Yeah
7:30 in the night, yeah
Ooh

I get those goosebumps every time, yeah
You come around, yeah
You ease my mind, you make everything feel fine
Worry about those comments
I'm way too numb, yeah
It's way too dumb, yeah

I get those goosebumps every time
I need the Heimlich, throw that to the side, yeah
I get those goosebumps every time, yeah
When you're not around
When you throw that to the side, yeah

I get those goosebumps every time, yeah

7-1-3
To the 2-8-1, yeah, I'm riding
Why they on me? Why they want me? I'm flyin'
Sippin' lowkey, I'm sipping lowkey in Onyx
Rider, rider
When I'm pullin' up right beside ya
Popstar, lil' Mariah
When I text a cute game, wildness
Throw a stack on the Bible
Never Snapchat or took Molly
She fall through plenty, her and all her ginnies
Yeah, we at the top floor, right there off Doheny
Yeah

Oh, no, I can't fuck with y'all
Yeah, when I'm with my squad I cannot do no wrong
Yeah, saucing in the city, don't get misinformed
Yeah, they gon' pull up on you

Yeah, we gon' do some things
Some things you can't relate
Yeah, 'cause we from a place
A place you cannot stay

Oh, you can't go
Oh, I don't know
Oh, back the fuck up off me

I get those goosebumps every time, yeah
You come around, yeah
You ease my mind, you make everything feel fine
Worry about those comments
I'm way too numb, yeah
It's way too dumb, yeah

I get those goosebumps every time
I need the Heimlich, throw that to the side, yeah
I get those goosebumps every time, yeah
When you're not around
When you throw that to the side, yeah

I get those goosebumps every time

I want to press my like, yeah, I wanna press my
I want a green light, I wanna be like
I wanna press my line, yeah
I want to take that ride, yeah
I'm gonna press my lime
I wanna green light, I wanna be like, I wanna press my

Mama, dear, spare your feelings
I'm reliving moments, peeling more residual
I can buy the building, burn the building
Take your bitch, rebuild the building
Just to fuck some more
I can justify my love for you
And touch the sky for God to stop debating war

Put the pussy on a pedestal
Put the pussy on a high horse
That pussy to die for
That pussy to die for

Peter piper picked a pepper
So I could pick your brain and put your heart together
We depart the shady parts and party hard
The diamonds yours, the coupe forever
My best shots might shoot forever like

I get those goosebumps every time, yeah
You come around, yeah
You ease my mind, you make everything feel fine
Worry about those comments
I'm way too numb, yeah
It's way too dumb, yeah

I get those goosebumps every time
I need the Heimlich, throw that to the side, yeah
I get those goosebumps every time, yeah
When you're not around
When you throw that to the side, yeah

I get those goosebumps every time

A superficial description of SS13 would say that it is an online role playing game played in rounds that last around an hour (sometimes a little less or a lot more depending on the gametype.) where you play as a crew member on a quirky and chaotic spacestation. Your job could range from a doctor to a security officer or even a clown, and each of these jobs is given enough depth to feel like it could be a game all on its own, but what really set it apart for me back when I played it as a kid was the dynamic nature afforded to its mechanics by its community.

If you rolled playing as the captain, you could steer the round into any flavor you wanted, deciding to rule with an iron fist and focus on delivering harsh sentences to undesirable troublemakers didn't always result in a full brig and a peaceful station but it did always result in exciting multifaceted conflicts. Traitors planting bombs to serve as diversions from their true objectives would turn into complex rebuilding efforts with random no authority cooks and barkeepers being conscripted as emergency paramedics and engineers. Potentially uneventful shifts as a janitor could turn into a desperate struggle for survival hiding from aliens and trying to not run out of oxygen all while dragging the naked corpse of an assistant to the cloning bay. Every round felt different from the last, and this ceaseless variety is something that I think has more or less been preserved to this day, but I can’t help but feel that my best times with the game are long behind me.

I still come back to it every now and then, but I’ve never been able to recapture that feeling of playing a game where the world so often felt not only dynamic, but truly alive. On youtube you can find a dozen videos with hundreds of thousands of views showing the game off, but back when I first heard of it that wasn’t the case. You had to find it for yourself, and that made it a lot easier to sacrifice a bit of my round if it meant everyone else that found the game got to have a little bit more fun, and I may be making shit up, but I think this went the same way for a lot of the people I played with too. It’s a bit harder to take having my head lopped off with an esword in stride when there’s now a high chance that the person who did it may have learned to play it not because of their own interest in it, but because they were told about it by a youtuber who constantly regurgitates memes from /pol/

Space Station 13's codebases all share a simple premise: there's a massive environment you share with a bunch of other people with really complex systems that anyone can fuck up in at least twelve different ways. However, unlike real life, Space Station 13 is built around cyclical resets, where everything is temporary and therefore so are your mistakes. There are some obstensible 'progression mechanics' like unlocking a new job after X hours of playtime, but that is more of a moderation mechanic meant to keep inexperienced players out of roles that can be very unfun for others to interact with if you don't know how to use them properly. Space Station 13 is the greatest video game of all time - not any specific codebase, the concept of Space Station 13, the manifestation of it through the community, drama, discourse, and of course, the actual gameplay.

Video games have always been cursed with the problem of ephemerality. Retro game preservation requires active effort and some games take thousands of hours to be restored to a playable state due to releasing on hardware that no longer exists or is impractical for the vast majority of players to obtain. Multiplayer games have double this problem, since the experience of playing the game is also directly tied to the other people playing it, and the community that surrounds said game - every multiplayer game has a hidden death clock ticking down to its irrelevance, at which point the player count to make the game 'worth playing' will have dropped below critical mass.

Space Station 13 is an extreme example of ephermality, in which every round can have millions of possible outcomes at any given moment due to emergent mechanics, and if you miss that round you can never recreate them. Sure, you can listen to other people talking about the stories from particularly notable rounds - but you can never viraciously experience it, being in the space where you realize that your decisions will actively feed into the outcomes of what happens next. I can not name a single other game that immerses you in such an active, unpredictable world that still feels unique during every new cycle. The most magical moments are when you become an antagonist, and the tension of every action you take skyrockets. Nothing is more viscerally fun then getting to plan out and then enact diabolical plans to mess with the crew, and getting a 'greentext' (in this context - a message saying that your antagonist objectives were successful) is a massive rush of relief and accomplishment. The stories that you can create with this game are simply unmatched.

You can find these stories everywhere - the subreddit even has a weekly thread to post them - but I might as well share one that happened to me early in my experience with this game:

In my first round as a changeling (a very transparent take on John Carpenter's The Thing), I was promoted to being the head of the station, which gave me far more resources to work with, such as a firearm readily available. My goals were to assasinate two specific people and absorb another changeling. I started by giving the other changelings all-access IDs - we had a hivemind chat, so coordinating was easy. I then turned into a monkey and crawled through the vents, in search of my first target. No luck, but I did see the clown. I told him that he could come to the HOP line to get all-access. Once he got there, I him by injecting him with a substance that made him grow an armblade - a usually tell-tale sign of being a 'ling. I then shot him to death before he could say anything, with the justification of 'he was about to kill me'. I also get away with cremating his body, since lings can self-revive if their body is intact.

At that point, security was starting to get suspicious of my actions. Two other lings had already been busted, and my justification for murder was dubious at best. I'm unexpectedly tased by the detective and taken into the interrogation room where I try to calmly defend myself for my actions. At some point, I get fed up with the conversation and purchase a power that supposedly dissolves restraints - in this case my handcuffs. I activated it and then immediately activated my own armblade. Now, the armblade is one of the deadliest melee weapons in the game - three hits can put someone in critical condition, five can outright kill them. However, I was still buckled to the chair! The detective responded by opening fire with his revolver, but the chamber was empty. He hastily starts reloaded, while I unbuckle myself from the chair. With the element of surprise lost, I can't win against a high-powered revolver. But I can still escape through the du-

It was just then that my game decided to crash. By the time I reconnected, I got to see my dead body in the incinerator, joining the clown in what might be called the circle of life. I then spent the rest of the round as a research scientist on a far-removed station, drinking (in-game) alcohol in solitude and pondering my own mistakes. Fun times!

Of course, since we can't have nice things, it's time for me to talk about the 'bad'. The truth is, I don't know if someone reading this review would get a similar experience to what I did. This comes back to the inherent ephermality of the experience - I can make absolutely no guarentees as to how the game will play out for you. Though my brain tends to look at this game through a rose-tinted lenses, I can still remember the many boring rounds where nothing of particular interest happened. Many times, there will be something interesting happening, but you just won't be in the right place or the right time. At that point, it's often more fun to just observe the round as a ghost and monitor what shenanigans people get up to. Even then, a lot of players, especially in low-RP servers, play the game exclusively as amoral powergamers who focus exclusively on 'winning' the game over creating interesting scenarios with other players.

But if you can find that one, magical round - you will never stop playing this game unless you force yourself to quit. That's what I had to do several years ago because, as much as I hate to admit it, this game consumed my life. The ephemeral nature of this game can also be an addictive quality - feeding into the worry of 'missing out' and chasing the 'hit' of another interesting round. If you are incredibly autistic about massive lists of information or just endless wiki rabbit-holes in general, this game was specifically engineered to continually nerd-snipe you for hundreds, even thousands of hours. If you have anything remotely productive that needs finishing in the near future, do not play any version of this game.

I haven't even touched on the community, a messy subject to say the least. The drama can be fascinating at times - like when a popular server admin created 14 alternative reddit accounts to promote himself and disappeared from the face of the earth when called out. It's all the worst human tendencies made manifest, especially in the ranks of administrators and server owners. The playerbase can sometimes be even worse, thanks to the community being occasionally overwhelmed by capital-G Gamers reviewing le hidden gem, thus sparking a very predictable influx of chuds who think the epitome of human thought lies in /pol/ screenshots and usually only play the game to fulfill some twisted power fantasy. The good news is that these idiots get filtered pretty quickly through the esoteric gameplay systems and violating multiple server rules against bigotry, powergaming, and just generally being an asshole. But since the origins of this game do come from edgy message boards, some of that is going to be inherent, even baked in. For a community that actively pushes away those awful people, I highly recommend Goonstation or Baystation12 - not that they can be free from drama themselves.

At the same time, I can't deny that Space Station 13 shaped me as a person, when I look back on my experiences with it. It played a role in helping me to figure out my gender, unironically taught me some useful collaborative skills and internet etiquette, brought me back into developing games, and gave me countless laughs along the way. Most importantly, some of my greatest friendships have been made through this game. I will always be grateful for that.

One more word of advice for those who choose to walk down this path: don't play as assistant for your first game. Everyone will think you're actually a veteran player trying to avoid the consequences of their own actions. Play as a cargo technican instead. You get to lug packages around, deliver mail, and bond with your department coworkers. Start a union, do some day trading, or just go talk to people in the bar for 30 minutes. Space is the limit!

''scares on the back are a swordsman's shame'' - R. Tylenda
(Roronoa zoro)

''sa beyler turk warmi.''
- A. ulucay