Frog Fractions
I wrote this one last November for a failed blog experiment, but I’m still into this piece, so enjoy!
Any of the blogs where I’ve seen Frog Fractions recommended have basically said the same thing: “Oh, just go play it, trust me.” The disclaimer is necessary: Frog Fractions initially appears to be a shitty edutainment game. We’ve played a billion of those–ones where what you’re doing only vaguely relates to the lesson they’re trying to teach you. Oregon Trail was a better videogame than a history class.
So for the first few minutes of Frog Fractions you’re a little frog gobbling up bugs, and randomly fractions are appearing, and they’re adding to your score, but nothing’s really happening with them–they don’t seem to be adding to anything coherent. And you begin to get upgrades. And some of them are standard, and then some get strange: One upgrade is for an electronic tracking chip to make catching bugs easier, and then another unlocks which lets you get the chip surgically removed. And then that unlocks another upgrade where you change your mind and put the chip back. And then you can decide that the natural way is best and remove it. And this goes back and forth until the description text for the upgrade turns into an argument where the two sides are arguing between themselves whether or not you should be using this upgrade, and ultimately that devolves into “nuh-uh”/”yeah-huh”-level grunting, until ultimately both sides agree to disagree and leave it to the player to decide whether or not to have the targeting cursor. You can upgrade the frog with a computer brain which turns the fractions into decimals and those weird numbers that have “+e” in them that no one really understands. And you can upgrade your lillypad to a turtle, and to a faster-moving dragon, and then you get a rocket engine and the dragon blasts off into space to face the bugs on their homeworld (Bug Mars), and suddenly it’s a shooter game. And that’s when the game slowly begins to reveal itself.
See, Frog Fractions isn’t really an edutainment game, of course, it’s–well, an art piece, I guess. Because at this point the game begins switching genres left and right. There’s a quiz in order to earn citizenship on Bug Mars, a text adventure portion, a maze, a lemonade-stand-type game involving pornography instead of good old wholesome lemonade–and the particular joy of the game comes in recognizing the genre the game is riffing on.
As a piece of comedy, the game works brilliantly. It plays itself straight for just long enough–you do have to play a few levels of the faux edutainment game before you get clued into the idea that something’s a little off here, and just when you think you’ve got the handle on it, it takes another turn. But as a piece of art, I think it’s kind of a failure.
See, Frog Fractions isn’t really about anything. There’s two games it reminds me of, both of which are shaggy dog stories in their own right. Steamshovel Harry is one: It initially appears to be a physics-based space adventure, which you begin by being given your briefing about how you have this mission that’s crucial to the safety of the galaxy, and just when you’re ready to play, the tutorial continues, giving you lectures on the physics complete with a song (“gravity is gonna kill you, Harry/ gravity is gonna shoot you in the head”), descriptions of all of the enemies you’re going to face, and then it’s time to sing the Earth Anthem with its glorification of Earth’s great Spider King (whose jaws can crush anything), and after all of that, you finally land on the planet, and a character’s attempt to explain the controls is interrupted by the bad guys’ bombs, since all of that dicking around in the tutorial gave the enemies time to mobilize their forces and make their final assault. Another is Upgrade Complete, which is a little shooter game that makes you upgrade pretty much everything in order to continue–the game even makes you upgrade in order to pre-load the game, to have menu buttons, even background music. I find it strangely satisfying to play, if only because the game has a feeling of constant progress, given that all of the available upgrades means you’re constantly progressing.
Both Steamshovel Harry and Upgrade Complete have Messages, if you will, and their purpose is to critique a single gameplay mechanic. Steamshovel Harry completely rips apart the idea of tutorials, placing them in a 100% diegetic realm, unusual for a tutorial, and not only points out that people would much rather play than stay around for an endless amount of time listening to a character drone on about backstory. Upgrade Complete takes the restriction of game features to a ludicrous degree–a criticism of games like Guitar Hero has long been that the game doesn’t let you have features you paid for right out of the box, and Upgrade Complete simply takes that to the logical and most elaborate conclusion.
Frog Fractions doesn’t seem to have anything like that as far as I’m concerned. There’s no grand message, no real unifying concept. It’s just a bunch of stuff that happens. You go from gameplay type to gameplay type until you’ve run out of them and then the game ends. There’s no punchline, no point. Is the game criticizing edutainment games as both non-educational and not fun to play? Is it making some kind of point about games which can’t figure out what genre they’re in? I don’t feel like the game is making a critique of anything, because the game gave me nothing but joy every time it switched to something unexpected. Even when I began to catch on to what the game was doing it still managed to find ways to come out of left field and surprise me. But I don’t think the game is entirely positive either, especially considering author Jim Crawford’s other games include Futilitris–the most depressingly Sisyphean Tetris game ever made–and other arty things which question the point of videogames. (And none of the individual scenes in Frog Fractions are particularly fun to play, so that’s another thing.)
Now, the individual scenes are wonderfully written–the quiz portion is particularly masterful, a series of questions about Bug Mars history with increasingly absurd choices of answers, all of which are considered correct (the bug giving you the quiz, in fact, gushes afterwards about how you’re the first person in Bug Mars history to get a perfect score). Taken as a whole, it’s just a geeky little postmodern void. No need for meaning or purpose, here’s a bunch of shit. It’s a great bunch of shit–I just wish it had more of a point.
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I think this is a little unfair on Frog Fractions. I see as a Monty Pythonesque game. No message required, just wonderful absurdity.
A very fair point! Crawford chatted with me briefly on Twitter–he said a lot of the reason for the game’s existence was simply to make a game that had as many absurd secrets as it does–he basically wanted to make a game that appeared to be one thing and turned out to be a complete other thing. I do wish it had had a grand punchline tying everything together–but at this point that feels like nitpicking something which did delight me every time it changed genres.
As I mentioned, I wrote this last year–Second Quest lay kind of fallow for a while after Eric left, and I wasn’t really sure if I wanted to keep with the site and the same format or do something drastically different, so I started another blog, mostly to experiment with style and get my writing chops up. Most of it isn’t super worth sharing–I was experimenting with writing one long, flowing conversation with myself and I don’t think it was entirely successful–I ended up going back to SQ after reading a little article about Fallout 2 and Mommy Issues, and you know the rest.
So as you might have noticed I’ve been pulling a couple of old pieces that I never found a home for. The Frog Fractions piece is one I liked, and while my opinion has shifted I don’t have any arguments with the basic views of the piece. I have softened on the game, and remember that this was before I’d ever heard of Twine or before we had the Formalist vs. Zinesters thing or Nongames or the Personal Narrative controversy, so the philosophy of it is a little questionable, admittedly. It did inspire at least one person to play Futilitris, though, so I think that’s a success!