27 | WELCOME TO THE UNIVERSE
27 | WELCOME TO THE UNIVERSE
by: Colton Olds
Progress:
- I played through this game once, reaching the end after about 53 minutes.
Things I Appreciated:
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What stands out significantly here are many of the meta jokes. First and foremost, when I clicked on this game, I thought it was going to be some kind of cooking simulator because of the front matter (“SimpleChef is helping parents out with a new back-to-school offer.”) I legitimately thought I was about to play some game where I have to put together meals using one of those mail-order services along with some Ikea-core instructions. I kept thinking about this while I was playing, only to finally realize (I think) that it’s making fun of YouTube/podcast etc ad sponsorships. There are many examples of this kind of meta-humor: “unfinished” content, an extended survey about the game and the survey itself, and a fake download screen that gave me an opportunity to pretend I cared about checking my e-mail for a few minutes. These moments create an interesting effect because of how meta the game is. It’s almost as though the in-universe professor/creator of the game is self-conscious about how the thing they are writing is going, and is trying to distract the reader and themselves from these uncomfortable emotions with this meta-humor.
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There was a unique phenomenon I experienced while playing this that I will now attempt to explain. Wish me luck! I think in games that are About Life™, there is a natural player urge to hold a mirror up to their own experiences and current state. Indeed, this is heavily encouraged by the game in this case. But! From the first moments of narration, I kept being distracted by the voice of the narrator. What is happening exactly, I wondered, that these kinds of philosophical thoughts are being imposed upon a baby/child? And as the game goes, the narrator becomes more and more intrusive. I realized, eventually, that the narrator is using the game as a mirror to hold up to themselves, instead. And this led to a kind of authorship-readership-narratorship power struggle: who gets to hold the mirror? I wanted to snatch back the ability to be introspective because of the subject matter of the game, yet, the narrator snatches the mirror back to view themselves instead. It kind of has me thinking of the responses that I’ve written for IF Comp so far. Like, I guess they’re about the fiction/games, but don’t they also kind of feel like weird personal essays at times? Like right now, for instance? Have I, as a responder to IF Comp, snatched the mirror to look at myself more than the work these responses are ostensibly about? Is that an inevitable feature of subjective review/analysis/criticism such as this thread? Let me know in the comments, and don’t forget to c̸̙͠lic̴̭͌k̶̩̅ ̵̱̕th̷̟̃at̶͚͑ ̴̧͂b̸̡̅ë̷͇́l̷̺̐l̴͜͝!
Feedback/Recommendations/Questions:
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I ran this game online through Chrome and I found that this game really chugs/lags, which is strange to me. I’ve ran many more resource- and media-intensive games than this so far without a similar issue. So what is happening with this text-based game? Any time I wanted to copy-paste a quote, it took some time for the cursor to catch up to make that possible. (I even went through and closed a bunch of other things running on my computer/other tabs to see if that helped. It didn’t.) Maybe this is an intentional feature (the game is meta and intentionally “wastes” your time as part of the experience), otherwise my guess is that it must be running some inordinate amount of code/variable checks per page. I don’t know enough about coding to offer a specific recommendation, except that I would like it to not lag.
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I had a weird emotional experience of this game. At times, the questions this game asks me or prompts me to think about are very difficult. (Based on what I’ve experienced IRL over the last few years especially, certain elements really made me feel uncomfortable. Not in a bad way because the game has done anything wrong, it’s just the nature of games that are trying to be about you.) Yet the game is also going out of its way to be very funny with the meta jokes, etc. It leads to a kind of mercurial tone where I’m not sure if I should be clinging to a core of meaning here, or if I’m being trolled, essentially. My question is, is the meta humor a necessary relief from the darker elements of the game? Is it necessary because the game is simulating the inescapable tension one feels balancing on the razor’s edge of acknowledging/distracting from death, and humor is an essential part of that? I think maybe the answer is yes, but I’m not fully convinced.
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
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Something this game posits (as I read it) is a kind of triad of methods to better understand life: (1) analyzing it in an academic/philosophical way; (2) actually just doing/living life; (3) doing/living life as mediated through a guided fictional experience like this game. In terms of the first one, there’s a presentational element I’m flagging here: the use of a white background and plain text along with academic writing dense with quotes, citations, etc., which seems to point to the insufficiency of that type of approach as these fragments of a paper interleave with the rest of the game. Similar to film editing techniques of the association between sequential images, the different backgrounds push the player to make an implicit comparison between the methods. The message I got from it is: isn’t the game approach, the IF approach, more inviting? (Wait, I just kind of realized that what I “learned” here was… use different backgrounds for different sections? Don’t I already know that? Well here is another example of a context to do that in.)
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This game plays with expectations as to whether or not your choices are being recorded/mattered. Throughout the game I wondered if I would see some kind of summation of the simulated life I lived based on those choices, and I did! But in a twisted way. You are shown a “letter to yourself” based on your choices, and the letter is structured to reveal inconsistencies in your choices based on what it groups together. (At least… mine did. Maybe my choices were particularly disjointed, but I kind of doubt that.) This was an interesting meta twist as it provides the player with what they are expecting (a summation of their choices) but shows them why that is a questionable thing to want (the summation is definitionally inadequate to tell you much more about yourself than a horoscope might). So my lesson here is: you can weaponize your reader’s familiarity with the genre (an IF game about life that shows some kind of culmination of your choices) to give them an interesting experience when it doesn’t turn out quite like they expect.
Quote:
- “Clowns represent full depravity and unchecked hubris. We are to speak in truth, not deceit and lies. The stories are wrong. Canio is not a tragic puppet of circumstance or dramatic irony, but a fool undeserving of compassion and love.” (This is an absurdly exaggerated response to me saying that I’d prefer a good joke to a bad joke. Also: what’s up with all the clown games lately?)
Lasting Memorable Moment:
- When in the middle of a survey about a game I hadn’t finished yet, I was asked whether I thought the length of that very survey that I hadn’t finished yet was appropriate. I guess it’s connected to this idea that these games about life are asking you to reflect on a life that by definition hasn’t finished yet. Or it’s just a cute meta-joke. Pick whichever you like.