{"id":2652,"date":"2013-03-23T17:52:03","date_gmt":"2013-03-23T17:52:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/?p=2652"},"modified":"2021-01-14T18:41:45","modified_gmt":"2021-01-14T18:41:45","slug":"the-procession-of-the-line","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/?p=2652","title":{"rendered":"The Procession of the Line"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ridiculous Fishing<\/em> is not a game.<\/a><\/p>\n

Much of the aura of\u00a0Ridiculous Fishing<\/em> is bound up with its predecessor, Ninja Fishing<\/em>.\u00a0<\/em>An honest game in its unimaginative execution and its obvious intentions, Ninja Fishing<\/em> is clearly a commercial product and nothing else. We can praise it for its absurdity, or deride it for its banality. We can discard it as a trifle, waste time with it, or consume it like content. Our own desires and perspectives can so easily overpower Ninja Fishing<\/em> because it is, like Radical Fishing<\/em> (its predecessor and the game it mechanically reproduced<\/a>), playful.<\/p>\n

Ridiculous Fishing<\/em> cannot be played. Whatever your own intentions your relationship with Ridiculous Fishing<\/em> is always a moral one<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Ridiculous Fishing<\/em> is a conservative action. Positioning itself against the decoupling of creation and propriety it also satirizes the corrupt and manipulative ‘free-to-play’ model<\/a>, which is the most critical change made by the designers of Ninja Fishing<\/em> to the formula laid out in Radical Fishing<\/em>. Where anyone can play Ninja Fishing<\/em> and advance more quickly by paying a small amount, in Ridiculous Fishing<\/em> you must pay a small amount up front, and then grind for in-game currency. The currency of Ninja Fishing<\/em> has an exchange rate, both with everyday currency and with time (the existential currency). Ridiculous Fishing<\/em> is much more hardcore, demanding of its players their money and<\/strong> their time, on its own terms.<\/p>\n

That Ridiculous Fishing<\/em> defends legitimacy and purity by taking a form which was itself once considered corrupt and manipulative<\/a> doesn’t matter. Forms are not important. As with all moral issues the purpose is not to find the perfect design but to structure relationships. Ridiculous Fishing<\/em> serves to articulate a line so that people may better understand their distance from it, and to make it more difficult to walk with subtlety.\u00a0That\u00a0Ridiculous Fishing<\/em> is a popular success rather than a financial failure is also irrelevant to this purpose since the line is drawn in both cases, whether in redemption or in persecution. Though it’s pleasant that in this case talent has been rewarded.<\/p>\n

Indeed, Ridiculous Fishing<\/em>‘s retrograde form is what makes it so effective at its task. Ridiculous Fishing<\/em> is a simulation of a game. It resembles so well a game that it perfectly masks that there are no games anymore. In this way it is a more perfect player than its contemporary, Proteus<\/em>, which still believes that being a game is important<\/a>. Where Proteus<\/em> wants to cheat and be caught, Ridiculous Fishing<\/em> is happier to play the secret spoilsport.<\/p>\n

This is why Ridiculous Fishing<\/em> is not a game, and why there are no more games: because it is actually a move in a larger ‘game’ in which the player cannot refuse participation (a type of bad game we sometimes call ‘war’). There is no free play in regards to Ridiculous Fishing<\/em>. There is nothing voluntary because playing and not playing, boredom and interest, approval and disquiet, have already been cast as moral stances which are non-negotiable. Even those who play without knowledge of the higher struggle are no more playing than a pawn is playing at being single-minded. Everyone has already been placed on a side.<\/p>\n

Ridiculous Fishing<\/em> is art. It follows a different path but arrives at the same destination as Brenda Brathwaite’s Train<\/em>. Few could play Train<\/em> and so the thing itself, what ever it might have been, was easily subsumed by the discourse that surrounded it<\/a>. Ridiculous Fishing<\/em>, on the other hand, is\u00a0ascendant\u00a0and easy to access, but its discourse is similarly inescapable. In both cases the games become simulacra: the model precedes the referent because the game precedes its play.<\/p>\n

This transformation, where the substance of a work is dissolved, made immaterial and so indistinguishable from what the work is ‘about’, is the process by which an object is made sacred and worthy of its worship.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ridiculous Fishing is not a game. Much of the aura of\u00a0Ridiculous Fishing is bound up with its predecessor, Ninja Fishing.\u00a0An honest game in its unimaginative<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2652"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2652"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2652\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3348,"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2652\/revisions\/3348"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}