Saturday 16 April 2016

Autumn All Stars 2016 review: Famous Baby by N.C. Kerklaan

Famous Baby is a microgame about a famous baby. You play the famous baby.

The punchline made me laugh, if eventually only on the inside, every time I read it. Which was five to six times.

The whole thing was over five to six times in two to three minutes, or even less time than that (no smutty jokes, please.)

The review of Famous Baby will probably seem bigger and longer than Famous Baby, both to me and to readers.

This reminded me of those times I've gone into the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Sydney, looked at something briefly, then read a plaque about it. In this case, the plaque is the blurb on the Spring Thing website. Given how microscopic Famous Baby is, you shouldn't read the plaque first.

Famous Baby randomly generates most of its content at points you'll identify after the first pass. A few non-sequiturs inevitably materialise that will strike you as inspired, but once you realise you're walloping away at a random content generator, you'll decide whether you want to persist. The design is the situation, the random mechanic and the content inventory. The scope is tiny. Personally I am skeptical of small scope random text generation as a standalone entity, but Famous Baby made me laugh and offers more than some not dissimilar things that I have seen in the MCA.

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