Screen Review: asses.masses

What followed was an eight-and-a-half-hour gaming escapade, brimming with bold, bawdy humour and prescient social commentary, which was ever-present, but never overdone. asses.masses is a cinematic multiplayer gaming experience from Canadian creators, Patrick Blenkarn, Milton Lim and co., described on their website as ‘Animal Farm meets Pokémon’. We played as an audience, one after the other, through 2D platformer levels, puzzle games, and even the Donkey afterlife: a 3D ASS-tral plane, after collectively singing the donkey song of ASS-ension. Our protagonists, a band of technophobic donkey revolutionaries, lovingly termed ‘comrades’ by the game, featured various punny ass names: Slow Ass, Hard Ass, Smart Ass, Kick Ass, amongst others. We cycled through numerous herd members throughout, all with recognisable personalities and character designs, available to buy as stickers in a kiosk outside. A particular crowd favourite was a newborn foal we affectionately (and incorrectly) named ‘Dum Ass’. 

The donkeys of Fannyside Farm, having spent a lifetime working in the fields and mines, are now obsolete and unwanted. The expanding industrialisation and automation of farmwork has rendered them useless, and their livelihoods have been lost to machinery. Banding together, the donkeys set their sights on an uprising, navigating a world intent on exploiting or ignoring them. The communality of the event lended itself well to this ongoing revolution, combining the shared joy of gaming, cinema, pantomime and political protest all in one. As player after player took to the podium, we both metaphorically and physically passed the baton to our next comrade. We carried the load of revolution as a herd. The task was too gargantuan to be tackled alone, and if no one took a stand, change would not come. 

Though the game mechanics may not be entirely revolutionary, this community-driven gameplay certainly is. The group dynamic is warmly reminiscent of the pre-online gaming era, where a single controller would be passed around a room of friends on a lazy Sunday, or a group would huddle around a shared arcade machine, battling for the highest score. This sense of nostalgia is only heightened by the 16-bit RPG style of the 90s SNES era, expanded to the size of a cinema screen, making asses.masses both instantly familiar and entirely unique.

Much like a group of friends, passing around a shared controller, this was a self-governed experience, wherein we held group votes, elected new players, and even selected the length of our own break times. Our Canadian supervisors, two of the creators, watched eagerly from the corner but never intervened in our playing or decision-making.

At the midway point, a wheelchair-user addressed the room and asked for a few back-to-back slots for those who might be slower at descending to the floor, which the crowd promptly whooped and cheered for. The accessibility of the event, beyond the limitations of the venue, will be entirely unique to the audience running it, but our group was supportive and convivial, with camaraderie from the offset. We were fast friends, slinging jokes around the room, shouting (nay, screaming) support for the player, even at their eighth unsuccessful attempt to clear a level. At the beginning and end of each turn, the room would erupt with cheer as comrade after comrade took to the stand for the revolution. 

Though the roads taken will vary from audience to audience, the story revealed two ideological pathways, clear from the offset: improve the system or dismantle it entirely. While half of the asses rally for kind employers, good working conditions and a life of reliable labour, the others fight for liberty, a life free from work and systemic oppression. Do we protest for better jobs? Or destroy the ruling classes? Do we ASS-imilate to humans, or ASS-assinate them? Our crowd firmly fixated on the latter, slinging a slurry of BOOOO’s at any human or machine who dared to grace the screen (the relevance of this story was not lost on us, as workers battling AI automation today). 

This division between labour and rest, movement and inaction, enthrallment and boredom, is central to the experience. In many ways, it bears a striking similarity to 16-bit farm simulators like Harvest Moon or Stardew Valley, wherein arduous labour is much the point. In borrowing from these games, asses.masses blurs the boundaries between ‘the work that defines us and the play that frees us’ (find the website here). After all, there is pleasure in labour, particularly when that labour is performed in service to your community and not your overlords. There is a heavy, bodily satisfaction to be found in exerting yourself and then satiating yourself, as we had now come to discover amidst hours of playtime, punctuated with salad, flapjack and ice-cream breaks. And, conversely, there is pleasure in rest and boredom, so rare a resource in our rapid, information-driven climate. With modern movies battling withering attention spans, bending narratives into shorter run-times, it was strange to plod along so leisurely, to toil slowly through the puzzles, to surrender an entire Saturday to a game with a group of strangers. 

In the final hours of the experience, a tiredness settled over the room. Breaks stretched slightly longer. Patience wore slightly thinner. Puzzle sections grew taxing and repetitious. It seemed increasingly apparent that this was an intentional feat of endurance. This grand adventure, spanning a minimum of seven hours (it took us eight-and-a-half), in many ways mirrored the gruelling march of a real revolution. Our initial fire still burned, but had dimmed along the way. As the donkeys passed a billboard titled ‘Boredom will set you free’, we plodded onward, tired, but gratified in our search for freedom. 

By the eighth hour, the audience had settled into a sleepy, donkey-driven delirium, exhausted from screaming and rallying all day. Still, in a penultimate moment of uprising, when the screen prompted the room to press every button at once to make a choir of donkeys sing a protest song, four men descended to the floor to clutch the same controller. Four strangers, hands knitted together, joined forces to press each button in turn, while the crowd clapped and chanted an entirely unprompted protest song of our own: ‘Ass Power! Ass Power! Ass Power!’. 

The ultimate meaning of asses.masses will vary person to person, audience to audience, ass to ass, but the pervasive messaging seems to be this: we are always stronger together. As the final comrade carried us through the playable end-credits, and the lights began to blink back on, we rose from our seats for a standing ovation. A few of us, at first. And then, increasingly, everyone who could.