leaving the party

I struggled this week with a weird internal pressure to make something. I’ve had this website going for a couple weeks now, and I’ve really liked writing it so far! But I’ve been beginning to think to myself: god, I should be writing something for next week. I’ve had to tell myself to relax. It doesn’t really matter. We’re just having fun here. But there is a demon in my brain, a creativity consuming little Worm called “perceived responsibility.” The Worm crawls in my ear, squirms around in my temples, whispers: “you should be working… you should be writing… you should be productive,……” So at the beginning of this week, I wrote some slop I didn’t care about, and just five minutes ago, read it again and still didn’t care about it! I could say something like “it doesn’t meet my standards of quality” but I don’t have those or want to. It’s even worse than that. I just thought it was boring to read and write. It has forced me to re-evaluate what I’m doing here. Why write a blog every week (or so) like this, having spent money and time hosting and building a website for it? What am I seeking to gain from this experience? Some kind of profit? Clout? Be serious! Of course, the answer is obvious: I do it because it’s fun, and I like to share it with my friends. So why the stress?

This is what Catgirl has forced me to reckon with. Catgirl, a two hour RPG developed by an artist named City Girl, is an incredibly free, very funny, extremely 2 hour game about saving your doggy friend Mopmop. The premise is not very complicated, and to its benefit, neither is the rest of the game: a pretty demon lady is following you around and trying to steal all the art in the world. Mopmop loves painting, so the pretty lady went ahead and stole Mopmop too. In an effort to save her weird little dog, Catgirl has to get strong enough to defeat the demon lady Yumi and save artistic expression itself from her grasp. That’s really all there is to it, and I feel Catgirl is almost about the fact that it need not be any deeper than that. The story largely gets out of its own way in order to let the real stars of the show take the center stage; its humor, its banging original soundtrack, and its big cast of colorful and weird women. City Girl is a musician making what I can mostly describe as “chill music to relax and study to.” What she’s made here is like a terrific little album which she’s attached a terrific little game to. It’s mostly retro-style 20th century RPG inspired music with a lot of modern polish, but every now and then it seems to allow itself to go sickos. Yumi’s theme, for example, is a reoccurring song that quickly became one of my favorites: it’s a deep and intoxicating percussive and trap inspired beat with a slightly warped 8 bit melody overlaid on top and it works for me every time I hear it.

Yumi is just one of many pretty and strange women that rotate in my mind still after playing this game. There are so many Girls… everywhere you look… Even all the enemy slimes are slimegirls! Some of the women here become important supporting characters, some are silly one off jokes, some are giant cats that serve as airships, all of them are unique and strange and lovable. I love when a woman is silly. Hook line and sinker for me.

Mechanically speaking, Catgirl is incredibly simple. It has a turn based battle system you’ll interact with several times, which is not at all complex or particularly interesting. It’s mostly just a turn by turn numbers game, where your only option is to attack every turn. if you’re high enough level and do enough damage to beat them before they beat you, you win. Otherwise you lose. Generally you won’t find out whether you have a chance at all until after you start the fight. It’s pretty weak mechanically, but thankfully, I think they probably recognized that and made sure that it wasn’t an important pillar of the game so much as a it is a little check to see that you do everything in the right order. Often you’ll fight a penguin or slime who is too powerful for you, and the answer is not trying again, but instead going to make sure you did all the other stuff you need to do first. The core of the game is not in its battles anyway; mechanically speaking, what works about the game is its flexibility and willingness to not get pinned into being just one thing. The deeper you go, the more you’ll find totally different “battle systems” for its unique bosses. You’ll have to do dance battle rhythm games and Touhou style bullet hells way before you end up getting sick of the regular battles. It always keeps you on your toes, and it’s decidedly less Final Fantasy and more Warioware. What comes through this mechanical diversity is an effort not necessarily to make something totally coherent, but rather an effort to have fun making something fun.

If this game has a theme, ultimately this is it. Everybody in Catgirl has some kind of artistic practice they love to make or consume in one way or another, and each of their relationships with this art is twisted when they’re forced to make slop they don’t care about under conditions they aren’t happy in. This applies to all of the major characters: with Star, who has to draw images of her captor when all she really wants to draw is cats, or with Nova, who has to change the names of all the characters in the library to the names of the antagionist, or with Jieun, who has to rewrite all her songs to be about evil women controlling her. They, too, have The Worm, this perceived responsibility to create, pushed unto them by forces outside of their control. For me it’s a real, actual Worm which tangibly exists. You can pick it up and stretch it out and everything. The Worm for them just happens to take the form of a beautiful woman or demon lady, who imprisons them and forces them to do what she desires. That part doesn’t sound so bad to me!!!! But different strokes etc. My point is that they have to spend their time productively, and only in doing so are they allowed to feel “satisfied” by their work. But left to their own devices, all these pretty girls love making art not because it’s a productive thing to do to advance their career and impress their boss or whatever, but because it’s fun.

This is something that City Girl seems to understand intuitively through experience about the creative process. Catgirl is a game about making stuff you want because you want to, and chilling out about it completely. You don’t need to be making the most interesting artistic piece in the world all the time, and the things you create don’t have to be the most sardonically witty or intelligent things in the world. It’s not that deep, and it doesn’t have to be. You can just make something because it makes you feel good. You should never feel like you have to make art as some sort of solemn responsibility you should feel guilty about not always fulfilling. You make art for the same reason you kiss boys or go to the beach and eat ice cream or do a little dance or play Warioware: because in some ways, whether it’s meant to or not, it just feels good to do. It’s satisfying to make something, but only when it truly comes from your own desire.

It’s okay to give in to that desire. It’s actually the only way to make something genuinely interesting. Good writers are perverts. The act of creating something, pretty much anything, is the act of actualizing some desire within you, and the more you lean into that desire, the more authentic to yourself and your creative vision the finished thing becomes, whatever it may be. You make something because it excites you! The moment it no longer excites you and you do it just because you feel you must is the moment you start making something passionless and plain. That aside, you don’t even need to be doing it because you’re hoping for a complete and beautiful finished product. I don’t do this because I’m dead set on making the Worlds Greatest Blog (Lmao) so much as I do this for the sake of a process which I find pleasurable. Sitting and playing all these games, paying closer attention to them than I might without the writing that comes with it, it’s satisfying in a certain hard to place way. It activates something in me to care in this way. I wouldn’t be doing it otherwise!

David Lynch said that there’s a myth about creativity, this myth that good art comes from this place of suffering and sadness. David Lynch argues that we have to believe that all the great artists made this art not because they were suffering, but because they loved to make something. In his book Catching the Big Fish, Lynch says:

“Right here people might bring up Vincent van Gogh as a painter who did great work in spite of — or because of — his suffering. I like to think that van Gogh would have been even more prolific and even greater if he wasn’t so restricted by the things tormenting him. I don’t think it was pain that made him so great — I think his painting brought him whatever happiness he had.”

I’ve heard him say before that we’re all supposed to be running around like little puppy dogs, happily wagging our tails together. What’s the point if we aren’t happy? The moral of the story is to do things you enjoy, whether its an artistic practice or a silly little blog or something else entirely. If it sucks, hit da bricks! The Worm, I realize, is a sickness. It exists mostly to make girls like me feel bad about themselves when they haven’t hit some imaginary standard, a standard also created by The Worm. I hate this Worm called guilt. And its buddy shame too! I knock em both upside the head!!!! Rattle em around!!!! Etc!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Like all things that make me personally feel bad, The Worm should be sought out and destroyed. So I hope you’re destroying your Worms. Make your games and your music. Make your paintings and your movies and whatnot. and make damn sure that you’re enjoying doing it!

PS: in lieu of a long credits sequence in Catgirl, the game instead ends with a link to buy the Catgirl OST. i mentioned and linked it before, but it is really good, so i’m mentioning and linking it again here. yippee!