Did you know that the number 57 is not a prime number, but one mathematician famously claimed it was and so it is known as a “Grothendieck prime”? No, me neither.

This week, Florence sits atop a hoard of games past. And we’re afraid that Chris just spent the week on TikTok. Again.

The Bathysphere crew
Christian Donlan
Florence Smith Nicholls
Keith Stuart

Contact us at bathyspherecrew@gmail.com

Delightful games

Lovely game devs Char Putney and Martin Pichlmair (of Neon Aurelius) showed me the auto battler Oaken Tower recently, and now I’d like to show it to you too. You construct a tower of items to battle another tower of items, and the inventory management of a magical hoard is very appealing to me. FSN

Interesting things

Sadly, I am not at A MAZE (the games and playful media festival) this week. If you are, then please attend a writing workshop (about storytelling through weird mediums) on Friday at 10:30am. It’s run by Daisy Fernandez and Tanat Boozayaangool, and provides such creative prompts as tackling “complicated familial love through Deutsche Bahn train delay announcements.” Don’t miss your stop! FSN

This artist has spent the last few years working on some of the loveliest games in recent memory. They were then laid off in an astonishingly inhumane manner. They’re now devoting their phenomenal talents to painting custom Pokémon cards. I’m so impressed I even put the accent in. Give them a look. CD

And this fellow used the Mount Wilson Telescope to allow them to take a photograph of Jupiter using their Game Boy Camera. I am utterly on board with this kind of thing. CD

Essay: Hoard Games

I enter a room that smells of dust and old sunshine. The garden through the window is overgrown, unruly blossom. Almost every wall is completely lined with books. I am in a residential area in Copenhagen, combing through a house for second hand furniture so I can furnish my new flat. Being surrounded by the curated clutter of someone else’s life is both infinitely fascinating and increasingly unnerving. I can’t help but be reminded of all the detritus I’ve brought across the ocean from the UK, of all that I’ve left behind.

“Among disorders included in the DSM-5, hoarding is unique because its diagnosis requires the existence of a material entity external to the patient’s psychic reality: the hoard.” So writes Rebecca R. Falkoff in Possessed: A Cultural History of Hoarding. It’s true that we often associate hoarding with the material world. Think Smaug atop his piles of treasure, the voyeurism of the Hoarders reality TV show, or the looted artefacts in the British Museum. Yet, hoarding can be (almost) entirely immaterial.

It’s possible to be a digital hoarder, not just an analogue one. A great example of this is the concept of the “Steam backlog,” those countless games you bought in a sale on the platform and will probably never actually play. It can be both a source of shame and strange merriment, watching your game library grow like a weed. There’s now even a title based on the idea called Game Quest The Backlog Battler in which you fight against Steam games that you’ve played 2 hours or less. The more you originally paid for them, the more damage they do to you, and those with a high Metacritic score can fly (naturally). There’s something very compelling to me about the idea of fighting an archive of your own making, yet which you have minimal knowledge of.

And here’s the thing: what’s a hoard to an archivist? A treasure trove. We can learn so much more about how retro games were made if someone took the time and effort to keep their remnants in a loft. A case in point is the work of Katie Biittner and John Aycock, who conducted an archaeological and anthropological study of an early visual novel prototype called Computer Theatre, which wouldn’t have been possible if not for one of the developers (Paul Allen Newell) holding on to handwritten notes and twenty-one floppy disks for the last 40 years.

I consider myself to be a hoarder, or at least someone with hoarding tendencies, and I have to resist the compulsion to constantly document and collect ephemera, both analogue and digital. Perhaps I am suffering from what Derrida calls “archive fever.” After all, the true power of an archive, or indeed a hoard, is its capacity for bending the future to its will. I’m not sure what this means for your Steam backlog, but if you want people to remember what you never played, you best write it down. The pen is mightier than the platform. 

Then stick that note in a book somewhere, in a room full of other books, sleeping. Waiting to be found. FSN