Bydlo; or the Ox-Cart

This game was entered into the back garden of Spring Thing.

It is game written using bitsy, which uses minimalist graphics and is typically used to make interactive fiction through text boxes which can pop up with different interactions.

This game only has a single word of text in it, though. You simply progress through the same screen multiple times, that screen becoming somewhat of a maze. Eventually you discover a bit more, and have a musical ending. Throughout, music plays.

Overall, I found the piece was very successful at setting a mood and communicating an expression. I found the maze repetitive and would have enjoyed more written words.

I’m a reasonably confident critic of several things: writing, first of all, but also characterization, plot, and puzzle design (whether I’m a good critic of these things is a separate question). But when it comes to things like graphics, movement-based gameplay, and music, I’m anything but, often struggling to feel like I have anything interesting to say – heck, I play most IF, this game included, with the sound off, so I’m especially at sea as to that last bit. As a result, I’ll take a page from this near-wordless micro-length game and try to keep this short, to avoid embarrassing myself with too much aimless flailing.

Bydlo is a second-order bit of ekphrasis – that’s a work of art that describes or deeply comments on a single other work of art, Ode on a Grecian Urn being the canonical example. Here we’re told the game is based on one of the movements from the classical music suite Pictures at an Exhibition – the gimmick of said suite being that each movement was based on a single painting from a posthumous exhibition by a now-obscure Russian artist. I don’t have any first-hand knowledge of either the music or the painting (and actually it turns out many of the paintings are now lost, including this particular one so far as I can tell from Wikipedia), so that doesn’t provide much in the way of context for me to grab onto; fortunately, the itch.io 1 page does directly say what the game is about, albeit with a spoiler warning, so I’ll likewise spoiler-ify it here: (Spoiler - click to show)the triumph of art over drudgery.

Does the game incarnate that theme? Maaaybe. This is a Bitsy game with a simple set of mechanics: your little guy starts out in a fenced-in field, with an ox-cart at the other side of the screen. Shiny lights at the exit of the field and then a path leading off-screen indicate destinations towards which you should walk; when you reach the latter, the screen resets, with the field being encumbered with incrementally more obstacles and the cart moving one square over. Over the course of subsequent iterations, the field becomes a maze, clogged with pixel-art squiggles that might be bales of hay, fallen crops, and the bones of other oxen (I think? I have a hard time decoding them); finally, the cart exits stage left. You’re allowed to follow its tracks; a new set of screens open up, empty space filled only by the one track, which is then joined by two others running parallel to it. Musical notes begin to fill the tracks, which have becomes a musical score; you reach a last screen where an orchestra plays, with the word “FIN.” printed across the top.

I can try to venture a few interpretations of all of this – if I’m right about what the graphics represent (and I’m supremely unconfident that I am), perhaps the protagonist is a farmer who’s neglecting their work because of their fixation on music? If one part of the theme is meant to be drudgery, I’m guessing that I wasn’t supposed to enjoy running through the mazes (they weren’t super fun but the worst of them only took five seconds to solve)? I did feel a sense of relief and possibility at finally seeing a new screen after doing the same thing twelve times in a row, though I can’t help but feel that moving to the left four times isn’t substantially less drudgery-y than doing a maze a dozen times. Does the fact that I can run straight through the orchestra members and the “FIN.” at the end indicate that they’re a hallucination? If so, what does it mean that the notes seem to be solid? Was coding this game (Spoiler - click to show)a triumph of art over drudgery, or was it (Spoiler - click to show)drudgery in service of art, and if that’s the case, is composing a symphony or painting a picture any different?

These are not questions posed for rhetorical effect: I really don’t have a strong take on Bydlo. It seems like a unified aesthetic object that’s aimed at questions I find important and interesting, so I will say I’m happy it exists – in fact I think it’s kind of neat to engage with something that’s coming at these themes from an entirely different frame of reference than those I’m more used to. And I think it’s meant to be open-ended and unbothered by whether or not I “got” anything out of it – like a placid ox tilling its furrow, I suppose, though I still can’t help but feel it deserves a better critic than me.

Bydlo; or the Ox-Cart by P.B. Parjeter

Pictures at an Exhibition is a famous piano composition by Modest Mussorgsky that depicts a musical tour of an exhibition made by Viktor Hartmann. The ten numbers are all based on Hartmann's works, one of which is called "Bydlo", which imitates an ox slowly pulling its cart. Its slow tempo and repetitive nature echo the menial labor of the ox as it trudges forward, ceaselessly, painstakingly, without ever stopping. The music rises and rises as if the ox is approaching the listener, culminating when the listener is finally close enough to inspect the hard work of the passing ox. The instruments then soften, suggesting that the ox is receding into the distance -- this song captures a moment of labor, both its ordinariness and its grandeur. It is boring, exhausting work for the worker, but it is also a kind of spectacle for the listener.

That is my interpretation anyway. We don't have access to the paintings on which this composition is based, but most people tend to agree that it is a negative interpretation of labor. Patrick Bouchard's stop-motion animation of the same name reanimates an overworked ox, which is then overwhelmed and eaten alive by miniature clay-like humans. The dread this track inspires makes it difficult for anyone to present work as something positive or meaningful.

This is where P.B. Parjeter's Bydlo comes in: it is a Bitsy game where you play as a human who has to capture dots in a small farm while an ox moves across the screen. Each time the player collects all the dots, they are taken back to the beginning, but the layout of the farm has changed. More and more obstacles appear in the fields, turning them into a chaotic maze full of abandoned objects and bones. When the ox finally leaves the screen, the player can follow its trail [spoiler]and reach an orchestra with a conductor and the letters FIN.[/spoiler]

The game describes itself as a Bitsy game about [spoiler]the triumph of art over drudgery[/spoiler], which left me a tad confused. I understand the game is trying to say something about labor. The repetition is meant to provoke boredom and ennui in the player, and the choice of music makes it clear that it's meant to signal to the player to reflect on how tedious the gameplay is. However, it ends on a laudatory note: the tasks you have performed are actually quite meaningful and artistic -- think about it, player, because you are just like the ox that worked its heart out and that labor is beautiful.

The message reminds me of the realist movements in painting: these painters reject their predecessors who painted historical and mythical figures in favor of ordinary laypeople working under the sun. When painters take their fine oils to paint a butcher's shop or a woman cleaning turnips, they are making a statement that these people are as remarkable as the kings and symbols they once painted. There is beauty to be found in the people who break stones or people harvesting potatoes according to these realists and I think so too.

However, there are many tensions for those who subscribe to the realist dogma in the art world. These ordinary subjects will only be art if someone bothered to paint or photograph or make a video game about them, and that's only relevant to the people involved in the art world. For the workers, they certainly want to be listened to and loved, but they also work to attain subsistence.

This usually doesn't matter because there are plenty of grounded works of fiction in our world that follow and respect the lives of ordinary people doing ordinary things. (I like to think of myself as doing just that.) However, I think this particular game describes a realist philosophy of art in the abstract and implicitly valorizes work. This creates a tension with the imagery of the ox, an animal that is chained to our exploitative production methods, that the game does not resolve or tease out.

As a result, I find the ending particularly strange because the [spoiler]orchestra[/spoiler] suggests that the way we produce goods, while exhausting and debilitating, is still artistic. And I think that's a risky conclusion to arrive at: the rhythm of field work is always pleasant to listen to, but it does not negate the environmental and political implications of labor. Art does not overcome our dependence on labor. It can heal us from the drudgery of work, but that's about it.

All that said, I think this game is an interesting, if not provocative, interpretation of a notable piano piece. I enjoyed thinking with this game a lot. If anything, it was fun writing this review and figuring out where to place this game in the contexts of labor discourses and people's interpretations on the piece. While I disagree with the message of the game, I respect that the creator has written a love letter to the song and what it means to them in a language that may confuse most people unfamiliar with the song's history. The language they've chosen is full of love and care and I'm glad they've stuck with it because it makes me engage with its themes on labor and art on its own terms.

Adapted from a SpringThing24 Review

Played: 4/16/24
Playtime: 15min

A second ST24 Bitly entry! I’ve only recently encountered my first! Another Atari-block-graphics throwback game, this one with effectively no text at all. You navigate your farmer-icon through a series of mazes of inventive icons (I particularly liked the orchestra at the end), pleasant colors and background music.

BUT! While the mazes start trivial, they grow increasingly complicated, increasingly crowded with both more product of your labors and more detritus and remains of previous farm work. It requires more and more effort just to reach the same point. All the while, the Ox-cart of your lifespan slowly advances. Cycle after cycle it crawls forward, as burden slowly overruns your farm. The cart of your life eventually breaks free just before all that detritus becomes too dense to escape. Then, finally untethered, the tracks of your life are transformed to musical bars which you navigate. Only this time instead of a tortured climb to the top of the screen, you are almost floating horizontally through them, until they populate with musical notes. Have you, after a lifetime of toil been freed by art? Or has your lifetime itself been the art all along?

Y’know, typical maze stuff.

Mystery, Inc: Fred
Vibe: Mazy
Polish: Gleaming
Gimme the Wheel! : No notes. Mission accomplished.

Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

Bydlo; or the Ox-Cart is a minimalist micro Bitsy piece about, according to the blurb, the triumph of art over drudgery.

Using a simple orange and white palette, and the dreary Mussorgsky's Bydlo theme from Picture At An Exhibition, the game lets you control a little sprite (farmer?) navigating through its field, day by day, as an ox cart passes through the screen. Each sequence (about a dozen) shows a different iteration of the field, with boulders, plants, and carcases blocking your path. Yet, you must continue on, weaving through the obstacles to reach the next level, and the next, and the next...

Until... the cart exit the screens. And so can you.

There is very little you can interact with in the environment, only moving about the screen. You learn nothing about the setting or yourself, why you are here and what you want further. There isn't any text aside from the title and the final screen. Only the chirped version of the melancholic theme...

I am not really sure what to make of it still... Monotonous work pushing people into boredom and daydreaming? Tediousness making us wish for an easier time, a more fun time? Or is it a confrontation of how we view labour (i.e. seeing beauty and art in the mundane)?
Or... should we just enjoy a piece without reading too much into it...