#he looks extremely good so cool apollonian even

[eightspringdays]

Near in this chapter. Exactly.

[myfriendpokey]

7 bubsys of the world

1. museum bubsy:

i love bubsy bobcat's ghastly, staring eyes, which look past everything around him, as if he were the dead theologian mentioned in swedenborg - who upon death simply moves without knowing into a new eternal house shaped exactly like his own, but which over time begins to grow dimmer, more transparent, he finds rooms he's never seen before, populated by dead and faceless men, themfurniture and writings fade, until we can only imagine some final increment of ghostliness leads to the awful truth that - - aaah!!

but of course the distance in bubsy's stare comes from a different location, not so much the gulf between the living and the dead as that between the living and the 90s. bubsy looks at us from the depths of a bubsy 3d that NEVER ENDED, that rather than being a temporary and ignoble home for the hovering bubsy spirit (as expressed in various promotional materials) has somehow become the final determining limit for where that spirit can go. bubsy can explore any kind of content, go on any kind of adventure.. once it is re-expressed within the conditions of this mangled polygonal plain..... i think that it's so easy (and so profitable!!) to fall into a sort of idealist conception of videogame history as one of various platonic bogeys (truth! gameplay! mario!) temporarily given shape in base matter before disintegrating to appear in some new form. we don't really think those material expressions have anything to say about their spirits, obviously mario isn't "really" as chunky and polygonal as he is in mario 64, just as videogames as a form can easily be distinguished from any of the various rather sad attempts to embody that form. so it's a real shock to find our credit rescinded and be told, no, this is what you have. bubsy is trapped inside his temporary emblem, inside a world he never made, drifting around haplessly and at last thrust towards that final refuge of the doomed, which is the effort to at least be Cultured.  do his unseeing eyes still register a sense of potential alterity in the artwork he consumes, or just the frozen parody of same?

2. personal bubsy:

interestingly very few of the bubsy fangames try to replicate the protagonist's canon personality at face value, very likely because it's unbearable. but maybe also for other reasons. the bubsy games themselves play with the idea of bubsy as either an actor seperable from the gameworlds he inhabits ("bubsy the bobcat in claws encounters of the furred kind") or as at least possessing a kind of bugs-bunny-ish awareness of an audience (who are all those quips addressed to?). but that's within the games' own conception of themselves as exciting blockbuster product - taking them as failures of one kind or another as it's become standard to do converts bubsy's actorliness from that of the starring attraction to a sort of jobbing z-movie shlub, mired in one contractual dispute after another and forced through a variety of ill-concieved ventures. and i say interestingly because as far as i can see there's little to support this good will or sense of implied interiority - i'm not aware of gex, say, or duke nukem being extended the same kind of escape clause from their own insufferability. maybe the sheer unbelievability of what these games are telling us about themselves, as mediated through some decades of bubsy trash-talk, gives them a plaintive quality.

3. omnipresent bubsy:

i made a bubsy bobcat fangame once because i thought it would be funny to have a fangame for a character nobody actually liked. it got picked up and reposted by a bubsy fanblog a few days later ("Added for the sake of Bubsy completeness... man this looks bad... but you can download it XD".)

4. dialectic bubsy:

to clarify: i made a bubsy bobcat fangame because i wanted to be funny, but i also wanted to be annoying. i was interested in the "indie games" scene (as distinct from the rpg maker one) and in 2009 the public face of that was very much High Designist, minimal, meaningful, squares, grids, programming, Passage, etc..

i was making a game for an experimental gameplay workshop open jam and figured since i lacked all qualification for this style of art i might as well deliberately disqualify myself from it and make something that was sort of ostentatiously mired in the same junky, unreflective commercial culture that stuff was trying to escape.  so it was partly a tease, but not a very dangerous one. bubsy was so visibly, universally reviled within videogame culture that it was hard to imagine any kind of sincere identification with the character taking place - using that franchise therefore meant being able to convert the ickier associations of the fangame format (unoriginal!! un-"challenging"!! made by and for hobbyists and women!!) into more aestheticised, and also more acceptable, forms of disagreeability ("punk" recontextualisation and deliberate badness, etc). so it's a funny ugliness but also one that relies on a sort of shared, unquestioned sense of what's genuinely "un-touchable" in this artsy context, and of course bonding over mutual agreement on what's beyond the pale of acceptable taste is one of the founding rituals of "gamer culture". i'd never played a bubsy game and probably only knew about the franchise from seanbaby or something like that.

what happened next is more interesting. i'd made a game called space funeral, which was popular enough on gamejolt to generate a fairly active fanart tag and even some fangames, a number of fangames all by different authors and with different approaches. and one of the fangame authors ended up playing my own bubsy fangame and decided to re-include bubsy as a character in space funeral 4 as something of a callback to that. i think (forgive me, i only browse the tag) this slowly became the occasion for some drama within "the community". Words Were Said re. furries and the appropriateness of same within this context, bubsy continued gaining more and more of a prominent role in the new fangame, "new bubsy" was also reimagined as a trans sex worker with an extremely prominent chest, these decisions appeared to be contentious, eventually the developer of SF4 declared that they were sick of the fandom, sick of the original game, and going to start a new project based entirely around their new bubsy character.... all of which is well and good and Culture In Action and frankly i stopped having any opinion about space funeral long before the first fangame came out. but what i'm interested in here is bubsy, and specifically the idea of how the deliberate reuse of the bubsy character acts as a way to thematise and re-engage whatever's felt to be awful, unacceptable, within some specific space. in rip van bubsy that means pushing against artgame's more apollonian efforts with a reminder of the garish, lumpen, unsignifying qualities of most actually existing videogames; in space funeral 4, the ironic repurposing and sexlessness of games like rip van bubsy and space funeral is itself critiqued by a sincere / artless / horned-up reusage of the same material which is similarly "unacceptable" within that framework. the travelling figure of bubsy appears as an index of dissent around the format...

5. negative bubsy:

i think it's a known and documented phenomenon that punk music has a weird, recurring affinity for the purest of pure MOR pop - sex pistols, the clash, nirvana all known abba fans, the minutemen covered steely dan, sonic youth the carpenters, madonna floats across michael azerrad's "our band could be your life" as eerily recurring presence and talisman... all of which might just be a catalog of private tastes. but it's also tempting, given that in seperate ways these were all very self-fashioned, ideological, image-alert bands, to take this taste for pure pop as to some extent  deliberate, as maybe part of the same self-fashioning. the very distance of abba from anything approaching punk, noise, art-rock, becomes a reason to like them - they become a kind of model of aesthetic autonomy, serenely detached from any kind of taste or wider expectation - abba are a vantage point from which you can critique punk rock itself. and punks and abba become comrades in their mutual distance from pink floyd("horseshoe theory").

why so many art games about bubsy? there are many perverse or ironic reasons, but i wonder if one of them could be that he occupies something of the same role within the videogames imagination. the idea of a franchise for a character nobody likes turns into an image of art for art's sake. the fact that bubsy is irredeemable from a "meaningful, expressive" perspective makes him useful as a point from which to hypothesize forms of art which deliberately avoid the meaningful or expressive - as in ulillillia's marvellous bubsy 3d videos, which transform the game into a oulipean suite of detached operations.

6. material bubsy:

the recieved idea of the mid-1990s mascot platformer audience is like the old analogy of the pre-revolution french peasant as a man walking up to his nose in water - while the ground is flat, he can persist indefinitely, but come the slightest decrease or pothole he will instantly drown. with the bubsy games as tipping point for the temporary demise of this form. but it's still curious that he was chosen, rather than, say, zool or cool spot, mascots who were "worse" on an objective moral level in that they were literally marketing contrivances to sell snack food to children. the videogames audience is traditionally able to accept any level of ghoulishness of this kind as long as it is presented in an appropriately humble,relateable way - the only sin really punished is that of pride, of getting above your station. so here we have a sort of martyr-bubsy, whose only real crime was not exemplifying videogame industry hubris and cynicism so much as making insufficient effort to cover for it...

well, maybe not, maybe we should honor the "disproportionate" scapegoating of bubsy as a real moment of disgust at the habitual crapness of mass media and avoid that charitable revisionism which is so easily rolled out to brands with the power to outlive many of their critics. but there is a  certain fascination that comes with those games blamed for or associated with some kind of crash, collapse - - like the atari ET game, they can no longer be regarded as "just games" operating within some fixed economic niche, they fall partly out of that niche and into the material world, they temporarily dispel the sensed changelessness of the industry. if ET really did destroy the industry it would be the best videogame ever made. bubsy never acquired this glamour, but it means that within the awful pantheon of named videogame characters he's one of the few which can be identified with any kind of negative drive, which gives him a special affinity for hobbyist games interested in tarrying with that drive.

7. official bubsy:

how many bubsys can you shut up? in 2016 a new, official bubsy game was released for pc and ps4, proving once and for all that that is not dead which can eternal lie, and came with a nauseating press-release-cum-interview with bubsy himself in which he ruminates smugly about his ensuing return to planet earth. the fake interviewer glosses the weird and largely negative history of the franchise (bubsy is a "gaming legend", apparently - i can't see anyone described as a "legend" without thinking of those awful laddish testimonials to the likes of boris johnson and raoul moat); bubsy throws in an unexpected jab at "unauthorized indie pixel games and deeveeart  portraits", suggesting he's at least seen space funeral 4; the overall  tone is that same bullying landlord chumminess of people deposed by scandal who pop up on the chat show circuit five years later with memoir in tow, blandly self-certain about the place they  deserve to keep in public life. whatever human meaning had accrued to the  franchise - in failure, in the way that failure could be used, repurposed, in wider ongoing arguments about culture - is firmly pushed away, in favour of that strangely anonymous recognition-without-history that constitutes ultimate value for any IP.

but it's also hardly unexpected - nothing dies anymore, even those forms whose only interest was in death, and we're of course not restrained by the threatening (litigious?) distinction between authorized and unauthorized versions of the same wretched official culture. better just to see it as yet another fan-bubsy to add to the catalog- a horrible-undead-persistence-under-capitalism bubsy, a bubsy that now signifies as well as everything else the monolithic stupidity by which "authorized" culture attempts to safeguard its possessions. so maybe we will see this new bubsy start to emerge places as well, an all-new emblem of the negative, emerging where you want it least... a bubsy for our time..!!!

[image tags: bubsy visits the james turrell retrospective, bubsy the bobcat in rip van bubsy starring bubsy, space funeral 4, “rabbid better than bubsy” by shinxboy on deviantart, bubsy animated tv show]