1. This era of the internet missed me by about 5-8 years, yet it still evokes an uncanny sense of... not nostalgia... just... memory? My era of the internet, was, to an extent still haunted by the echoes of 90s internet. Anything that in the 00s delved into the recent past, would inevitably bring up the aesthetics and mechanics of that early popularization of the medium. So I guess it was a memory then, and now it's a memory of a memory.
I dunno, I coincidentally played this at the same time as I started listening to That One Homestuck podcast, which is another dive into a similar yet different internet that I've ever only been tangentially and indirectly aware of, and I just have a lot of unstructured thoughts about the ghosts of past internets that hang over our current experience of the web. Mostly the feeling that, for all their faults, these past internets seemed, at least to an extent, to promote and enable community and human-ness, rather than merely exploit it, as the current late-social-media era internet does.
I miss blogs and I miss forums. They were 75% terrible, but honestly, I'll take toxic forum culture every day over the relentless and pervasive clout chasing of social media. Past internet was filled with assholes, cause people are assholes sometimes, and it sucked, but at least it was honest. There's nothing honest about any of the culture of late-era influencer-driven social media. It's an uncanny perversion of social mechanics, that just spins its wheels forever, tiring us out, and draining any meaning from the words we write. It commodifies aesthetics and rhetorics rather than exalting them. It slowly kills our sense of belonging as it tries to convince us that just one more like will make us happy.
There's this one page, that appears around December in the game, featuring this song about how "Zones" (the in-game communities) are "places for people to feel the same" and "places for people to feel different". I like that song. I wish I could still think of the internet in that way.
2. So, like, the idea of, basically a wiki-hole game is great. And like, props to everyone involved in the development cause the logistics of actually making something like this sound like a huge pain.
This is fun. For the most part, I love the mechanics. They're cleverly designed to tap into the innate pleasure of "internet research", making the player feel like they're cleverly digging through data and making mental connections, while at the same time guiding them through the content. It's so cool!
I wish this game... dwelled more on itself though. A key part of the experience of the old web, was logging in every day, looking at all your favourite websites to check if there was any new update, or if someone had replied to that one thread you liked on that discussion board. It was truly a "place", in many ways.
Hypnospace Outlaw, while it does feature some mild time-skipping mechanics, never quite manages to fully convey that, almost Animal Crossing-like, feeling of Being in a place that moves at its own, asynchronous, pace. You're always hunting for the next clue, solving the next puzzle, in an environment that's mostly static. It's very much a snapshot.
On the other hand, I understand that to make a game that actually focuses on that feeling of Place, would require a ridiculous amount of content. So like, I get why it doesn't. It's an imperfection in the retelling of those experiences, but a necessary one. In a way, it gives it its own, vaguely ahistorical, but inherently fascinating vibe.
Game's still great. I had fun with it. The first game in a long time where I actually wished it was a bit longer.
I dunno, I coincidentally played this at the same time as I started listening to That One Homestuck podcast, which is another dive into a similar yet different internet that I've ever only been tangentially and indirectly aware of, and I just have a lot of unstructured thoughts about the ghosts of past internets that hang over our current experience of the web. Mostly the feeling that, for all their faults, these past internets seemed, at least to an extent, to promote and enable community and human-ness, rather than merely exploit it, as the current late-social-media era internet does.
I miss blogs and I miss forums. They were 75% terrible, but honestly, I'll take toxic forum culture every day over the relentless and pervasive clout chasing of social media. Past internet was filled with assholes, cause people are assholes sometimes, and it sucked, but at least it was honest. There's nothing honest about any of the culture of late-era influencer-driven social media. It's an uncanny perversion of social mechanics, that just spins its wheels forever, tiring us out, and draining any meaning from the words we write. It commodifies aesthetics and rhetorics rather than exalting them. It slowly kills our sense of belonging as it tries to convince us that just one more like will make us happy.
There's this one page, that appears around December in the game, featuring this song about how "Zones" (the in-game communities) are "places for people to feel the same" and "places for people to feel different". I like that song. I wish I could still think of the internet in that way.
2. So, like, the idea of, basically a wiki-hole game is great. And like, props to everyone involved in the development cause the logistics of actually making something like this sound like a huge pain.
This is fun. For the most part, I love the mechanics. They're cleverly designed to tap into the innate pleasure of "internet research", making the player feel like they're cleverly digging through data and making mental connections, while at the same time guiding them through the content. It's so cool!
I wish this game... dwelled more on itself though. A key part of the experience of the old web, was logging in every day, looking at all your favourite websites to check if there was any new update, or if someone had replied to that one thread you liked on that discussion board. It was truly a "place", in many ways.
Hypnospace Outlaw, while it does feature some mild time-skipping mechanics, never quite manages to fully convey that, almost Animal Crossing-like, feeling of Being in a place that moves at its own, asynchronous, pace. You're always hunting for the next clue, solving the next puzzle, in an environment that's mostly static. It's very much a snapshot.
On the other hand, I understand that to make a game that actually focuses on that feeling of Place, would require a ridiculous amount of content. So like, I get why it doesn't. It's an imperfection in the retelling of those experiences, but a necessary one. In a way, it gives it its own, vaguely ahistorical, but inherently fascinating vibe.
Game's still great. I had fun with it. The first game in a long time where I actually wished it was a bit longer.