Killing Interactive Art…and Loving It!
Anthology of the Killer (hereafter AOTK) is an anti-game in the same way that Dada artworks and performances were anti-art. I don’t mean to say that AOTK is aiming for high-brow; indeed, this latest cult-hit title from thecatamites a.k.a. Stephen Gillmurphy and his various collaborators is unabashedly irreverent and unpretentious in its expression. Gillmurphy is a veteran freeware developer, with some of his games even dating back to latter days of flash games, like Biggles on Mars or Paul Moose in Space World, both from 2009 and still available on itchi.io and Game Jolt. These games feature multimedia collages like paper and clay as well as handmade dioramas made with cardboard and lego, in addition to digital animation. The models that Gillmurphy creates are cartoonish and emphasize a hurried doodle-like quality, a style that is popular for both flash game era expression and Outsider artwork–a mode that anti-artists like those in the Dada movement worked in.
At its core, AOTK has an anti-establishment philosophy, much like the avant garde. Especially with its penchant for remixing, and therefore subverting, bourgeois expectations of art objects and texts (as with found object art, collaging, and Dada magazines which used both the aforementioned aesthetics). Similar to Parun’s DIY aesthetics, which ludzu explored at length in our Heisei Pistol Show issue, thecatamites incorporates open source software and incorporates his multimedia artwork into his games in a way that creates an individual assemblage of digital objects and design engines. Although perhaps it’s more accurate to drop the descriptor of “individual”, as AOTK is resistant to focusing on an icon in the same way that Dada was not defined solely by its most recognizable figures like Marcel Duchamp.
While the game centers mostly on BB and her paranormal, true crime misadventures as an inquisitive zinester, scavenger, and erstwhile contractor for zany part-time gigs, she is less an agent than she is an observer. In spite of the title of the game, the nonsensical figure of The Killer, is merely described in the game’s glossary as a “Mechanical drinky bird possessed by an evil metaphor for history” and designed by a theatre group to resemble a recurring Symbolist figure in Alfred Kubin’s work. Although the player’s experience is mostly aligned with BB’s, the POV shifts several times throughout the game. The game also delights in proliferating the figure of BB via several simulacra or figures, like the “My First Strangle Victim” dolls, BB’s image being used by several slasher films (all of which cheated her out of royalties), real serial killers impersonating BB’s slasher character, and arguably Marcie from the “Heart of the Killer” episode.
The last is an antagonist who started out as a “zine star” who has turned to using her subcultural knowledge for an evil consultancy known as the acronym R.A.G.G.M.O.P.P, which in turn is “a front for an even more sinister group known only as the ‘Deep Chamber Of Commerce’”. When BB confronts Marcie in the bowels of the Dream Hotel, which is actually just a facade for an immersive psychological experiment, there’s a sense that Marcie was once a role model for BB. Marcie cautions BB as she takes her leave that someday BB will yearn for predictability and the comforts of a conventional and commodified lifestyle prescribed to her by someone like her: the zinester turned soulless corporate elite. Despite the precarity of BB’s life in XX City, amongst hundreds or perhaps thousands of killers both mundane and cosmically profane, she refuses Marcie’s final offer to be molded into a late capitalist meat puppet. Quite literally, in fact, as the suburban scene Marcie presents BB with is one slick with blood and viscera (which calls me back to the body horror concept of capitalism explored in Etherane’s works). Throughout the game the commodities of modern and postmodern life are often portrayed as containers for toxicity and irrationality. Dada was leery of commodities as well and many dadaists stressed the rejection of art as merely a visual product instead of a curated idea.
Speaking of history as a toxic entity, that’s another key intersection between thecatamites design philosophy and Dadaism–namely, the belief that modern rationalism and order of civilization was an illusion. Throughout AOTK, BB chronicles the ways that a legacy of capitalism and cultural theory violently haunts her city and its people. There are cults of dark academia that want to study murder deep within the tunnels of BB’s apartment complex, itself a monstrous entity of accreted layers each “draped piecemeal over the last, to form new spaces where Opportunity might live.” The museum of Drinkybird objects hides a torture lab, graduation parties are excuses for killers to congregate and easily snare victims and commit copycat murders based off B-movies (BB-Movies?). The world of AOTK is a Dadaist’s nightmare. One where both the visual products it mediates and the philosophies they signify (if any at all) are merely ways to commodify everything and make excuses for corrupt authorities, like XX City’s police department which celebrates their success rate for hiding murder victims’ bodies. Or billionaires hiding worthless and puerile “moral” art in secret tax exempt freeport galleries.
Games are often not striving for artistic excellence and its “hardcore” audiences are often resistant to projects that explicitly aim for such a design goal. Even when they are offering up social commentary, their developers are at times almost embarrassed or afraid to admit that’s what their projects are capable of. That doesn’t erase the fact that games are composite experiences that express the ideas of their creators. I believe Gillmurphy is aware of this and likes to play around with the absurdity of digital games in the same way that Dadaists wanted to paradoxically critique art by creating artworks that undermine the legacy of fine art. Games are an offshoot of the military industrial complex’s technological development and you’ll notice that whenever there’s a sudden surge of violence throughout AOTK’s narrative, Gillmurphy explicitly references more classic game genres like platformers, RPGs (think of the top down overworld map sequence in “Blood of the Killer”), and FPS a la Doom (see “Face of the Killer”). BB constantly jeers murderous types for not just creating or playing games instead throughout as well.
AOTK is not here to offer up answers to complex problems in our present fraught paradigm of games and what legacies they are representative of. In curator Nilson Carroll’s foreword essay for the exhibit SEQUENCEBREAK//’s catalog, he calls games like thecatamites’ title “artists’ games” because they use “the medium’s unique characteristic of interactivity, finding a balance of form and content, playable poetry” and because many of them “consider their player as more than a customer.” As a parting thought, it’s important to remember that AOTK is an exhibit itself, one that frames and elevates BB’s misadventures as a zinester documenting strange occurrences in her subcultures as art.
The nine episodes of the game were originally created separately, then later anthologized, so this exhibit isn’t just a clever diegetic conceit. There are even Brechtian curtains that fall when the player exits the exhibit before or after they’ve traversed its psychedelic installations. Gillmurphy wants players to remain aware that this is a structured interactive experience, one that values the conceptual nature of games, rather than the commercial value of them.
