![]() Without a doubt, it is invisible to the world of laws, and is bounded by the greater agency of its human masters. The cat is also an outsider on the very basis of its species, and is thus external to the very cultural and historical details that makes Mossadegh a fascinating figure. This is a world that can be both effusive and claustrophobic. It is privy to the private and intimate world of Dr. The cat represents both an insider and an outsider. This is because the central character of the game and the motivations that carry the narrative forward are not at all in the cat that you play, but the cat’s owner that you try to convince to move from one space to another. The player’s subject is a cat, which is subtly unusual. These visual cues also allow the player to put him or herself in an unusual subject position. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding Excitingly, objects are also simultaneously de-named: In the case of dadaist paintings, through paint strokes and textures that partly obscure an image In Cat and the Coup, through animations that transform an object. ![]() Such juxtaposed visual cues combined onto one screen compel a stream of allegorical interpretations, tied intimately to the gestures of one central character. Like dadaist paintings, in which places are named through landmarks and street-signs, the Cat and the Coup portrays flags and animal avatars as stand-ins for politicians and heads of state. All of these emotions appear at first to be contradictory, but indeed they can be suffered by the most rational individual, and expressed by a painting on the wall (albeit, in my opinion, only the best). The Cat and the Coup runs through the same stream of sobriety, anguished intelligence, and even psychological hysteria. The originator of the photo montage gives a phenomenological, layered experience through lived, found images, rather than reproduce it in the form of traditional still-life and scenery. Hannah Höch - Das schöne Mädchen (The Beautiful Girl), 1919–1920. The dadaist also encapsulated an attitude of refusal to forgive the Establishment for the traumas of modernity. Combining Found Objects such as news prints of iconography and landmarks with painted textural elements, the dadaist cultural movement was irreverent of conventional visual styles and authoritative histories. Particularly, I am thinking of the collages as seen in the inventive artwork by Hannah Höch, or more recently, in the neo-dadaist works of Robert Rachenburg. The experience of this game can be generalized as comparable to an experience of perceiving the dadaist paintings of the arts world. Despite the imagery’s perspectival flatness, the actual experience of the visual scope is labyrinthine. An unusual mix of Erik Satie and Nine Inch Nails saturate the aural space with viscosity. Encapsulated within a 2D side-scroller, traditional Persian artwork combine with black and white rotoscoping, somber caricatures of figures and peoples, and pictures from the historical press. In playing this documentary game, one gets the same sense of cross-cultural influences as comparative to a whirlwind tour of a foreign art gallery. Mossadegh’s fall from grace? How can we unravel and interpret its poetry? There are so many different modes of reading the illustrations, further extended by its unusual interactivity. Why did the developers chose this self-conscious approach to tell of a well-documented but silenced tale of Dr. The very frailty of these spaces, all teeter-totter, amounts to a sense of wonder in the player. The rooms that Mossadegh and cat must traverse through are tableaux-like, where either cat or man can make objects and doors clatter and fall, depending on which side of the room they are balanced on. You use the arrow keys to move Mossadegh’s cat around and use his dainty weight to solve puzzles. The gameplay is simple, as dictated by the spartan developer summary above. As such, I will focus on the game’s aesthetics and affects, so to avoid “ruining” the narrative as much as possible. The Cat and the Coup contains a pastiche of layered cultural illustrations that begs for multiple playthroughs. ![]() A diversion and a mere pastime it is not. The Cat and the Coup can be much more demonstratively named an interactive puzzle poem or a phenomenological docu-media. So too, is the possible misnomer of the term ‘game’ itself. The immediate impression is that this is a game that buries all pretensions that art and gaming are incompatible elements. As a player, you coax Mossadegh back through significant events of his life by knocking objects off of shelves, scattering his papers, jumping on his lap and scratching him. During the summer of 1953, the CIA engineered a coup to bring about his downfall. Mohammed Mossadegh, the first democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran. The Cat and the Coup is a documentary game in which you play the cat of Dr. ![]()
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