Victor's IF Comp 2024 reviews

[VictorGijsbers]

Welcome to the Universe by Colton Olds

Let’s talk about Dr. Jacob Balamer, the well-known sociologist whose seminal The Necessities of Function (1999) is the main, if unlikely, source of inspiration for this piece of interactive fiction. Balamer… okay, he’s fictional character, who appears in Welcome to the Universe both as the subject of a sort-of intellectual biography (it sounds like an obituary except that it’s written in the present tense, and in fact is probably written by the guy himself) and, we find out later on, as the fictional author of this very game that we are playing. A deliciously complicated set-up around which the whole piece is built.

The intellectual biography passages are convincingly written, convincing enough that I checked out whether Balamer might perhaps be real. They’re also very dry, in a style that is unfortunately not uncommon in academia. But they should be read well, and with an eye on finding out what Balamer’s famous theories actually are. Here’s some of the first things we learn:

Life, as Balamer explains, is a functional process. It is not theoretical, faltering, or illogical; it is realistic (“because it can be perceived”), perpetual (“because it seeks itself”), and practical (“because it simply is”) (1999, pp. 21). Because life is functional, elements of life can be classified into observable, repetitional patterns (Balamer, 2001).

This, my friends, is utterly banal. Life is and can be perceived, and it can be classified into ‘observable, repetitional patterns’? That’s trivial. Of course life can be classified into observable, repetitional [which is not actually a word, I think] patterns; this is merely to say that behaviour can be described. Nobody has ever disagreed with it. Nobody could.

As we move further through the game, Balamer’s ideas are going to remain as unimpressive as this. Things don’t, for instance, get better when he embarks on ‘lived experience’ case studies:

Jobs like lifeguarding, Balamer asserts (1999), are built on the fundamental understanding that humans will engage in predictable behavioral patterns, an important tenant to Balamer’s research.

The claim that ‘humans will engage in predictable behavioral patterns’ is, again, a platitude that nobody can deny. Literally; in order to deny something you need to use language, and language is predicated on the idea that humans will engage in predictable behavioral patterns. (BTW, ‘tenant to’ should probably be ‘tenet of’, but I’m unsure whether this is done on purpose.)

Balamer also launches the theory of ‘connaturalism’:

Connaturalism is a philosophical theory that claims all individuals share universal experiences inherently by being human and posits that certain attributes of human existence are universal (Balmer, 1998).

That sounds kind of deep… until you realise that it’s made true already by the fact that we all share the universal experiences of being born, of breathing, of needing to pee; and that these attributes of human existence are universal. Again, big language hides an absolute paucity of ideas.

What makes all of this poignant is that Balamer wants to do good with his theories. He wants to help us “better understand ourselves and collectively manufacture a considerate, thoughtful society.” Of course his work, being meaningless, can’t actually do that, and he becomes sad and embittered.

Let us turn to the other – and bigger – part of the game, the part that we might be tempted to call ‘the game’. This is a weird kind of life simulator. We’re going from baby to toddler, to middle school kid, to high school kid, and so on, all the way to old age; and in each scene we’re supposed to make a choice. It feels like we’re building our character, or choosing how our life will unfold. However, the scenes are all so weirdly specific, and the choices so inappropriately big and momentous, that one cannot take the proceedings seriously. You’re in the supermarket, some small kid starts vomiting… and you have to choose whether or not you want to have kids later! You’re about to show off your skateboard skills… and your choice makes the difference between being the coolest dude in town and being so embarrassingly lame that people catch fire watching you and your entire school burns down. ‘Hyperbolic’ doesn’t begin to describe it.

That’s also true for the prose, where I thought that the game occasionally went a bit overboard:

It was a hot summer day, the kind where kids melt on the sidewalk and palm trees catch ardency. Summer break had just shaven its legs. You were young and ready to seize the day as long as it came with a can koozie.

The pavement in front of your house cracked from the heatwaves. You were too tired to want anything, but too bored to do nothing. Heat emanated like a broiler skillet spider. The sun had bled out and gone numb, ice cream liquifying straight off the cone.

It’s all intentionally hyperbolic, yes, but my patience as a reader was being tested somewhat too much. But then, it’s easy to forgive a game that sends this kind of passage your way:

This is placeholder text for an unfinished story section that will be added in a future update. Please make a selection on the next screen, imagining the scenario that lead to these options:

I am the goop master.
I am the goop servant.

Fairly hilarious. Indeed, as the game progresses we get more of these strange interruptions, including a long and absurd questionnaire, which becomes only more funny if you refuse to take it. This finally leads to the revelation that Dr. Balamer himself is the game designer! Disappointed by his own theories, he made a game to really get into contact with people. Tempted perhaps by his own love for dichotomies:

In order to understand life as a functional process, Balamer (2000) establishes that opposing boundaries are the best way to define universal functionality. Existence, for example, only has two, opposing states: life and death. As a human being, you can only exist within one of those states at a given time. While rudimentary, this example highlights how polarities are necessary in defining states and understanding characteristics at a given time.

he devised a game in which we continually have to choose between dichotomies, until, at the end, we are given an overview of all the dichotomous choices we’ve made – a picture of us, the unique individual. Or at least, that’s what he thought. But then, he tells us, after an update has been installed (I found it hilarious that the update bar progressed more and more slowly as it neared the end), he has found out that this is the wrong approach. You can’t catch people in dichotomies! And so in an almost touching way, Balamer gives us his final hard-won wisdom:

I’ve spent a lot of time wrestling with my worldview—my dreams, my doubts, my values. I thought if I kept going, life would fix itself. I was wrong. Life only fixes itself when we make an effort to fix it.

That’s it, folks. To fix things, you need to make an effort; don’t forget to listen to each other; and we can’t be contained by a list of binary truths. After all his failed approaches and supposed growth, Balamer’s understanding of life remains astoundingly, hilariously naive.

But Welcome to the Universe is not naive. It’s bold of Colton Olds to take us on so wild a journey, complete with a fictional narrator who has gone through two life-changing episodes that finally brought him to wisdom… and then show to us that the narrator remains as mired in banality as he always was. I won’t speculate whether this is all meant as an attack on sociology, or on the transformative power of games, or if there’s some other target in sight. It’s enough that it’s funny, and, in it’s own very very strange way, actually affecting. Dr. Balamer is one of the saddest characters to grace interactive fiction.