings. Now, people could bring home the magic of a game that was also a video, with voice and recorded music. Now, people could experience the next step forward in digital storytelling. Now… people could see in their own living rooms just how limited these games were, firsthand.

TWO - The Background - A Stauf Toy is a Toy for Life (But as for Stauf...)

Our story begins before the ubiquity of CD-ROM technology, in a much better decade: the 80s. In this time that saw the death and rebirth of videogames, there were all sorts of people trying all sorts of things. One of those things was a company called Cinemaware, which had an idea: Make games that are like movies. They had some successes, like Defender of the Crown, a Robin Hood inspired simulation of England in the Middle Ages that frankly looked utterly amazing for the time. This was 1986, and for a company to call themselves Cinemaware, with the aim of being Movies inside of Videogames, stuff like this was them demonstrating major chops. Two years later, they had repeat success with Lords of the Rising Sun, a similar game set in feudal Japan.

But they also had a lot of misfires, such as their Three Stooges game, which while it may have had some interest back when it was new, now just stands as a repository of cursed images. There’s also this sound Curly makes in the NES port.

It’s at this time I’d like to point out that the ending of the actual Stooges bit involving eating chowder ends with multiple attempted murders via firearm. It’s important to know context, you know?

Then there’s the Kristal, which is a game that is once again proof that sometimes a passion project is just a portal to the area that’s so far up your ass, you just disappear into nothing, like you divided by 0, using your own ass. It’s such a baffling and pointlessly florid walk through someone’s lovingly created but utterly impenetrable setting that you get the feeling that were this actually a some sort of new wavey disco science fiction stage play, you’d get that really embarrassing shot of the director mouthing his own dialogue as it’s performed. As much as I can get out of this game is that you play as some dude that looks like Doug Hennig in a landscape of something someone else obviously thought was really interesting, and that its cover is so hilariously bad I put it in my opening titles.

Cinemaware isn’t a super important part to our background here, but its guiding principles are threaded throughout. This is because one of the sorts of people that worked on the thing called Cinemaware was one Rob Landeros, its Art Director. Landeros is the sort of person you want in that position, too, the sort of guy whose experience in different mediums is broad, and who very obviously has an idea of what he’s there to do. Even if Cinemaware’s games weren’t all super hot, that at least looked pretty good to downright great for the time, and Rob was a part of this quality.

But Rob didn’t stay at Cinemaware. In 1990, along with programmer Graeme Devine (yes, one of the Quake III devs, badass), the two formed Trilobyte. For three years, they percolated their concept for a horror experience in games unlike anything that came before.

The 7th Guest is one of the first games released on CD-ROM. Released on April Fools of 1993, it was an interactive journey into a haunted house, created with a degree of care and realism that had never been seen before. If you want to know what the hell a Multimedia Experience was, what that sort of inane marketing verbiage was directed at, it’s this. Right here, this. To be clear, this is not a game that was sold by people suddenly having PCs with CD-ROM drives in them; this was the killer app that made people pick up a new piece of technology and shove it in their computer case. The initial run of 60,000 copies sold out on release day, and Trilobyte was inundated with orders for more. Not bad for a game with a production that included bluescreens made out of butcher paper and filmed portions shot on Super VHS.

Things wouldn’t last, despite 7th’s Guest’s massive splash. The followup sequel, The 11th Hour, dropped in the fall of 1995, a year after its initial release date. While a landmark game for being one of the first to use 16-bit colour and once again being visually above and beyond what other games at the time were doing, it had a lot of points of criticism. For one, it was a DOS game, released after Windows 95 had become a pretty standard operating system. So instead of fielding orders, they were fielding complaints for folks that wanted to know why their game didn’t work. There was also the fact that while MIDI audio on a disc-based game could fly on PC when the tech was new, people were expecting something a little more, and no, once again, MIDI soundtrack, and people were underwhelmed. Then, finally, the puzzles themselves- namely, people didn’t find a lot of them fun, because the solutions were less than apparent in some of the mild cases, and requiring nigh-on sorcerous knowledge to get first time around in their worst cases. Consider what we know now about games, that puzzles are a tightrope walk of holding player interest, and what happens when people slam their face against a solution too well obfuscated, for too long. Turns out it doesn’t matter that you’re smart enough to completely stump your playerbase, because when you stump your playerbase in a game that’s meant to be progressed through and solved… that’s not good.

So the 11th Hour did some big damage to Trilobyte, to such a degree that they failed to break even on production. This is a really bad thing to have happen to a game. It’s what kills companies. It’s probably what killed Trilobyte in its 90s incarnation.

That death was not instant, though, because Trilobyte had a lot of creative people putting down ideas. Unfortunately, none of them could bring the same degree of success as the 7th Guest, and it’s been said that the relationship between Rob Landeros and Graeme Devine became so strained, the last time they spoke to each other was a meeting in 1996. So parallel development began, on multiple projects, as though the company had a line drawn down the center of it. Nothing bore fruit, and Trilobyte as it was sank in 1999, while Graeme Devine was attempting to develop an MMO project Millenium. Meanwhile, Rob Landeros was working on something a little less easy to describe, an evolution of what he had first worked on in 7th Guest, yet also very different. It was something that was more cerebral than the its haunted house horror, designed for a mature and introspective audience that wanted something considerably more grown up and raw, not a game, but an experience that asked the people taking the ride to put more of themselves out there than they might be comfortable. This was something that he would see to Fruition, with the creation of his own company, Aftermath Media, something to show that games and movies could be more than just the sum of its parts, and that a film could be guided by the feelings and emotions of its viewer.

How’d that go?

Not well.

THREE - The Break - The Maslow Hierarchy of Need (to Feel Validated as Mature Through Our Hobbies)

The question, “are games art?” is so utterly trite right now it’s become the shortest distance between two points in terms of mocking empty-headed big-think types efficiently. Of course, when that debate started, the importance of the question was as to whether or not games were just pieces entertainment software and not actually culturally relevant of themselves, thereby subjecting them to censorship. This actually was important, because the last thing the world needed was people like Soulless Career Democrat Android Hillary Clinton, perpetually clammy, yet unpitiable and unlovable Joe Lieberman, or any given interchangeable pasty-faced and corruption-laced organ mass with a ridiculous name the Republicans cared to trot out and burp up a statement. Their interference could have done damage to a young medium’s arc of development. Because if you think games have bad scripts these days, imagine if Kidd Thunder wasn’t just an easter egg, but what Mortal Kombat was forced to become?

Nowadays, the question is used by mewling and frequently Kermit-voiced boys-in-lumpen-men’s bodies as an actual reason for why we shouldn’t critically analyze games. Because they’re art, and as art, shut up about it, nobody analyzes art, ever.

What I’m getting at is that critical softness surrounding narrative and actual cultural elements in games has led to an area where laziness in writing is acceptable, and even expected, as though the opposite is a stupid waste of time. Intellectual laziness isn’t just a general thing, it can be present in smart people, because it stems not from not understanding a thing, but from not even caring to understand it. This is why there’s been this almost fanatical need for some people to play games to have some sort of Cultural Killer App that they can point to and say, hey, look, we’re actual media too! Artistic license and exploration of themes, wall to wall in this here game. Subtext, biiiiiiiiitch!

So that need for something deeper has existed since we realized games could be used to tell more complex stories, and where there’s a need, people who create will create to fill it. Some of the games that were created to fill this need for a deeper story, with deeper emotional resonance were significant, and many of them not for the intended reasons. Hey, wanna stroll down memory lane? Hah. Too bad.

[Montage of TWUE DWAMA goes here]

Your choices don’t mean anything, and that means everything. This is significant, because a guy who wanted to show us who the real racists could also be thought it was significant.

That’s the thing, yeah? As time goes on, as standards change, we go back and compare how stuff was to how it is now and observe the evolution. This is something that has been true across all forms of arts, and yes, I can even say martial arts, because look at what we thought competitive martial arts looked like, versus what we now know it does. Sometimes, you get works that are huge leaps that advance a form into its next incarnation. Do you want to know why it’s so infuriating to hear people about the Citizen Kane of Games? It’s because they keep using it to describe games that are really good, but ultimately conventional, extremely well polished gems. And that’s wrong, because Citizen Kane wasn’t just some very good movie. It’s because it’s before it came along, movies didn’t do what Citizen Kane did. Citizen Kane was a highly nonlinear film with a number of massive innovations to the medium, made in an era where actors hunching over huge microphones hidden in set decorations and enunciating dialogue into it, flatly and loudly, so the people in the back can hear you.

Wanting for it to be the time for games to be on the level of the best in films, in television, in writing is ultimately self defeating, because rather than pushing the boundaries of the things being done in the medium, it’s just taking games as highly polished gems and holding them up, hoping they’ll glint off the light from other art forms. If it’s the time for games, then I say, let it be time, and let’s be brutal, but honest toward games, so they actually can develop into something that can be on the level of the best in films, in television, in writing, not just something shiny that seems as though it should be respectable. It’s one thing to be better at something someone did before you, but it’s another thing entirely to strike out in your own direction, find you’ve got something and wind up changing the course of culture.

So we looked for innovators, people that wanted to try and make something different and better. In this search, we put faith in people we now know we really should have just ignored. Some of them? Well, frankly, they’ll get theirs. But where and how these individuals failed were perhaps on a scale more grandiose or just plain old base, such as “don’t have your protagonist fight the Mayan internet” and “don’t have your female lead fuck a guy who is technically a corpse.” These stories have been spoken of, but this one? Less so, because at its core, one of the biggest mistakes made was that the game itself was a Multimedia Experience released in 1998, and because of that, very few people actually saw it. Given that this game handles some extremely heavy themes with about the same level of deftness and sensitivity as VC Andrews house writer- because that’s actually who wrote this story originally, this game’s an adaptation -that it’s probably better off for everyone involved that this game’s existence stays quiet. 

If you know anything about VC Andrews or her novel Flowers in the Attic, you might just have had cause to shudder just then.

If you don’t know who that person is or what that book is about, hooooooooo lord, welcome to The Bad Place.

FOUR - The Wreck - Scalding Hot Pizza Burns on the Dong

The 90s were a weird time for the western world, in terms of emotional space. Call it an odd mix of flavors that had a strange aftertaste and emitted an unpleasant aroma while simmering. The most predominant was the wave of self confidence and displays of prosperity in media produced by the nations of the former First World, particularly those ones that wore capitalist values on their sleeve in the wake of a vanquished socialism after the fall of the Soviet Union. Even though The Simpsons was currently wreaking havoc on the concept of the family situation comedy- remember, these were the years were The Simpsons fucking ruled both because of a hot shit writing team and a target rich environment -look at what was running on other channels at the same time: nowadays, what looks like a commercial for the rewards of Jesus and Prosperity Doctrine, was the status quo trying to be pushed by American media. Even Roseanne, a show that was supposed to be about the lower end of the middle class working family, featured a functional nuclear family that lived in a home, that they actually did own, they just had a mortgage on. Hell, look at Home Improvement- don’t look too closely, it hurts -a show about a family of a husband and wife team of small-scale TV host and doctorate candidate, in their amazing omnihouse. 20-odd years ago, the western world had a middle class, or at least our media liked to celebrate that it did; in today’s context, that’s so fucking weird.

But there was also an introspectiveness to be found in the 90s that wasn’t nearly as prevalent in the 80s. While there was a wave of progressivism that broke through media in the 80s, the end of the Reagan era and the one term presidency of George HW Bush segued to the Clinton/Gore administration and values that, at the time, passed as progressive left wing legislation… in comparison to what was previous policy. You know, Ronald Reagan’s policies. 

In practice, this results in the one pursuit of policy that resonates in memory of most people that have been around games and music, and are now in their 30s and up, which is the policing of obscenity in new media and new genres within media. You know, genres that just so happen to be populated with the work and art of non-white people. Hey look, that’s where this stupid thing came from. Careful, wouldn’t want to make parents have to actually engage with the media their kids engage with, let’s just slap this arbitrary thing on stuff that’s naughty, so they can go back to working in our glorious and victorious capitalist economy, and go by that. Thanks, Tipper.

And then there’s these two: the personified mental agony of every incel man that decided he was unfuckable because a woman once told him no in literally any context; and world’s saddest, droopiest Thin Man snake-hybrid infiltrator. Like dual overhead valedictorian hall monitors, and along with a whole car full of other clowns, these two dickbags tried to blame videogames on an imaginary rise in youth violence that was actually just The Ugly Reality finally being put together by a world that was growing more and more connected. Never mind the fact that in this time, a lot of small town American high schools were places where athletic achievements were valued over anything academic, in a nation where at the time physical healthcare, let alone mental healthcare, being a state responsibility was considered largely a joke, and that high school has always been a goddamned social hell-meatgrinder; it’s Doom that caused Columbine. Not the fact that these were socially stunted and disillusioned kids with easy access to explosives and firearms in a society where Boys Will Be Boys, detailing what they intend to do using the cultural touchstones that give them a sense of release in their journals; it’s those touchstones themselves that made these obviously good boys just snap and kill their classmates, so let’s just ban them, make Mortal Kombat into Kidd Thunder-

[KIDD THUNDAAAAAA!!]

-and then we can all get back to doing what Democrats do best: caving to genocidal Republicans, taking bribes from soulless corporate lobbyists, and literally fuck all else.

But even in regular old media, that wasn’t a series of controversy after shitfire fake controversy, media had a pretty notable fascination with the psychiatric profession. This was the era of Star Trek: The Next Generation featuring the ship’s counsellor and therapist in a prominent role, right there on the bridge, serving as an expert to the highly diplomatic Captain Picard in a trusted role. And Counselor Troi wasn’t just there to be there, she actually did stuff, she had stories and otherwise was on hand to be there for anything that had a more internal or introspective element to it. And do you hear those blues a’callin? Do you know what to do with all these tossed salads and scrambled eggs? Because here comes Frasier, one of the most successful spin-off tv shows of all time that launched out of the also beloved Cheers, about a call-in radio therapist with blue blood, his pent up basket case brother, his hardcase ex-cop dad and his co-host who was more or less HIS therapist. While I’m not really sure where I stand on Frasier in terms of how it holds up, I haven’t watched it in a while, it was out there in prime time, normalizing the idea of having someone to talk to being good to help workout the neurosis we all have. All of us. Even the ones who are supposed to be our wisemen. So in that respect, there wasn’t all bad going on, there was some cases of “actually, I’m fine with this,” and I feel pretty qualified to comment on this. Because I’m no therapist, I’m just mentally ill, so trust me, I know when I’m being insulted by a piece of media.

[Flash Outlast logo here]

Unfortunately, there is the last predominant ingredients and that’s this: if there’s one thing I’ve confirmed to myself having started this whole thing, it’s that the 90s were an extremely obnoxious decade. It’s obnoxious in that very specific way, that you’re being condescended to as some easily dumbstruck bumpkin that’s about to be razzle dazzled by some real shit, perpetrated by marketers who were emboldened by capitalism’s rise and tempered by the popularity of shouty shock comedians that people insisted were “telling it like it is.”

Which as we know now as “talking out of your ass.”

This wasn’t the age of attitude, this was the age of Tude, where the supposed peak of cool expressed largely as world weariness and ensuring you buy everything some dickhead idiot in a boardroom wants you to. Knowing what we know about the entertainment industry now, there’s a lot of stuff that seems pretty self evidently the idea of people who sit around in suits and sort of babble at each other in language that probably sounds impressive to sheltered people who have enough money to afford to be lazy past the age of 18. One of these is the concept of the Corporate Executive as a Sexually Powerful and Animalistically Attractive Sensual Force.

Completely unprompted, here is a photo of John Schnatter.

Another of these is the hair trigger and dimitted sense of snippiness that permeated media, the earnest rise of Can I See Your Manager culture. There was a lot of media that knew better back in the 90s, and it wanted to tell you this in ways that make whatever think seem ridiculous. Women just need themselves a Good Man. Nerds are unacceptable, but can be made better by changing their outside. Being gay is weird and wrong. Psychiatry is untrustworthy, those people try and change the way you think.

While I’m definitely not saying that media is nothing without some sort of majorly affirmative message or storybook moral, a lot of what was going around in the 90s had this particularly pissy little chihuahua sensibility regarding even minor social change, like “maybe don’t encourage kids to be dicks to kids who are into science and creative fields.” This was weaksauce enforcement of hostile societal norms by people that thought putting bleeps in commercials was real transgressive; it’s peabrained yap-yap-yapping behind a glass screen door at shifts in a materially exploitable zeitgeist by network, studio and publishing executives that wanted society rock stupid, snake mean and working constantly. I mean, why think about anything more than never when you can just have a shitty attitude all the time?

Completely unprompted, here is a photo of Elon Musk.

And now with this in the cauldron, our brew is now complete. The fetid stink of smug, moneyed and sneering has infused with whatever mitigating value the modicum of introspection brought to the mix, and now this repulsive slurry is bubbling, and boiling.

AND THE SMOKE.

And from the putrid vapours rises the image of our tormentor: Tender Loving Care.

The Plot

There’s not a lot to tell in the overall story of Tender Loving Care, in that for as much as it meanders and as much as it really likes to talk, it’s actually a much more simple story than I think it would want to put forth. Goes a little something like this:

Husband Michael and wife Allison are not happy. Their daughter Jodie was killed in a car wreck, and that’s horrible, but also luckily, off screen. So terrible in fact that Allison is traumatized into a state that appears to be naturally stoned at the best of times, and childlike at the worst of times, and utterly unable to grasp that Jodie is actually dead. This has not been easy on Michael’s own emotional state; Swiss watches are less thoroughly wound than this guy. With Allison unable to function like she used to, the couple seeks relief in Dr. Turner, John Hurt, who suggests a live-in nurse to assist her and provide her with home care. He’s quick to suggest his own student, psychiatric nurse, Katherine. Then Michael and Katherine fuck because it quickly becomes clear that Katherine is basically a form of shark that needs to violate monogamous relationships in order to survive, and Michael’s got less hypnotic resistance than a white investment banker that’s been unwittingly dosed with scopolamine. And everything is terrible. So, so terrible.

To get an idea of how any sort of gameplay takes over, you have to look at this game’s tagline, “Watch What You Wish For.” This is quite literally what you do in this game, affecting the plot through first observing, then a modicum of exploring, and then finally engaging with this game’s major mechanic, the Thematic Apperception Test or TAT. Which are real things, in that they have been used in psychiatric applications, just that they’re… dubious in a contemporary setting. We’ll get into that later.

The point is, via player input, either through finding optional scenes or directly branching the story through TAT choices, new scenes are revealed and the story is unfolded. The plot’s not necessarily thick in the sense that it’s a winding tale with a lot of stops in the way, but rather the ramping up of pressure toward the point of explosion, which is actually the sort of thing it should do for the sort of story that it does tell- the thing’s a thriller, so thrill me. Where the main problem with how Tender Loving Care lies in how it ramps up that pressure. Namely, that it approaches the idea of ramping up pressure not by adding foibles to the equation, or increasing the complexity or the pieces or rules in play, or just depicting more and more interesting and volatile interpersonal moments, but by turning up the volume dial, steadily, while mean mugging you. Like a dick. And then a dog gets poisoned at some point, just to let you know shit’s serious. This game isn’t a circle chase, because that would involve too much interesting footwork. It’s psychological dizzy bat, with a cast of four whole characters, whose primary input to the development of pressure can be summarized as such:

Allison: Michael, Jodie told me she’s alive again and this is upsetting me, now it’s time for me to come and hammer on your trauma points in a cloying voice, Michael.

Katherine: I’ll need your assistance administering my penetration, Michael, it’s a therapy method I use to keep a clear mind when I treat your wife. I require a clear mind to work, Michael, because I am the Fuckdoctor.

Michael: My existence is being pulled apart by wild horses, only it’s profoundly ill women that wanna climb me. And yet somehow, I can manage to seem unlikable and unsympathetic…

Dr. Turner: WELL I COULDN’T POSSIBLY HAVE SEEN THIS COMING, I DON’T KNOW WHAT KATHERINE IS DOING BUT I DIDN’T TEACH HER THAT.

So throw those stones in the rock tumbler and set the thing running, and then marvel at deafeningly annoying the whole thing becomes in a short little while. Unfortunately, this game does not last a short little while, and it feels a lot longer, due to scenes where two or more characters approach one another and open communications. They eject their wants in the form of direct and plain dialogue at one another, and fail to connect in any way that comes across as ‘definitely human.’ For proof of this, look no further than the infamous Pizza Scene:

[Pizza Scene goes here]

This isn’t interpersonal interaction, it’s a goddamned TCP/IP handshake. Like let’s work past the point where we’re not entirely clear if the concept of pizza in this scene is meant to be a double entendre, like I’m still not sure what sort of pie these idiots are really talking about. Regardless, look at this mess. We got Allison being upsetting, check. We got Katherine barely holding her human form against Blatant Succubus Tendencies, check. We got Michael being put upon by two people who have very clearly fallen out of their tree and are currently dangling by their ankles, and yet still coming off like a peevish little twerp, probably because his response to being put upon is to react like a member of Cobra Kai being told he’s gotta go to summer school. Michael, who despite his performative “being a dicklock” ultimately proves to have a strand of spaghetti for a backbone, and goes and gets the pizza anyway, like a chump.

There’s also the fact that this game is an erotic thriller, and that may not seem apparent at first, though there’s decidedly a general feel of Cinemax after dark in how the sexual tension in the dialogue is layered on like lasagne. The reason why is that it takes forever for a lot of the more explicit boning to actually happen, and when it does, it’s relatively tame. But then all of the sudden there’s an implied 69 that immediately cuts away before barely softcore becomes full hardcore, and what even the shit. I’m a strong proponent that like writing in general, individual aspects of content, such as sense of humor and portrayal of violence, has a tone that can affect how a piece of media reads. This rings true as well with sex, because with how hard the fucking in this game suddenly ramps up and then… phases out? It’s like getting Biel thrown into the deep end of a pool, a pool full of Michael Getting Blown.

The sexual ridiculousness of this game plateaus in a scene in which Michael narrowly dodges the out of control intercourse delivery system that is Katherine, despite his own utter inability to say no even for the sake of sheer goddamned self preservation. Called away from his newfound carnal addiction that could be described as having a narcotic analogue in Bath Salts, Michael attempts to escape via motor vehicle like a sensible human being. But like Orpheus attempting to exit Hades, he can’t help but look back. Which is when Katherine reminds him that now wears two leashes, in direct fashion.

[The Scene]

That’s right, this motherfucking game went and had a cast member do as Sir Mix-a-Lot requested as he rolled in a Diablo, while looking for females and cops:

[Replay The Scene, but with PUT EM ON THE GLASS]

The sound that Michael makes upon getting the Pressed Amsterdam from his wife’s shrink is a microcosm of this game. I have rewound it hundreds of times. It is one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard in my life. Welcome to your own Wack-Ass Crystal Prison, consisting of a thousand cut facets of an infantilized wife, fetching pizza and herbal shampoo for the live-in staff and constant sexual tantalus via illicit titties. It’s Hell, Michael! There’s no escape, you live here now!

The Endings

Tender Loving Care is a game that is only tenuously so, in as much that a piece of entertainment software that takes user input and alters itself to engage and tell a story in a visual method. It’s a video Choose Your Own Adventure, just with deep dickings instead of getting killed by a damn Dracula. Whatever paths there are possible to take through the game, and in general it’s a pretty linear game, eventually matters re-lineate themselves and bottleneck into a few endings. In this case, the bottleneck is a staircase, which also sometimes involves a sledgehammer. The breaking point is when Katherine, fed up with the fact that Michael’s turned into a major bummer now that he’s all crazy and filthy and unwilling to bang, attempts to go upstairs and re-traumatize Allison by throwing the surrogate Jodie doll they’ve been using down the stairs, killing her in Allison’s mind. What choices made during the TAT determines in what way things progress here, and there’s variations. However, there can be two umbrella terms these ending variations: Nonfatal Confrontation and Outright Murder. I’m a much bigger fan of Outright Murder, so let’s talk about that first.

The path taken to get to the point of causing one of these doofuses to commit to the full fatality lifestyle can result from two factors. One, Michael has completely flipped his wig and reacts with some volatility to Katherine’s threat to expose their affair. Two, Katherine is frustrated with Michael and he’s willing to expose their affair himself. The method needed to get these individual endings remains unclear, but could be about favoring one character among the other, maybe a prudish avoidance of giving any degree of a definite sexual answer during the TATs, or maybe just completely shitting all over one character during the TATs. Whatever. But the long and short of it is that in either ending, whichever one between Michael and Katherine that decides Diplomacy Has Failed will grab Jodie’s trusty sledgehammer, from her room- yeah, don’t question it, I don’t -and demonstrate one of the many activities that could possibly occur at a viking wedding.

[Motorhead’s THE GAME plays over a montage of these dopes getting hammer surgery and taking a header down the stairs in slow motion]

This doesn’t end well in either account, because one it either ends with Michael attempting to bury Katherine by the dog and getting almost immediately found out, because why wouldn’t he be, that’s literally the worst thing you could have done. But then for two, when Michael dies, Katherine is free to Assume Direct Control of Allison and I guess uh.

Pizza for everyone?

The Nonfatal Confrontation path is marginally a more healthy course of action, with the major concession of me saying so being “at least Allison stands up for herself during it” a thing that actually makes it feel like it’s the course of action that’s meant to be seen. Then Michael makes this facial expression, causing you question whether or not this was meant to be seen by anyone, let alone the player. The doll-based shove has decidedly less woman-stopping power and instead results in Katherine taking a nonlethal header onto the foyer and onto her dome, though this is probably not exactly a rosy ending for her. Hell, John Hurt gets a good ending just by not actually being connected into this plot, aside from basically being the Greek Chorus. See, because while the other characters in this story can achieve some modicum of an ending that’s an improvement over the utter trough of the past few days, part of the reason why I generally am the sort of person who is a completionist that would actually prefer a threat being put down with death, is because in my view, prisons as they stand today are barbaric, and it’s hard to get enthusiastic about an adversary that lingers on in a maimed and agonizing state of prolonged, slow death. And with that said, here’s one of the things that can happen to Katherine in one of these endings.

[The NO Gag]

So a few things. One: How? Two: Why? Three: Under what jurisdiction? And finally, four: Fuck off. Seriously, fuck off. There is no untangling this, and there’s no point to it. I don’t even know if her little eye movement at the end there is supposed to be a cry for help or Freddy’s laugh after the the fade to black. This is is ludocinematic garbage water, the water that gets on you when you have to take the trash out, and you don’t realize it rained in the night.

What Little Gameplay That Exists

So it’s time to row back from that horror, to the method at which we have arrived in its station. That’s the thing, though, it’s hard to actually come to terms with how we got to this point, because if games are engines that do work when input with the power of player input, then Tender Loving Care is a very efficient engine. In that there’s not a lot of moving parts, and a lot of narrative to unspool. It’s like a water pipe, made out of hydrophobic material- so redundant that you sort of wonder why people took the route to arrive at what is ultimately a mediocre visual novel about being psychosexually tormented by a woman who’s riding high on what could be the horny version of the Ultimate Warrior’s ‘Destrucity.’

Hornicity. I like it.

Let’s not get into the debate of what is or what isn’t a game, based on the standards of what some overexcited young 20 something man that thinks he’s seen some shit because he graduated high school, beat Dark Souls and caught Todd Howard in a lie. This is a game of Calvinball that’s played by the nerds that got picked last for kickball because they’re not even fun to be around as a morale booster, and these aren’t the sort of people I’d trust with keeping watch on a brickpile, let alone curating a media genre. Where I stand is that I’m willing to call any sort of entertainment software that has rules and goals to be completed in ordered to reach a point of completion, even if it is walking around. 

Let’s instead point out that Tender Loving Care wasn’t even seen as fully a game by Rob Landeros’ own description, but rather, in his words, "a game-like experience while watching it." This is sort of indicative of what Landeros’ intent was in his creation and, frankly, I don’t like it. If I’m going to do the teardown of what exactly went wrong in this experience, it’s that it’s literally an individual taking an experience that isn’t distinct or quality enough to be worth it in the medium it’s trying to ape- Tender Loving Care doesn’t make a good movie, it doesn’t even make a good softcore movie, there’s a thimble full of actual sex in it despite the weird tonal issues of it -to be worth the extra addition of the interactive portion. This is putting a lot of movie and a little game on a disk and asking for the piece of technology that spins and read the disk provide the sizzle for the experience, which is at best misguided, and at worst lazy. Tender Loving Care is not lazy, because it’s the work of a true believer in what full motion video and CD-ROM could do. This is silly, yes, but it’s very clear that someone spent money on it, and people don’t do that with shit they don’t really care about, unless it’s some sort of big ego thing. So instead I’m forced to come to the conclusion that somebody actually thought this would stand on its merits.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t. CD-based games needed to actually be games worth playing in order for them to be worth the cost of admission, because just being able to cram a bunch of bigger files than you could normally fit on a disk onto a more advanced storage medium doesn’t magically make the experience itself better. It does not matter that it’s John Hurt asking you the questions in these TAT exams- I mean, it does help, John Hurt is an easy voice to listen to. But the thing is, his delivery doesn’t change the fact that every single one of these things isn’t so much a game as it is a limp psych evaluation administered by a non expert for the ultimate purpose of being a DVD chapter menu. I’ve been through the process of therapy, or at least one form of it, and I’ve done tests like this. They’re not really what I’d call a game, more like assisted introspection in order for you to get a feel for what it is you’re actually feeling. This might seem deep but consider that the reason why it does is because in society we’re surrounded by forces and individual that treat introspection as some waste of time, even react to it with hostility, because to those with minds that fixed to the material, actually feeling out what emotions are to you seems like a dumb waste of time. I mean, when I’m mad, I feel mad, I just do, I don’t know what you’re supposed to mean by anything else than Mad is Mad.

Actually emotionally defining yourself when you go through the actual process of tender loving care that is good therapy is what can help people break out of the programming that’s been written into them that causes them to lash out, or make self-sabotaging choices, or in my case, just feel really shitty all the time, for no reason. It does not however make for an engaging gameplay mechanic, nor does it serve as an effective means of guiding a story. At the end of the day, you click through a bunch of oddly worded and sometimes really blockheaded statements at associated images, and then the game decides what you want to see based on what it deems your desires are. If it was in any way good at this, it would have read my character and immediately just started playing Action Jackson instead.

Instead, it presents you with branches in the story that aren’t really branches so much as they are minor variations. It’s very difficult to tell what has had a perceptible effect because in this rush to be some real mature storytelling booned by new technology- which by the way, this game came out in 1999, the CD-ROM was actually on its way out at this point -it forgot to do anything actually extraordinary in any branch to make them distinct. Or even not drab. For a game where folks are willing to get naked, that’s sort of nuts to think about. But for all it promises in its mature and psychological experience, the only big change that’s really worth pointing out is “who falls down the stairs” and “was it a hammer or a doll that sent them tumbling.”

There’s a word for that, and despite the sensual experience this game wants you to enjoy, it’s ‘limp.’

FIVE - The Aftermath - “Sorry I Slipped and Fell Into Your Shrink So Much, Honey”

See, it’s ironic. Because this game was produced by Aftermath Media. And also, they didn’t have much of one. That’s it, one and done for this venture, in a fairly definitive fashion. And that’s despite a stronger than average release this game had in Germany, apparently- I dunno, I can’t explain someone in Germany want to speak up? There’s a lot that I said regarding Tender Loving Care, more than I though I would have to say, because there’s actually when you get right down to it, not much there. Perhaps that’s the thing that best suits it, that like the concept of Full Motion Video as a central feature in games, it’s big and consuming, but also extremely insubstantial. Whatever I had to say about the actual craft of games was split with my time being incredulous at the ridiculous thought experiment that this game was trying to be. At no time did I believe that Michael was actually the crazy one, because Katherine gaslights like she’s filled with fucking magnesium; this is neither a mechanic nor a story beat, it’s just dreck.

But that’s just the thing, isn’t it? Because people spent the effort, and in doing so, created something that has left a reputation that’s much worse than they probably deserve as an artist, and it’s not because they failed in producing the thing; two companies did, in this case, but the Thing came out. But more than games that didn’t actually make to market, or low effort hand-shovels of lazy shit that clog up Steam these days, games like this provoke a strong, nigh overwhelming response, like you as an onlooker have been empowered in reaction to a display of artistic hubris that momentarily elevates you into some sort of demigod being off sheer injection of the Wrath of the Gods, to bellow in a voice as wide as the Grand Canyon and as high as Everest, “YOU INNOVATE NOTHING, YOU JUST COMBINED YOUR BAD MOVIE WITH YOUR BAD GAME AND CALLED IT AN EXPERIENCE, LOOK AT YOURSELF IN THE MIRROR BEFORE YOU MAKE MORE OF THIS WANK.”

And I gotta say, for once, it’s really refreshing not to be yelling this about David Cage.

[Uncomfortable Pause]

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAWWWWW YEEA[hard cut to credits]