When I was maybe eight years old, my curator aunt took me and my brother to an underground gallery where Canadian artists had installed arcade machines with their art games available for play. For the life of me I can't remember their names or find any online documentation, but two games remain burned in my memory.
The first had the player jumping out of an airplane to skydive. Unlike a skydiver, the player didn't have a parachute. You could manoeuvre yourself as you fell, but regardless of your actions, you would always hit the ground at terminal velocity and become a splattered corpse.
The second had the player in a grocery store with shelves scattered around. A wave of acid would come in from the left side of the screen like that scene in Season 7, Episode 2 of The Simpsons. Like Radioactive Man, no matter what the player did, the acid would eventually consume the space. The player would be nothing but a pixelated skeleton.
In both games, the player would be told to try again. Obviously I tried many times to affect the outcome, to no avail. At the time my brother and I decried these games as stupid because they were impossible, because our actions did nothing, because there was no point.
Nowadays, I consider these games to be formative in my appreciation of what games necessarily are and can accomplish. With so many itch.io titles and walking simulators and art games under my belt, I understand now that a game does not have to be fun, does not have to have mechanics, does not even have to definitionally be a game. In theory, the 'program' I made in an intro compsci course in university in which you clicked a button to have a .gif of a wizard appear and disappear is itself a game just as those indie art games were. The My Dinner With André cabinet Martin plays in Season 5, Episode 8 of The Simpsons is no longer a joke in my mind, but something I would totally play with vested interest.
All this is to say that 000000052573743 is the same sort of game I would have loathed nearly two decades ago. It is punishing, it is harsh, it is ugly, it is loud, it is 'stupid.' Unlike those games, there is an actual goal here which is only accomplished by not doing anything for a long enough time to be granted the opportunity to proceed. In this dystopia, you are not Gordon Freeman or JC Denton. You aren't even Bing from Season 1 Episode 2 of Black Mirror. You are an actual and actualised nobody, less than a nobody, beyond subhuman, a mere number. There is no overthrowing of your oppressor, only your abiding of their rule. You do not overcome insurmountable odds, you hope against hope that those odds favour you at the expense of the Others around you who are in fact true reflections of the Self. There isn't a reward at the end, only the continuation of a perpetual machine.
Surrounded by madness, surrounded by hunger, surrounded by everything but death, I knew death was our only way out. - Harlan Ellison
Recommended by fweged as part of [this list]
The first had the player jumping out of an airplane to skydive. Unlike a skydiver, the player didn't have a parachute. You could manoeuvre yourself as you fell, but regardless of your actions, you would always hit the ground at terminal velocity and become a splattered corpse.
The second had the player in a grocery store with shelves scattered around. A wave of acid would come in from the left side of the screen like that scene in Season 7, Episode 2 of The Simpsons. Like Radioactive Man, no matter what the player did, the acid would eventually consume the space. The player would be nothing but a pixelated skeleton.
In both games, the player would be told to try again. Obviously I tried many times to affect the outcome, to no avail. At the time my brother and I decried these games as stupid because they were impossible, because our actions did nothing, because there was no point.
Nowadays, I consider these games to be formative in my appreciation of what games necessarily are and can accomplish. With so many itch.io titles and walking simulators and art games under my belt, I understand now that a game does not have to be fun, does not have to have mechanics, does not even have to definitionally be a game. In theory, the 'program' I made in an intro compsci course in university in which you clicked a button to have a .gif of a wizard appear and disappear is itself a game just as those indie art games were. The My Dinner With André cabinet Martin plays in Season 5, Episode 8 of The Simpsons is no longer a joke in my mind, but something I would totally play with vested interest.
All this is to say that 000000052573743 is the same sort of game I would have loathed nearly two decades ago. It is punishing, it is harsh, it is ugly, it is loud, it is 'stupid.' Unlike those games, there is an actual goal here which is only accomplished by not doing anything for a long enough time to be granted the opportunity to proceed. In this dystopia, you are not Gordon Freeman or JC Denton. You aren't even Bing from Season 1 Episode 2 of Black Mirror. You are an actual and actualised nobody, less than a nobody, beyond subhuman, a mere number. There is no overthrowing of your oppressor, only your abiding of their rule. You do not overcome insurmountable odds, you hope against hope that those odds favour you at the expense of the Others around you who are in fact true reflections of the Self. There isn't a reward at the end, only the continuation of a perpetual machine.
Surrounded by madness, surrounded by hunger, surrounded by everything but death, I knew death was our only way out. - Harlan Ellison
Recommended by fweged as part of [this list]