Paper Mario fanatics are kind of the worst, huh? They're like the most annoying attributes of Nintendo nerds amplified by ten; they constantly whine about how dead their series is, get into absurd fights over which game is the best, they shove their games down your throat without giving you room to breathe. I suppose it has died down a little since that recent installment for the Switch, but I'm sure you all know what I'm talking about. It gets really tiring sometimes to hear the same things hailed as godsends, and instead of making me want to check them out it just drives me away out of annoyance. This can also be said for stuff like Outer Wilds and Hollow Knight, but I remember tracing this feeling in my head back to games like this.

All that being said, this game is damn near masterful in many aspects. The amount of heart and soul thrown in is just staggering. The story in particular is one of Nintendo's finest and most captivating. You probably couldn't count all the memorable characters here if you had four hands, and same goes for the songs featured throughout. It's also a really good RPG for beginners, seeing as the difficulty as a whole is very very low up until the final two chapters. There's a lot to love here. I do love this game, and ultimately I can indeed see how it reached its status.

A big thing about the ridiculous levels of hype, though, is that it makes the lower points sting that much more. This game is absolutely not free of those, I can tell you that much. Most notably, the backtracking can be pretty exhausting. In particular, Chapter 4's ridiculous amounts of wandering back and forth reduce it to a tedious nightmare, even despite the introduction of Vivian, whom everybody loves and everybody should love.

Less significant, but still worth noting is that the battle system started to wear on my nerves after a while, though I guess this is usually an RPG problem as a whole. I guess it's pretty hard to get that right, admittedly. But things like the Twilight Town/Creepy Steeple fiasco, or Chapter 7's asinine fetch quest...they really just make me wonder, what was the point? Was there not a better way to pad those chapters out? I don't know, man.

And the thing is, I probably wouldn't be as worked up about moments like this if its fans didn't tout it around as a flawless masterwork. It feels like the cracks are bigger than they really are, since everything good has been already said and then some. Sometimes when things reach this status it's just easier to talk about the negatives, even if it really is a wonderful time as a whole.

So for the most part it looks like the aforementioned loud, annoying fans were right. But really, in the end I still don't think a return to form for this series is necessary. It's part of what makes those early ones special, how one of a kind they are. Every series eventually declines with time, and it's not really a big deal how early or late it happens.

It's also just that like, projects like Bug Fables? That has "oh, this is for the REAL fans" energy all over it. That shit is annoying. Not touching it with a ten foot pole. Gootbye.

Anyway, uh, it's like 2 AM. This is a very scatterbrained and ranty review, if you can't tell already. I tried to bum rush through the last three chapters of the game today and I am totally out of energy. It's also deliberately my 500th game logged, though, so I wanted to write something longer despite being tired. Ultimately I'm glad I caved in and gave this a go. I think it was worth it.

CW: Murder, gun violence, child death, sexual violence, cannibalism, suicide, gore, eroticism of gore, knife violence, glorification of tragedy and crime, misogyny.
Updated version
Video version of this review

Preface

First, I would like to make abundantly clear this is a heinous work. On a surface level it is reprehensible. Digging into it makes every aspect of it worse. If it could only be played with a critical eye that would be one thing, but as I will get into this isn't just some curiosity to dissect.

The United States has had 27 school massacres since 1927. 16 of these occurred after Columbine. All but two were carried out with the use of firearms. Since 2000, there have been 388 school shootings in the United States.

Canada has had three school massacres ever (ignoring the genocide perpetrated by the Residential School system). One of these occurred after Columbine. It was carried out with a firearm. Since 2000, there have been 8 school shootings in Canada.

Japan has had one school massacre ever. It occurred on June 8, 2001. Eight children were murdered. All but one were girls. The perpetrator used a kitchen knife. There has never been a school shooting in Japan. There have been two multiple fatality shootings in Japan since 1952.

Potential

I think this is important to bring up because, from a Western and particularly an American perspective, school shootings are a dark reality that happens with shocking yet numbing frequency. The Onion's perennial publishing of their "No Way to Prevent This" article is testament to that. While it would be disingenuous to say school shootings have had no resonance in Japan, it is true that they have not happened there. The distance from tragedy lessens its emotional impact.

This is to say that, in a vacuum, Morimiya Middle School Shooting (MMSS) reads as intensely insensitive but not outright malicious. It is, in a vacuum, akin to Postal or Hatred, mimicking real world tragedy without outright reference to any specific event. An argument could even be made that there is some merit to MMSS in its commentary on the why of school shootings. The unnamed player character walked in on her mother's suicide, her father was an abusive alcoholic who disappeared. Her rage turns outward towards those who do not give her the attention she was missing from her parents. It ultimately manifests as a desire to commit murder after the game's fictionalised Japan reports on regional mass killings.

Like Super Columbine Massacre RPG, MMSS appears then to be a work which asks for a societal introspection alongside our abject horror. By not referencing a specific historical event, MMSS has the potential to make commentary without inflicting direct emotional harm. Its gamification and unnamed player character have the potential to instill a sense of being complicit with the act, as with Brenda Romero's 2009 board game Train. Even its arcade gameplay loop, high scores, and unlocks have the potential to increase engagement for some grand payoff of self-disgust that one would invest so much time into becoming good at murdering teachers and children. A part of me held out hope in my few playthroughs that there would be some message at the end of it all, that this glorification of violence would have a point. Instead, MMSS is closer to JFK: Reloaded. It teaches nothing. It has nothing to say. It exists to shock. It exists to hurt.

Play

On a technical and mechanical level, MMSS is something of a marvel. It is an RPGMaker game with gunplay. There is an undeniable element of strategy to it. Suffice it to say that every aspect of school shootings are on display here. If you have seen coverage of new schools in the United States being built to 'confuse and frustrate' school shooters, you can intuit how the prototypical Japanese school might facilitate mass murder with firearms and explosives. The player needs to slow down to increase their accuracy. I leave it to you to put two and two together. The unlocks amount to different weapons the player can use, as well as cheats. The player needs to manage the loaded ammunition between their weapons so as to not end up reloading while students wielding poles lunge at them to stop their advance. The player has a very strict time limit before the police arrive to arrest them. The player gets the most points for killing female students. None of this is particularly fun, even if it were removed from what it is depicting, but that it has been done on an engine meant for traditional JRPGs is impressive. That it is mechanically more than pointing and shooting is noteworthy. It is just barely engaging enough to warrant a couple playthroughs.

Precedent

Discussion of MMSS necessitates consideration of its creator and their niche. MMSS was developed by エリック aka erikku aka eric806359 aka kata235. They are an ero guro artist. Their depiction and obsession with the macabre is not in line with an H.R. Giger type, however. It comes across as more similar to the work of the Marquis de Sade. Reading through erikku's Twitter feed and scrolling through their Pixiv feels like trawling through The 120 Days of Sodom; it is a display of an amoral libertine.

Some choice textual excerpts from their Twitter (roughly translated):

"Drawing muscles makes me want to eat them."
"A touching coming-of-age story in which a young girl who has just lost her father gets a gun and grows up to be a splendid mass murderer."
"If I'm going to die anyways, I want the human race to perish while I'm still alive."
"I'm not a monster. Even for someone like me, I have human likes and dislikes. ...For example, what I love is 'Decapitation'"

I think you get the idea.

Their Pixiv is similarly naught but ero guro. Ero guro is not some 'release valve' for erikku, it is their sole purpose.

Perusal

Despite this, MMSS contains zero erotic elements. ConeCvltist stated in his review that MMSS probably exists for someone to get their rocks off. I think he is at once right and wrong in this assertion. Without explicit eroticism, MMSS is only a guro work, and thus cannot be said to be primarily for sexual gratification. However, it is also inextricable from its creator's main body of work. His illustrations of MMSS's main character are surrounded by nude women's stomachs being cut open, by school girls being strangled to death, of raw human flesh being consumed next to bare corpses. MMSS is not explicitly sexual, but it is implicitly erotic. The primary demographic is not you or I, but those already familiar with erikku's portfolio. And while not in the game itself, erikku has made numerous animations of the player character shooting school girls, their inflated chests jiggling, their panties digging into their crotches.

MMSS is unable to depict this level of fidelity for gore or lewdness in RPGMaker due to the rapid pace of gameplay. What illustrative art is present shows up in the introduction, endings, and when in the apartment at the start. For erikku's intended audience, however, those depictions don't need to explicitly exist within the game. One's familiarity with those short animation clips, those illustrations allows them to, in part, fill in the gaps during gameplay. In researching erikku and being exposed to the supportive art for MMSS, subsequent playthroughs have been marred by more accurate depictions of the violence and murder rendered in pixel form. Furthermore, I have seen that his illustrations and animation snippets are released in packs with other, non-MMSS related works of an ero guro nature. The mind fills in the gaps, the mind construes all of this as sexual.

Pang

In MMSS, during the news report on recent killings, one scene shows a middle school girl being escorted by police as her victims clutch their stomachs. This murderer committed their acts with a kitchen knife. They primarily targetted girls.

As mentioned at the very start, there has been one school massacre in Japanese history. It involved a kitchen knife. The perpetrator primarily targetted girls.

This is odious enough on its own, this unveiled allusion to the Osaka school massacre as tasteless as anything making light of the mass murder of children. erikku's fanbase will recognise this as a direct reference to his other game, Rouka de Onigokku (Tag in the Hallway). You sprint through hallways and stab students before you can be caught. It operates like an endless runner. The William Tell Overture plays the whole time. While MMSS references tragedy broadly, Rouka de Onigokku references it precisely. In MMSS one can even unlock use of a knife to carry out the game's mass murder in the same manner as Rouka de Onigokku's main character. It is despicable. It gets worse.

Perturbed

There is very scant documentation of MMSS on the English-speaking clearnet. I myself only came across it by chance on Backloggd. What I have found is deplorable.

Following the release of MMSS, erikku started answering fan questions on Twitter. Most of these are in Japanese, but some have been translated by erikku himself.

"Q: [...] how do you deal with negative feedback or criticism regarding the sensitive nature of 'taboo' nature of your art?
A: [...] I try not to care too much about negative feedback and so on :)"

"Q: [...] what do you use for inspiration before making a picture? Do you read about some real life murder cases?
A: I often read about real life murder cases, and watch a movie and TV series about murder. But I don't use anything for inspiration. I just draw what I want to draw."

His tweets continued in their perturbing statements. Above the aforementioned illustration of Rouka de Onigokku's main character, he writes "I was caught by the Thought Police and was temporarily suspended. It was caused by the cannibalism animation, but I think all the zombies are gone now. ...By the way, the situation in the picture is a very, very, very healthy illustration of a student playing a prank with ketchup and being taken care of by the police."

They also started answering questions on peing.net.

"I'm just painting 'imaginary violence against non-existent people.'"

"Murder, abductions, and transportation of body parts over long distances are very hard work, but it's better than repeating the incidents in a nearby area and narrowing the scope of police investigation towards you."

"I think there are various reasons why the culprit in Morimiya didn't commit suicide (including suicide by police). One of the goals is to know the suffering of the victims, including the survivors and bereaved families. It may also be the result of hatred towards the mother who took her own life. No matter how many people you kill, the hatred toward your mother, who took her own life and became a 'suicide statistic' cannot be cleared, but 'I won't die like that!' Is that the result of trying to persevere?"

"I have been drawing pictures of killing people since I was a child, but it was when I was a teenager that I start having interest in killing (anime) girls."

MMSS and Rouka de Onigokku are not just gamified depictions of perturbed minds. They are the machinations of a fucked up pervert. It gets worse.

Perverse

When looking up MMSS, one of the only results is the RPGMaker Fandom wiki. It provides the Google Drive link I got the game from. Far above that download link lies a link to the 'Official Discord,' with the blessing of erikku.

The rules for the 'Morityu Community Server' notably state the following:

"Rule 3. Don't be a weirdo. Keep edgelording to a minimum. If it's TMI, don't post it.
You can love seeing girls suffer all you want, just don't tell everyone, because nobody wants to hear about it.
Don't be that guy who idolizes mass shooters. It's cringe as hell and a sign that you should probably go outside for once."

"Rule 5. Do not talk about planning any mass murders or crimes of any form.
You may talk about previous cases of mass murder, but do not talk about the possibility of yourself or others committing crimes.
Even if you're not going to do it and are just posting it as a "what if", it is punishable by a ban.
This is the one rule you don't want to break."

The server is a cesspool of racism, homophobia, sexism, and generally making light of school shootings as a topic. Users have /k/ommando avatars and names and banners. They share gameplay clips and compete for high scores. They share links to movie clips of school shootings, they share DOOM WADs for school levels. They pontificate about whether or not women get aroused during shootings. They cheer for Russia's invasion of Ukraine, for police murdering black people. They hide behind the thinnest veneer of respecting Discord's ToS.

Searching for MMSS information led me to a danbooru post making light of the Christchurch mosque shootings. The artist's commentary notes the inefficacy of focusing on the victims of mass murder rather than the perpetrators themselves, particularly when those criminals understand how to effectively use the memetic nature of modern media.

It was also on that Fandom wiki I learned that the art room in MMSS has portraits of several school shooters. Real school shooters. If this is not glorification, I don't know what is.

The citation for that art room tidbit took me further still. A forum dedicated to Columbine and other school shootings and crimes. A thread titled Video games about Mass Murder. Users laud MMSS as one of the best games about mass murder. Avatars depict children holding guns threateningly. The Similar topics at the bottom of the thread ask what games school shooters played.

It's then I decided I had had enough.

Perpetuity

I wish there was a conclusion I could make here. Some hopeful message about erikku realising this is fucked beyond belief. That Discord being banned. The host of the Columbine forum shutting down.

There is no conclusion. There is no takeaway. This is revolting. Researching put knots in my gut. Writing evoked constant self-doubt.

I believe there is room for societal introspection on serious, challenging topics through games. But when the act of playing tragedy is not contextualised, is not condemned, then those games will function as just that, games. Tools for amusement, not for learning. Something to strategise about, not think critically about. A pedestal for amorality, not a mirror reflecting it.

Irredeemable.

When you’re a young kid in the 00s who hasn’t quite figured out that you’re trans yet, there’s certain pieces of media you fixate on. Things that give you Feelings that you don’t fully understand or know how to explain. This is particularly weird with media that is created by people that are absolutely not trying to create a trans message and would probably spit on in your face if you implied they were. Polyjuice potions in Harry Potter, the entirety of Ranma, and, of course, the "Boy Who Would Be Queen" episode of Fairly OddParents.

There's a bizarre nature to these kinds of projects. The creators are so single minded in their idea of how things are "supposed" to be and so consistent in using things they consider "wrong" as a cheap gag, it kind of swerves back around to give some kids (or least me) some young gender euphoria. A lot of FOP falls under this umbrella, but The Boy Who Would Be Queen episode toys with some interesting attempts at examining the idea of gender. Timmy is magically transformed to become "Timantha" to understand his crush, and discovers how his tastes haven't really changed as a girl. He still likes soap operas and comics, but now he's supposed to be ashamed of the latter rather than the former. He discovers his crush falls into the same problem. Trixie likes comics and video games but feels the pressure of society forcing her to fill the traditional gender roles. The prison of gender hurts all parties involved. What's particularly easy to read as queer in the episode is how both Timmy and Trixie are presenting themselves. Timmy's obviously dressed as Timantha, but Trixie is also trying to pass as a boy. In these disguises, these two can express genuine, vulnerable feelings to each other that they will never express in the rest of the show. Trixie tells Timantha, a girl she's known for just a few hours, like a normal straight girl would, "If only you were a boy, then I'd date you for sure." The gag is obviously supposed to be that Timmy's crush is still out of reach, but its so on the nose its hard not to read into it. To a young 10 year old who was just lectured and ostracized for agreeing with the girls that "girls are better than boys", this episode sent a chill up my spine. And I wasn't the only one. If you dive into fanfiction communities, you'll find more than a few stories that center around Timmy choosing to permanently stay as Timantha so that Trixie can have a real "friend."

Much of Breakin' Da Rules rehashes various plots from the early FOP canon. Timmy becomes a dog. Timmy becomes microscopic. Timmy fights aliens. Timmy and friends trapped in a video game. And, of course, Timmy becomes Timantha.

There was a time in my life where I would focus in on that ten minute segment where you're Timantha, trying to ignore the "could this GET any more silly?" quips. Begging for something more, I would spin elaborate narratives in my mind where this segment could go on forever. I never finished the game proper, that segment was all I needed.

Now I'm an adult and I can do two things:

1. Mod the game to add the Timantha face onto Timmy full time, which I sat down and learned how to do.

2. Understand how deeply bad this game is past that ten minute segment.

There's certainly ambition here. When you crack into a game's files, you get a greater understanding of just how much work went into the game. There's dozens of different models that Timmy plays as throughout the game. Timantha, Dog Timmy, Superhero Timmy, Robin Hood Timmy, Greek Toga Timmy, and so on and so forth. Modding the game required me to manually change the eyes of every single one of these models. The levels themselves clearly built a lot of assets. Each level has a different gimmick, sometimes multiple gimmicks. The time travel level required a bunch of different textures and assets built for all three of the time periods you travel to. I can certainly respect how much effort went into that.

But its hard not to compare this to its successor Shadow Showdown. The other FOP focuses in on the fantastical and allows the developers to build huge, elaborate levels with bizarre mechanics and designs. Breakin' Da Rules sticks with the human world and the established FOP episodes, to its detriment. The level centered around Timmy's neighborhood is empty and miserable, its almost haunting. It doesn't feel lonely in Shadow Showdown when you're journeying through someone's dream or investigating a spooky mansion. It would be easy to call this a beta for Shadow Showdown until you look at all the same files I did. If they centered in on developing Timmy's central model and mechanics, even if it meant losing my girl Timantha, the game might at least feel alright to play. But they had to program all the ways these different models had to move and it clearly bogged the game down. The actual art decision and level design are messy, but at least that can be something I know they learned from moving forward. The mechanics themselves are similarly flawed. Each level requires collecting five stars for a wish, which typically involves "press this button to progress" with no change to the actual gameplay. The game operates on the life system, which most platformers had moved past already. Losing all your lives get punted past to the last save point, which forces you to repeat tedious and dull levels just to reach whatever stupid thing trapped you for so long. You just get the sense this game suffered from poor direction even beyond being an underfunded licensed game in the 00s. Its a real shame but its tempered with the face that the sequel is so much better.

And also, I learned to mod shit in the pursuit of fulfilling some childhood dreams, so I gotta give that to it.

TOREE

- is a friend
- has a hat
- is on such an adventure
- is trans
- says "a" and that is so important
- is dating shadow the hedgehog
- has seventy alternative accounts
- has a number of world record speedruns under their deadname that they don't want to claim anymore
- didn't vote in the 2017 general election and despite their skepticism for electoralism they still feel culpable for the election of boris johnson as prime minister
- has two alternative costumes
- was ride or die on #ReleaseTheSnyderCut but thought the snyder cut itself was kinda mid
- killed a man just to watch him die

haters will try and tell you different but real toreeheads know...real toreeheads know...

“They’re just lines of code.” That’s what my friend tells me. I wasn’t allowed to play Halo. It was too violent, and my parents, either in spite of or because of their relative progressiveness, did not want to allow or encourage me in playing violent video games. I remember googling about Red vs. Blue and my dad informed me that I “shouldn’t be looking at that.” I was a kid, after all, not even in my teens at the time. It’s not like I wasn’t able to get my hands on violent games; my crusade to play violent games, though, is a story for another time. The point is that our house never had Halo in it. And when, on that rare occasion, I did get to play Halo at a friend’s house, I was very careful not to tell my parents. So, in my mid-teens, I was at my friend’s house, in their thoroughly air-conditioned basement, with the lights off, and we played some Halo. I’m sitting close to the screen in an awkward chair. I’m awful at this game; I only know how to play these games on a mouse and keyboard. I see a grunt, fleeing with its arms in the air, and say, “Poor guy.” That’s when my friend chuckles and says, “They’re just lines of code.”

Interactive Buddy was a mainstay for any kid looking for ways to goof off in computer labs. This is what you see: four gray walls, a gray background, and a chubby little figure made six gray balls. That’s the buddy. You use your mouse to nudge and move the buddy around, generating a small amount of money. You use that money to buy new tools and what not: bowling balls, fire hoses, Molotov cocktails. And in doing things with the buddy, you can acquire more money to buy more weapons and tools. You can choose to play with the buddy and be kind, and you can choose to torment the buddy and be cruel. Cruelty usually wins.

This is how Interactive Buddy is remembered: a torture chamber. The buddy seems to be modeled after other programs like Bonzi Buddy or other digital pets. Its UI conjures up images of Windows XP. But while a virtual pet usually exists to be cared for, the buddy has no needs. You can’t feed it, and it doesn’t want food. So what is the buddy’s reason for being? The game has an opinion. The buddy exists to be hurt. The game description instructs you to beat it up. It’s more like a Bobo doll than a pet. I would venture to say that the vast majority of players used the game as a sadistic time-waste and little more.

The internet in the 2000s was rife with violent Flash diversions. Madness, Whack Your Boss, Happy Wheels, these jubilees of juvenile hyperviolence were everywhere. Interactive Buddy came out during that time, and it shows. For one, the game is filled dated and niche reference humor (how do you even explain StrawberryClock?), but it also has a fascination with violence. This was in the wake of things like Jack Thompson’s lawsuits, after Columbine and September 11th, where the notion of violent video games still felt a little transgressive. The developer of Interactive Buddy is literally called Shock Value. It revels in violence intentionally. And hey, why not? It wasn't hurting anybody, after all. They’re just lines of code. But our attitudes (or at least mine) have shifted dramatically over the years.

I’ve seen others comment that they feel guilt for what they did to the buddy, that it was cruel to harm the buddy. And truly, the buddy did nothing to deserve this, right? It merely exists, a floating jumble of orbs, and we come in and brutalize and beat it. The buddy expresses fear and dislike for the explosions and drubbings it’s put through. It doesn’t like “boom!”, and it’s mood gauge will slowly become a frown. It is clear that the poor thing is suffering. That would make it cruel to abuse it this way.

So that’s the obvious corrected position, right? That hurting the interactive buddy is bad, and you shouldn’t do it? Well, I’m not quite convinced of that, either.

See, to adopt that position is to take up a pretty serious assumption: that a simulated action correlates directly to a real one. We suppose that the buddy is harmed, but the buddy cannot experience pain. It’s a digital object. It’s just lines of code.

It is false to say the buddy dislikes pain. The buddy doesn’t like or dislike anything. The buddy is not an animal. It has no desires. It has no consciousness or qualia. It doesn’t breathe or even bleed. It is a simulated object with simulated movements that imitate that of fear, pain, and joy. When the buddy recoils from an explosive or shakes as it is tickled, these are only animations, programmed and procedural gestures that bear a likeness to animal behavior. As far as we can tell, there is no real suffering occurring. There is no evidence of a computer having consciousness, probably won’t ever be for a while, and certainly not the buddy. Even a Kantian would struggle to find an argument against it; after all, the buddy has no rationality to which we are to hold ourselves to respecting.

There is therefore no harm in hurting the buddy, nor is there a duty to be kind to it. All there is is a symbolic charade of a hedonistic dichotomy. The simulacra of pain and pleasure, entangled with each other as a binary pair. It is an imitation. It’s just lines of code. It is in fact less than an imitation of pain, not of the sensation, but only an abstract impersonation of the response to pain, the superficial choreography. A simulacra, of Baudrillard’s third or fourth stage, which signifies either absence or deference to other signs. And to accept the simulacra of pain and pleasure as equivalent to their corollaries in reality is to accept simulation as reality. At what point does the magic circle give way to our realized actions, then?

It should not be said that causing pain in Interactive Buddy is in some capacity related to causing harm outside of it, then. As such with pleasure, too. To do so is to open the floodgates; any digital harm must be condemned. Is it ethical to shoot aliens in Halo? Is it ethical to kick turtle shells in Mario? Is it ethical to eat ghosts in Pac-Man? Is there any virtual action in most video games that does not carry profound guilt? This is the necessary extent of this argument.

So, that’s my conclusion then, right? That it’s okay to hurt the buddy, and you should feel free to remorselessly bully and mutilate any digital denizens you encounter, because they’re just lines of code? Not quite. That doesn’t really work for me either.

Even if they are just lines of code, these are lines of code that have been given faces. Scott McCloud created this pyramid of representation: the realistic, the abstract, and the iconographic its three corners. You might be able to argue against this model, but let’s adopt it for now. The buddy is abstract and iconographic. Again, by default, it’s six orbs floating in a blank room. But the absence of realistic features does not mean it is no longer representative and recognizable. Its orientation and movements imbue these orbs with a humanity. While the buddy is so iconographic to be merely six floating balls, it is still immediately clear to most that it is a chubby little humanoid. You can call it pareidolia if you want, I guess, but that’s lying by omission. Pareidolia is the recognition of a sign (usually faces) in nebulous stimuli. These video game characters, on the other hand, were sculpted with the intent to invoke this response. We recognize a level of humanity in them, and that’s why we have empathy for them. This is what Jesper Juul might call the game’s fiction. The fiction of a game contextualizes its action and engagement. Without it, they really are just lines of code; floating points and vectors in a fog. But the fiction condenses the mist into a concrete, intelligible, and recognizable form.

When I saw the grunts fleeing in Halo, I did not see an array of code and polygons. I saw a creature fleeing in fear. My mirror neurons responded. And so my body and my mind instinctually, if only a bit, felt sympathy for it. It may be a computer generation, but I am able to recognize the simulacrum of a soul. Once again, it is important to know that these are only representations, but how we respond to representations still could mean something. We engage with signifiers in a simulated world. Does how we engage with them signify something, too?

There is not much evidence as far as I’m aware of that being exposed to violent media makes you more violent, nor that enacting violence within a digital space does, either. But the effect of media on our behaviors is something that has bothered people for years and years. Rap music, hard rock, comic books, television, even theater are all of a family of reviled media. Well before Mortal Kombat’s moral panic and Jack Thompson, Plato expressed the opposite skepticism about drama and poetry as mimesis, as imitation. Aristotle agreed that poetry was founded on imitation, but considered the disjunct between art and life to be a strength, too, and not just a weakness. And is it not, on some level? Despite the moral outrage, violent video games have not heralded a sharp rise in violence in the world. Anecdotes, maybe. Heightened aggression, possible. There is no real empirical evidence that I know of that shows violent art encourages violent behavior. So what unnerves us still?

With his name still in our mouths, let’s refer to Aristotle again with virtue ethics. Virtue ethics frame ethics as a product of one’s character. This may be the key to unlocking the modern controversy of violent video games: the virtue of simulated violence. Harming the buddy may not produce any real negative consequences per se, but the fear is that it produces or is produced by a vicious player.

The question is then not a matter of ethical utility, but of motive and virtue. It is quite literally a question about virtual reality.

What is it that purpose of harming the buddy? What is its virtue, its vice, its extension? Even outside the confines of Interactive Buddy’s torture engine, there is no shortage of cruel ballet in digital worlds. The subjects are not harmed, and as far as can be told, it doesn’t seem to have any broader implications for the ethics of the player. It affects nothing. All we see is mimicked anguish. There is nothing, good or bad, that comes of it. So why do we do it? Why do we want to see depictions of violence at all, let alone participate in them?

The cliche answer is that there is some immutable darkness within humanity which feeds on suffering. This is the kind of answer you’d hear from a Jordan B. Peterson or whatever Freudian charlatan. I’m not sure whether to call this most significantly naïve or presumptuous. I suppose it is both. It is presumptuous because it assumes this aesthetic tendency is universal, something that we all experience. It isn’t, and there are plenty of people who do not enjoy violent art. It is naïve because it implicitly posits that this correlates to a desire to enact the imagined actions and not merely fantasize about them, just as discussed. That the simulated darkness is in direct relation to a real darkness. So what does that mean? What makes a simulated darkness?

They are fantasies, but why do we strive to blur the line between this fantasy and reality? There has been a race towards the most realistic blood and guts we can find. Even if we want and need the magic circle as a boundary between reality and game to enable our violent impulses, there is also a culture of delight in hyper-realistic blood pouring out of our screens. We may have grown bored of it, sure, but the remnants are there. An example? Interactive Buddy gives you an option. For a price, you can make the buddy bleed. It changes nothing other than flecks of red appearing on the screen. So do you choose to? Do you choose to make the buddy’s pain feel more real to you? Do you make the fantasy more real? Why?

There’s an example from Slavoj Žižek (I’m sure you can find it somewhere, I’m not sure if it’s been written down) where he offers an interesting inversion. He presents the cliche of a gamer who in real life is meek, milquetoast, and bland man, but within the world of a game, he is brash, a womanizer, a marauder. The typical interpretation is that the real life person is the real person who lives out a fantasy in the game, but Žižek asks: what if it is the meek version of him is the one where he is pretending, and in the game he is truly himself?

It’s an interesting twist on the thought. It’s undeniable that virtual spaces offer ranges of expression which we desire in the real world but can only access there. This is one of games’ many powers: not just a lusory attitude, but an attitude of realization is possible. The boundary between game and reality is what enables this, that allow us to inhabit new and foreign attitudes of any kind. This extends to violence. The initial deconstruction Žižek offers asks us to consider that the truer nature is one of cruelty that is merely suppressed by the context of society. But games are games, and their disjunction from reality is freeing because it is a disjunction. It is precisely the division between game and reality that allows the average person to engage with this sadistic charade. Should the digital world become reality, how many players would actually continue the abuse? Would they become a marauder? Would you? I doubt it.

You might at first compare it to the way an actor speaks and moves as a character, but does not become them. Like Plato and Aristotle before him, J. L. Austin recognized that the act of speech was transformed by the stage. Austin wrote on the concept of speech act, things we can say that perform actions in and of themself, and highlights this. While the actor’s monologue is quite literally a performative utterance in one sense, it is not in the sense Austin uses that term. The speech does not, and cannot, perform an action it could otherwise; it is not intended to be taken in the same way as when the actor is off the stage. This is sometimes called the etiolation of language. It blanches the language; it is understood to not have the same seriousness behind it. This notion has been properly interrogated by jolly old Derrida, who in turn was interrogated by Searle -- that whole scuffle. Regardless, it is essentially of intention, of what action is intended or unintended by the use of language. A similar thing happens in games. The lusory attitude we adopt not only changes the actions we perform, but also changes how they are received and understood. But we don’t just speak or write in games. In fact, we mostly make movements and perform actions. What is etiolated, then? A gesture.

The question of how one engages with Interactive Buddy is a question of gesture. What is the extension of these actions, and their meaning?

When philosopher of communication Vilem Flusser sets out to define “gesture”, he begins describing a scenario in which he is punched. He initially defines a gesture as “a movement of the body or of a tool attached with the body, for which there is no satisfactory causal explanation.” What Flusser means by causal is specific. His project is to establish foundations for a study of gesture’s meaning, elaborated to a wide range of sociological phenomena. The causes of a movement that are physiological or even psychological are not satisfactory for a gesture. The gesture has a component of meaning which Flusser does not view as fulfilled by those explanations. He then goes on describe being punched, and his arm recoiling in pain. This motion is one he declares a gesture, because it is representation of something: “My movement depicts pain. The movement is a symbol, and pain is its meaning.” This is seen in the buddy, but only as a simulation.

Let’s return to McCloud’s pyramid. While this system identifies images, it does not identify the images in motion. What of images’ gestures? Animation, too, could be put along such a pyramid. The motion of this buddy is what lends its verisimilitude. Lines of code parodying behavior. The buddy’s movements have an adequate causal explanation in the game itself, but when we extend this question to the programmer, it becomes a gesture. This is the intent of the designer: to communicate the concept of intention and interiority. We may recognize the buddy as just lines of code, but we still recognize the buddy’s behavior. Their gestures, while mere imitations, are recognizable as those of pain and of pleasure. But when we play Interactive Buddy, are these communicative gestures? When we express through the game, express through actions on the buddy? The buddy may communicate to us; maybe it’s more accurate to say that the designer communicates through the buddy. The buddy is a puppet of the code, the meanings expressed therein designed by a programmer. But in our engagement with the buddy, as we poke and prod at it, is this communication? If so, to what are we communicating?

Play may not necessarily be communicative, but when we make the choice to interpret it as such, and as gesture, we butt up against an issue. Communication, generally, implies at least two people. A person who transmits, and a person who receives. Communication theory also recognizes the store of information, such as in a diary, as a form of communication, as well, as it communicates from the past self to the future self. But in a game like Interactive Buddy, the movements we make ephemeral. They cannot be saved and cannot be retrieved. Like speech, it is uniterable and impermanent, eddying away in the wind. If a movement is neither made for communicate, nor capable of being retrieved, is it still a gesture, or just a random convulsion? Can a gesture be non-communicative? Or, is it possible that in this gesturing--or speaking for that matter, anything ephemeral and solitary--that the action itself is communicative to my own immediate experience? Do I gesture to myself, then? Is that what it means to entertain yourself? When we play a game on our own, are we gesturing to communicate with ourselves? What am I trying to say to myself then?

Consider a diary. When I write in a diary, I communicate to myself through written language. When I doodle in that same diary, I communicate to myself through images. The constraint of the medium informs what I communicate to myself. In some ways, the constraints are what create the possibility for immediate this self-communication to exist at all. When I open up Interactive Buddy, I communicate to myself through my gestures within the game. The buddy is just lines of code, but my way of interfacing with it is also made up of code, too. The tool of gesture is not just the mouse, not just the computer, but also the buddy itself. Flusser later defines “gesture” as a movement which expresses freedom (and even later, paired with the freedom to conceal or reveal). The cause of the gesture is the desire to make it and the freedom to do so. But any movement is going to be constrained in some capacity, the gesture by the body, the diary by the letter, the soliloquy by the spoken word. My freedom of communication is necessarily, to some degree, interpellated by its medium. In a game, this is the entire conceit of play. The constraints are what make this self-communication possible. The game's unique limits then directly inform what I am capable of communicating to myself through it. I am only allowed to express what the game allows me to express. My gestures are limited.

When we say that the buddy didn’t do anything to deserve this pain, what do we mean by that? The buddy does do something to deserve it: it exists. Let me explain. Video games are full of teleological universes. In most games, everything is instrumental. The platform exists to be jumped on, the enemy exists to be killed, the coin exists to be collected. Everything has a purpose. It is incredibly difficult to make a truly nihilistic game in a mechanical sense, because to do so is to weave between any instrumentality. It’s possible to tell a story about nihilism, or that lacks meaning, but its mechanics will have bespoke purposes. The universe of the game has a rhyme and a reason.

The world of Interactive Buddy is constructed for violence. Not in an architectural sense, but in a cosmological one. When Jacob Geller describes worlds designed for violence, he is describing the architecture of digital spaces, how they create affordances for violence, what they look like in the real world. The archicecture of Interactive Buddy is never more complex than four grey walls. Instead, the make-up of its reality is designed for violence. That is the destiny of its teleological universe. The buddy, of course, has no free will (and thus cannot truly gesture in the sense Flusser uses), for one. But the buddy also has a destiny. The buddy has an infinite capacity for suffering and cannot die. It’s lines of code that respond to what we do. By hurting the buddy, we gain more money with which to buy weapons to hurt the buddy. Its suffering is a tool of its own propagation. Even pleasure can be instrumentalized in making the buddy hurt. That is the monad of Interactive Buddy’s world: pain.

It is not only reasonable, but entirely predictable that players would abuse the buddy. When we begin to play Interactive Buddy, we enter a playground designed for the express purpose of violent gestures.

But did it have to be this way? Immediately, there is an ambiguity: the open hand. That’s what is equipped to your mouse at the start. What does an open hand do? It can touch and hold, and it can strike. In the closing of a hand, one can either grasp or form a fist. The open hand is a pharmakon, an undecided gesture, which the player disambiguates in their choice of what to do with it.

We will always be left with more questions than answers. By what virtue do we harm the buddy? Since it is not a true act of harm, what is the extension of the act that it is gesturing towards? What is the precise purpose of this gesture? What does it signify, and to whom?

Games create virtual realities. In them, we inhabit virtual bodies and disembodied forces. We inevitably make gestures with them. It is not merely the etiolation of gesture. The machine is made not just a tool of gesture, but the system of parameters that limits our gestures, too. Its confines yet also create, as a segmented reality, the possibility of new and alien behaviors and expressions. Their unreality is what defines them. They are virtual in every sense of the word. They are not just gestures, but gestures towards.

Whether or not to hurt the buddy is not really a question of ethics at the end of the day. The suffering of the buddy was a foregone conclusion. It was borne into a world that was made for torture. But that’s okay. Because it can’t be hurt, not for real. There’s no harm in it. They’re just lines of code. But why do we do it, anyway? What drives us to these fantasies? I don’t know, and I’m not sure I ever will truly understand the impulse. All I know for sure is the question we ask ourselves: do you choose to hurt the buddy? And why? It's not a question about ethics. It’s a question about virtual realities. It’s a question of what the gesture of the open hand means to you.

https://link.medium.com/rYQbDiTDjrb

A kitten lives in a cardboard box next to the shrine in Yamanose. One night, a speeding car takes the life of its mother. As quiet snow comes gingerly down from the sky to hug the fading warmth of the mother’s body, the kitten cries. These cries score the night’s wallowing blackness to an audience of one; a young schoolgirl. That schoolgirl brings the kitten to the shrine in Yamanose and houses it in a cardboard box. It stays in this box every hour of every day, calling out to any footsteps that happen to pass by. Whose footsteps they are does not matter; the kitten is cold, it’s hungry, and most importantly it’s lonely in a way it has never known before. To the kitten, any company is better than no company.

A young man lives in a house next to the shrine in Yamanose. One night, a cartel assassin takes the life of his father. As quiet snow comes gingerly down from the sky, pressing gently against the windows of the dojo where the young man holds his father’s body, the young man makes a wordless promise to himself. He spends every hour of every day chasing that promise through the streets and buildings of many places. The young man consults strangers and acquaintances alike for countless favors; who the favors come from does not matter, just that it brings him closer to his goal. Though just as quick as the young man approaches others for favors, he’s similarly quick to leave them, if not quicker. To the young man, company would only get in the way.

The schoolgirl’s classmates and friends all come every day to the cardboard box next to the shrine in Yamanose. They take turns caring for the kitten and making sure she is warm, fed, and loved. Before too long, the kitten recovers enough both physically and emotionally to start walking around outside of the box. The children provide for the kitten all the love and the care a mother would have given multiple times over. That’s what the kitten needs, so that’s what they do.

The young man’s caretakers, his best friends, and the girl who loves him constantly attempt to be a part of his life. They ask how he’s doing, where he’s been, what he’s been up to - the young man insists on being left alone. Before too long, they grow concerned and start wondering why he’s been staying out so late, if he’s doing anything dangerous, offering help if he needs it - again, the young man insists on being left alone. After enough insisting, the young man’s caretakers, his best friends, and the girl who loves him decide to start keeping their distance. That’s what the young man needs, so that’s what they do.

One day, the cardboard box vanishes from the shrine in Yamanose, and the kitten is nowhere to be found. Thanks to the kindness and the love of the schoolgirl and her friends, the kitten is fully recovered and ready to take on the world by herself. There is no doubt in my mind that the kitten will live a full and happy life. I have no worries about the kitten at all. The young man, however… I worry deeply about that young man.

CW: Suicide, Pandemic, Helplessness, Poverty, Global Issues Getting Worse

On Spoilers: I'm not actually a fan of spoiler tagging the whole document, so I have tacked in a 'spoiler section' point warning within it, with a bold capital lettering along with an 'end of spoilers' section. So just read around those points if you're interested in playing the game yourself and just want to know what I think in advance.

Est Reading Time: 15 minutes without spoilers, 20 with them.
Policy

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Now this is a fascinating one. In this is an apocalypse horror game, the main mechanic is literally 'patience'. It's a sort of anti incremental game, you have no control over anything, all you can do is wait. You are placed in a very small dingy 5ftx5ft prison room with a clock ticking on the wall, a bed, and a thick iron safe door with a grate on the bottom which you can't escape from. Through the grate, letters come streaming in under your jail door from various characters who want to speak to you. The primary one being the antagonist named 'Mr. Money' who has imprisoned you with a specific purpose. You see, a majority of the population has been infected with a very deadly virus, and the only healthy people left are isolated in their jail cells. The problem here however is that a lot of those people are killing themselves, so as a result the game is about encouraging your character through this correspondence and various material gifts, like posters etc., in order to spirit you to keep on living. Since you have no control over escaping from your cell, you just have to be patient and wait for people's letters to read about what's happening in the outside world.

The use of a very limited and garrish grey dented room goes a long way in making your stay feel as uncomfortable as possible, with some incredibly strong sound design backing it. There's a constant wind and clattering noise that brings an eerie quality to it all. The visual design of the letters and posters you adorn over time, while somewhat amateur in quality, are still made with a fine aesthetic craft. One of my favorite bits about the game is how each of the characters who send letters have very distinct visual designs around them and font choices that make them come to life.

For the most part, this game has a 'pulpy' quality to its horror where its riding the line as a dark joke in the mania of its writing similar to something like Little Inferno or Five Nights at Freddy's, coy yet dreadful. It grins at you while telling you that the world is currently being organ harvested, like a darker invader Zim (which would be Johnny the Homicidal Maniac if you know what that is). The game also feels less like a 'horror' game even if you might get scared, and more a thriller where the thrill is despondent. Being trapped on a long family drive slightly carsick, or a feeling trapped on a bad slow Disneyland ride. Less psychological horror and more psychological humdrum. That churning of dread in itself is so rare, that it's worth the price of admission on that point alone.¹

Yet, the ticket on the ride comes with quite a few caveats actually. For one, people have reported being seriously shaken up by this game. For one, a website peer Luna, who I highly respect has this to say "I really say this with tearful sincerity that this work should be locked in dungeons behind dungeons so as not to see the light of day ever again."ᵃ Calling it a 'mind poison' and mentioning it made several of her friends contemplate if they should even continue living, as she passionately puts it "I myself went through one of the worst months of my life quickly following this work and I don’t feel like I earned anything from it.". This is a rather serious charge.

Following this incredibly dramatic and compelling rhetoric. There's also the spooky issues this game seemed to anticipate early about our real world condition. Issues of isolation, despondency, and viral pandemics, economic depressions, mass incarceration, and political desperation. Recently its adjacency to the COVID pandemic has garnered with it a great deal of follow-up traction. Which is unfortunate because it seems the author can't enjoy the profound discourse around this game, since there's one final nail in the coffin of its horrific settlement. A game which depicts a highly normalized world of suicidality, in which people risk their lives or kill themselves, has a dev who, 2 years after this games creation, was driven to suicide himself. That all being said I was not really unsettled or disturbed by it too deeply, as I tend to get a lot out of reflecting on the 'darker' parts of humanity. This is not meant to be an 'edgy' point but I love reading pessimistic works like No Longer Human or the philosophy of Cioran, and generally enjoy the genre of psychological horror writ large. So if you have anything close to my proclivities take that as the go ahead to try it for yourself ^-^

Regardless of the interesting relationships to the text mentioned above, I would argue the main trauma the work is trying to deal with, and why it seems so prophetic, is that it is very concerned with the economy. Throughout the game you are told about the shady dealing of 'Dr. Money' who has manufactured a viral plague and then sells people a shoddy antidote. He does it all, selling people's organs, threatening and blackmailing people, war profiteering etc. All for his own pockets. None of this is even a spoiler, this is actually set up in the standard yet gothic incremental game predecessor game Exoptable Money which sets the backdrop for the lore here. You don't have to play that game first but this one is actually meant to be a sequel with events here that were a 'wedged' side plot in that one. We get to read about the decaying of the world: gray, black, and red markets merge into one bloody torturous chimera. As the supposedly pure 'white market' withers away. It's a brutal apocalypse one that Peter Frase, describes in his work Four Futures, as exterminism. He argues there's a punnett square of possibilities that exist after capitalism as we know it, and the one with the most hierarchy and scarcity of resources, and by far the most devastating, is exterminism:

"In a world of hyperinequality and mass unemployment, you can try to buy off the masses for a while, and then you can try to repress them by force. But so long as immiserated hordes exist, there is the danger that one day it may become impossible to hold them at bay. When mass labor has been rendered superfluous, a final solution lurks: the genocidal war of the rich against the poor." ²

More worryingly, one of the reasons why this game seems like it was able to 'tell the future' on COVID³ is clarified in a followup article he did on how the events of covid are a concerning predictor that currently in our real life we are on track for the 'exterminist' endgame hosted by the moment by the Party of Death

"For the Party of Death, the pandemic itself begins to appear economically useful, and the measures needed to combat it can come to be seen as worse than the disease — which, from the narrow perspective of capital accumulation, they may well be."⁴

He then goes on to highlight in that same article a warning, that you shouldn't just think the Party of Death as some indignant GOP candidates, the NY Times, Friedman, and honestly just basic cabal news is pushing for 'opening the economy back up'. I'm not the only one who lived through it either, people were constantly putting down and lifting restrictions every other week it seemed. The accumulation of scarce resources into the pockets of the rich, and clear structural 'violence' viciously merge into one monster, much like the ghastly cannibalistic world of Cruelty Squad. The only difference between that game and this one is you're kept at a birds eye view.

However here's the bit where I think the text is most brilliant, and also the one I find so fascinating. One of the main things that you get early on that you can use to stave off your dreary environment and bad situation, is video games. See, early on you're given a game device, and your hysterical 'buddy' sponsored by the institution to keep you happy, starts to buy you games. It's only after the second game he says he's too poor to get you any more games and profusely apologizes, and then his desire to keep you happy only gets worse from there as he disembowels himself to give you more incredibly basic and simple games.

This to me, is the brunt of the trauma that I felt was being communicated, almost as a sort of open form question 'is it even ok for game devs to expect money?'. Advertised both in this game and the original is a series of 3 failed kickstarter campaigns which, distressingly enough, is still up despite the original creator's death. On top of this, both of the current games he has up on Gamejolt are free, and the kickstarters are about making faithful 'remakes' of these for a pitifully small amount of money. This being a hyperlink in the game, and imbedded as a sort of quiet plea in the ending of both after everything I've described so far, it feels just to include it in a reading of the game's themes. If that's not enough to sway you, the reveal of the first game is using cat fur and human organs as money generators. It doesn't take a scholar to see how economies of suffering would make a game developer feel insecure about offering something or asking for money for their work.

A lot of games on websites like itchio will sell their games in bundles for dirt cheap, there's always sales. The only people daring to sell games at the 60 dollar mark anymore are studios selling AAA exclusives on the newest console. Not even highly polished AAA steam games can resist a steam sale markdown after a few months. So in theory, game devs should not feel worried about this and I'd be the first to reassure them they can price their game however they feel is right without much ethical issue.

But look, let's actually not discard it, lets dwell with this insecurity for a moment. From the inside, it's hard for a highly isolated yet passionate game dev not to see and putting game experiences behind a paywall as not being self cannibalizing the same working class it's supportive of. Even in the best case scenario it might risk doing this. And the various worse case scenarios intensify as our global crises do. Climate change is only getting worse and asking for 5 dollars for a game might have you in a neurotic state that people might starve or miss their electric bill because of trying to support you and your work. Might rack up debt interest just to try out your game. Might lose an arm working at Walmart or amazon just in order to buy your cute independent game everybody is talking about, or worse, nobody. So, if you beg them in the form of kickstarters, whereby you can also try to justify your game dev abilities as a core ability you have then you avoid it right? In a weird inverse way, street begging has more dignity than a paywall from this sort of worldview. All the more sad is that compared to a lot of kickstarters Wertpol was not asking for all that much "Alright, so the kickstarter is over, and failed again at 3188€/12000€."⁴ he closes with "So I guess, currently, it’s ‘on hold’, possibly cancelled, I don’t know. I really don’t feel like thinking about any of this much more.`` The disappointment here is palpable. This is all in spite of the fact it got it 5 minutes of youtube fame through popular lets players like Markiplier playing it. A depressing reality is that when it comes to indie games, most don't recoup the funds to continue developing games themselves.

What is the one counterargument that can be done? Well for the people already dead from these sorts of insecurities about world purpose and ability, there is none. No charitable set of words is going to make the dead change their mind about the value of their art. Or bring much healing to the affected families, who probably wouldn't appreciate having the suicide seen as non-rational, like 'its ok little Timmy was just wrong about how much he hated himself' doesn't ring well. So I must say as sympathetically as possible here, I deeply understand. I'm not out to overwrite the insecurity of one lost and young dev so much as trying to pave a path out for those currently suffering5. Honestly it's less a matter of being rational or not so much as being disconnected from kinships of care.

While not all suicidality relates itself so heavily to the feeling of the violence impacting others and themselves just by being alive, most at least tend out of self isolated loops of despair that are difficult to feel escape from. However if there is any way to quell these traumas for the living, one potentiality might be through gaming itself. In this setting, the entirely grim situation and circumstances can be almost entirely blocked out by minimalist gameboy games. Almost all are actually playable and Buddy mentions to you that the games have frustrated people with their difficulty. There are twenty levels for each and they all consist of dodging obstacles for a goal. They are all fun to play and they kept me occupied from the awful situation. I literally played the entire game hooked on these minigames, grinding through them for badges that would align my room, and stopping to read letters in between, because what else was I supposed to do? What was supposed to be unbearable became for me, actually meditative and fun, dampening the still upsetting tale within. For most of it I was in a better mood than I wasn't. A similar use of gaming inside the game, in order to stave off depression, shows up in 'No One Can Ever Know' and using it lowers your dysphoria from impacting you. It's just as effective in that text as well at 'dampening' the pain of being alive there as well. Computer games dampening the effects of trauma seem to have a legitimate is small amount of research supporting those claims⁵ ᵃⁿᵈ ⁶. So perhaps game devs can take solace in knowing that their games can actually heal a lot more than they think. Even if it's a dreary art game I think the same basic point holds true. And rather than throwing these games in a dungeon, basic optional⁷ yet easy to read in advance content warnings about whats inside of each would go a much longer way than just throwing every game we don't like into a fire. If I sound passionate on this its because these same echos against challenging art exist in the discourses around queer novels in high schools, which many districts including the one I live in in america is currently out to pull from shelves.

Nonetheless, it's this focus on economies as harm, is bound to take an incredible toll if somebody is already having self esteem issues. The constant use of suicide in the narrative feels more like bleak if somewhat humorous at points narrative device rather than something you're supposed to consider seriously as an individual. As a matter of fact your character doesn't actually have a option to kill themselves even with the only 'decision' in the game, you just bear witness to others that do. At the same time, the letters you get from the people who do are wistful 'you can go on where I failed'. I feel like this game is answering a dark echo about economies themselves, which is to say that we call when they aren't working as desired depressions and recessions, but don't actually treat them as such. Which for me at least is a daring form of storytelling.

STORY SPOILERS AHEAD

I think another point where this economic concern comes across is that your main character is constantly being sent letters of pure sincerity and gifts. Your well spoken woodworking friend Salvador will over the course of the story send you a table. Other people send posters as mentioned earlier, and one even a cake.

This speaks to another part of economic powerlessness that people don't really like to address, which is the power imbalance found in gift giving. I'm incredibly poor and for the most part of my life young as I am, many people around me were getting me gifts and nice things. Even in my current state now, close friends and family often send me money, clothes, etc. Some will send me steam games and it goes on like this. Yet I can almost never repay in kind, I just watch as people send me things and have life issues. Sometimes I do something particularly wrong by a friend, and stop being friends. Only to then be left by myself with the present remains. After a certain point in the game, not only do you feel overwhelmed by all of the gifts from the various benefactors, some who you care for more than others, but you can't do anything in return either. This is actually the most direct and specific the depressive function gets and even then its economic, you just literally can't because you're in jail in the confines of the game. More interesting than that, the ones that care the most are equally hurting themselves the most when trying to help. Whereas the evil Doctor Money is the only one who expects repayment for his 'gift' of a jail cell (your organs). Still, eventually there's a physical feeling to the gifts, they don't feel good, they feel like the only vestiges of memory of others as it attaches to the outside. The imbalance of the world of gifts and how it can reinforce a person's sense of looming inadequacy is told brilliantly by your player character having no voice at all.

Finally I think it's worth mentioning where the game falls short. There are 3 characters aside from Dr. Money, who all try to be your friend. One is Salvador, your old friend who ventures across to a different land, who has known you for a long time. Yet, it's not ever explained how he knows to send letters to you since the course of your understanding of the confines of the jail cell exists purely for you, and how they don't get screened out entirely means his feuding for your attention exists only for thinly held narrative reasons. He also electrocutes himself to death via the generator. Then you have of course your buddy who is mostly well written but, his hysterical laughing over text uses a throttling of capitalization and lowercase which combined with a creepy poster makes him feel like way too gimmicky, although breaking character by pleading with you quietly to be happy is neat, they didn't need to write him so psychotically. The worst of them all however, is how they treat Charlotte. Charlotte is the lonely baker girl who lives near the prison and sells cakes. She's sweet and plays you music at one point. The problem however is that she commits suicide and tells you right after you escape 'sorry I couldnt be more patient but anyway'. The other issue here is that she is only bonded to your silent protagonist out of a random knowledge she has that you and her are both the only people not hit by the virus in town. For her to be this lonely yearning flowery girl who commits suicide just before you can get to her, even though she knows you're in there is very twee and offensively exploitative of women for a cheap narrative trick. Which sucks because the rest of the game runs completely fine on suicide. It's not the most offensive thing in the world or anything but it's far from narratively ideal.

Even then, there's other smaller issues too. For example, the Triangle game which meant as a geometry dash clone takes input of several jumps when you press the button, allowing you to fly and even go outside the screen, there's no way to play it without this flying glitch happening since a press takes several jump inputs at once. Another is how Salvador, who does not know the confines of your room is able to build you a table that is perfectly aligned in the room, in fact I think it being too big or small would have encouraged the points being made more.

END OF SPOILERS

The final thing I will say is I don't think it's reasonable to discard difficult art about despair as inherently harmful. This is an instinct I completely get since I found the depiction of despair and futility in Omori and Danganronpa so upsetting I could not actually finish the games. I get the desire to either condemn these titles or at least make them inferior. But self deprecation, despair, depression, etc. are all deep emotions in our real life, and to repress our relationship to their depictions in art is to fall into the same maniacal trap of forced hostage happiness that this game criticizes. The more we repress ourselves from the misanthropic parts of life, the harder it becomes to accept things like Global Warming, Genocides, War, Depression, etc as the violent realities they are. That all being said I will again reassert that this game is not far the faint of heart, its an abrasive experience of powerlessness that counters the typical designs of why people want to play videogames.

That all being said, I know that even after writing all of this I still haven't gotten rid of my own feelings of inferiority and inadequacy. The game didn't give me them, just clarified them in nice ways. I feel kind of bad that as minimalist and simple as this, I couldn't accurately address the various other more nuanced depressions and discomforts in the game. Then there's the dearth in being able to make this a compelling piece to read, it's rather dour and unexciting. Honestly, this is likely because I'm still quite new to writing on games but I also try to put a lot of myself and knowledge into my writing as well. At the end of the day, maybe the fact that I abstracted depression to larger socio political issues means that I'm a bit of a death whisperer. For me, struggling with those feelings are just another part of the disappointments and degradations of life and to that effect perhaps that's also why I find a serious appreciation for art like this as well.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

a. From Luna's insight on the game link. I do end up somewhat critical of this text in this piece, but I only do so out of respect to the original writer as a peer I hold great respect for on the website. Not to mention she was who originally spurned me to give this one a try in the 1st place.

1. Although besides my cautiously positive praise on this game, there's a few other games on similar notes I think are worth prioritizing first, Little Inferno, Static End, and Trash the Planet, along with Exoptable Money itself. You could consider this game a much rougher hard mode to the themes and focuses of these games. Consider those other games just general recommendations in any other case.

2.Four Futures: Life After Capitalism by Peter Frase, sorry no page number on this one its an EPUB

3. I mean "Seems" here quite strictly. I don't believe in Predictive Programming and even if you did, a primary plot point in the story that is revealed is that Dr. Money manufactured the virus into existence, which makes him more similar to Bob Paige from Deus Ex than real life COVID. The pandemic connections are well meaning but not bringing up these facts can accidentally play into the hands of ludicrous conspiracies like that COVID-19 was lab grown. Which leads to other conspiracies like that the elite can just manufacture a deadly virus and various other bioweapons, a sorry conspiracy theory that even my highly liberal facebook dad seems to believe in. There's definitely some responsibility to be had to not just reference where games anticipate the future but also where they don't and probably don't even try to.

4.The Rise In the Party of Death link. For what it's worth, the leftism is not a politics I'm trying to push on you in this reading so much as a general understanding that the world we live in is slipping quickly towards apocalypse.

5. "We found that intervening with either Tetris or Word games four days after the trauma film was effective: participants in both Tetris and Word games conditions had relatively fewer intrusions after the intervention than participants without a task. The evidence for this finding was strong. " Tetris and Word games lead to fewer intrusive memories when applied several days after analogue trauma link

6. "But Colder Carras emphasizes that the genre or specific game isn’t what necessarily helped with recovery. The benefits, she says, stemmed more from the connections the Veterans made with other video game players; the distractions they created for themselves by playing the games and removing their focus, for example, from alcohol or drugs; and the meaning they derived from the games." Study: Video games can help Veterans recover from mental health challenges link

7. My thoughts on Content Warning or the uncharitably termed 'Trigger Warnings' is complicated, because they can be spoilers in themselves in the sense they tip off what a piece of art is about. For some, knowing the exact confines of them all may be unwanted and take away from the 'surprise' of the experience even if having 1 or 2 mental blocks around certain content would make you want to air on the side of caution in all cases anyway. Personally, I'm rather indifferent to spoilers but it's something I think about a lot. I hope one day backloggd allows you to spoiler tag specific sections of text because I definitely would like to make it opt in :/

(5-year-old's review, typed by her dad)

You get to catch a lot of Bugsnax. They're half Bug and half Snax. You get to feed people Bugsnax and that's it!

No that's not it. There's new places that you get to explore and catch Bugsnax, that's it.