OF DIZZYING HEIGHTS: only up, twitch, gambling, and the pipe-dream of capitalism

Dilapidated favelas, densely packed. Concrete and rebar, vandalism and trash piled up, compacted. The latest Twitch phenomenon, Only Up, starts us here — the “humble beginnings” of our protagonist, a nameless boy.

Only Up descends from a lineage of rage games: experiences engineered for frustration, games which forsake traditional progression, or punishment & reward systems, offering instead an inherently infuriating gaming experience, often sending the player to the absolute beginning with even minor mistakes. Jump King, Getting Over It, all being huge hits in the landscape of gaming content. The appeal of these games is elusive; one would expect such an unfair and absurd experience would be far from ‘fun’ — other games which often frustrate, like from Fromsoft or of the roguelite genre include a system of progression or metaprogression, which allows the player to beef up their stats or abilities, before attempting the intimidating task before them. The games termed ‘true / real’ roguelikes lack metaprogression, but are still dedicated to a fair and rewarding experience. They reward knowledge, adaptation, reaction.

Yet these rage games more or less are designed for unfairness. They feature jank controls, unclear rules, and rapidly changing level design. It is impossible to predict or even react, especially if one is approaching the game blindly. Every player is going to fall at some point. The games taunt you with a seemingly intuitive ruleset and design philosophy, but the only static is surprise. Even so, these games garner millions of eager viewers, and many eager players.

Essayist Patricia Taxxon makes a vital observation of rage games: The thing to understand about Getting Over It is that it was at least partly made with an intent to be observed second-hand.

Perhaps the most surprising phenomena to many, at its inception, was the popularity of lets-plays. Many confused parents have asked their children the question: ‘Why aren’t you playing the game? Why are you just watching someone else play it?’ It’s a very Baudrillardian experience, watching someone else have an experience, as an experience. But, it’s also a very human experience, to live through the experiences of others, for both the experiencer and the observer. If one doesn’t share their experiences, have they really happened? Living vicariously is perhaps the most important human desire in regards to social media and our content landscape — in some ways, in our overwhelming and complex world where no one really has agency, the experiences of others are much more tangible and immediate than our own.

Baudrillard discusses the concept of “transcendence” in relation to the modern experience: a meta-referentiality that “dominates the trajectory of modern art, not only of art but also of all our deeper perceptions, of all our apprehensions of the world.” This transcendence is, inherently, denial, a denial of evidence: by stating something is irreal, and it becomes palpable to us, bearable. “The world has become so real that this reality is only bearable at the expense of perpetual denial.” His example being Magritte — Ceci n'est pas une pipe — without the “transcendence”, commenting and denying itself, the not-pipe doesn’t become a pipe, it just disappears — the pipe lives, reflected, in the commentary on the pipe.

Magritte’s surrealist denial of evidence itself – this double movement of, on one hand, the absolute and definite evidence of the world and, on the other hand, the radical denial of this evidence – dominates the trajectory of modern art, not only of art but also of all our deeper perceptions, of all our apprehensions of the world. We are not talking here about philosophical morals, we are not saying “the world is not what it should be” or “the world is not what it used to be.” The world is the way it is. Once transcendence is gone, things are nothing but what they are and, as they are, they are unbearable. They have lost every illusion and have become immediately and entirely real, shadowless, without commentary. At the same time this unsurpassable reality does not exist anymore. It has no reason to exist for it cannot be exchanged for anything. It has no exchange value.

In his book, The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact, Baudrillard proposes what he terms Integral Reality, a state of hyperreality where everything becomes Real. He specifically notes that in this hypothetical state that everything would have a meaning, “whereas it is in the nature of meaning that not everything has it.”

Now, this state isn’t something that comes naturally, it’s specifically only achievable through a process, a task, the “undertaking of realizing the world, of making it technically, integrally, real” — giving everything a meaning, giving everything a metaphor, transitioning from reality (0) to reality (prime).

What we see now, behind the eclipse of the 'objective' real, is the rise of Integral Reality, of a Virtual Reality that rests on the deregulation of the very reality principle.

In T. Fleishmann’s essay “House with Door,” they comment on the tendency to experience words as metaphor rather than literal meaning, as exemplified by a statement a child makes to them: “I live in a house with a door!” Fleishmann points out how their first instinct, and all of our first instincts to this puzzling sentence, is to assign metaphorical meaning to this statement — Fleischmann illuminates the mundanity of metaphor, and how we seek out things that make us feel real and not a metaphor —“I shouldn’t have to think about [being not a metaphor], but thinking of the absence of a thing is still thinking about it.”

Right now, as I am writing this post, as the popularity of Only Up is growing with great ardor, the most vital recent news story in regards to gaming content is the competitor streaming platform to Twitch, Kick, and it’s tremendous bids, hundreds of millions dollar deals with many of the most popular streamers.

Kick has garnered considerable controversy for its finances, being linked to gambling money. Gambling itself has been, for years, a key puzzle piece in the modern content machine — from gambling on phase 4 doppler talon knives from CSGO to straight up gambling as done by streamers such as xQc — it’s a subsect of gaming / content culture that’s perceived as a bit embarrassing, yet is hugely important to how things are.

The appeal of gambling content is surprisingly similar to the appeal of rage games — it pits the inevitability of losing or falling with the possibility of success. The observer, the watcher knows that the gambler or streamer will lose, but they continue watching, just as the streamer continues, repeatedly, until the slim likelihood of a run with little mistakes or a gambling win happens. Which is in turn, similar to the appeal of the growth of high stakes personal investing such as that of Reddit board “WallStreetBets” — a communal experience where every individual has a low chance of winning, but the serotonin of seeing someone winning significantly, or even losing significantly, keeps people hooked. These intensely frustrating, high risk activities are long in a line of escalating stakes Content — in our mundane, boring world with little agency, watching someone win or lose it all feels Real, in a way many things don’t.

This economy of stakes is driven by another quality, of gambling, rage games, and investing — namely that it looks easy. Rage games have deceptively simple control schemes: For Getting Over It, the hammer mouse control looks easy and intuitive, but is quite unforgiving. For Jump King, the jump itself requires precision of timing, that seems simple but is again unforgiving, requiring trial and error. And Only Up perhaps has the worst control quirks of all of them — entirely predicated on a jank mantling system which is seemingly random and unpredictable.

For gambling and investing, the prospective player sees many losses and a few wins, and asks themselves “what if I won?” — the prospect and possibility of winning being infinitely more appealing than the cost & risk evaluation going in one’s mind. Similar to players of rage games thinking to themselves after observing other players, “what if I could easily beat the game?”

Even the losses provide an experience of reality, of real stakes and real experiences.

Only Up, specifically, is deeply ironic, in its connections to investing — the title itself is a reversal of the crypto / investing phrase “Up Only”. As has been pointed out many times, Only Up features many spray painted images of NFTs, including on the back of our very protagonist.

Only Up features a faux-realistic aesthetic, with tech demo-esque sunbeams and lighting, rolling off vaguely impressive-looking rusty structures straight out of a game engine’s asset marketplace. An AI voice calls over the favelas of the earth, rattling off platitudes and faux-profound statements about life, and childhood. The objective of the game is to scale to the top of a sprawling floating debris field, impossibly tall, reaching to the heavens, hanging above the favelas — when the player starts their journey, and start climbing, they come across countless floating vignettes, of train stations, factories, homes, schools; the boy’s ascent clearly representing a synecdoche of life.

From the protagonist’s beginnings in the visually impoverished favelas, he climbs rusty pipes and old railways — when he ascends, the vignettes become less dilapidated, more metropolitan, more modern.

At some point, luxury becomes the norm. The protagonist platforms over floating piles of money, personal helicopters — he weaves through highrise offices and through gold-lined hotel rooms.

And after this point, the images become increasingly stranger, more thrown together and abstract. There’s a giant anime girl with platforms built of innuendo around her. There’s a pirate ship. And on and on.

Something I have to address though — the soundtrack is scattershot, appearing at random, sometimes with the AI voice. The track selection seems to rotate between a few emotional tracks, but all of which have been lifted from other works — for example, there are tracks lifted from the anime Aria; one of the most used tracks in the game being Senoo’s “Shourou no Patori~Neo Venezia~” [鐘楼のパトリ〜ネオ ヴェネチア〜].

I just gotta point out the irony of this blatant IP stealing. I just have to. It’s so comically bad. Many other tracks are stolen but I fr just do not have the patience to watch this game again, im gonna be honest.

Only Up’s faux-profundities and it’s idealistic ruminations just seem to expose the fraudulence of its ideas. The dream of capitalism, of course, is vertical mobility. Starting from the bottom and ending at the top (insert drake voice: started from the bottom now we here). That’s the ideal at least. But the game is purposefully built to be unfair. It has inconsistent platforms. Some of which aren’t solid, for no reason. Some of them fall. It throws curveballs, even more unfair than the rest of the rage games. It’s deeply ironic, in regards to its idealization of this boy’s journey. It’s almost a sadistic relationship between the designer and player.

In Ayn Rand’s novel Fountainhead, the protagonist, Howard Roark is tried at court. The crime, you may ask? Blowing up an in-progress construction of a building he designed. The company constructing it however, went against his original specifications, and he decided that his individual idealism, weighed against everything else, prevails. In classic Randian fashion, Roark makes a speech about individuality and how Man will Prevail against The Things Trying to Crush Him. The courtroom claps and he wins the case.

Roark, represents a stubbornness and arrogance, exemplified by the action he takes: tearing the building down. It’s a fundamental disrespect for the construction workers who were working on it — a selfish act, for one's own vanity. Glory in destruction, in tearing down others for one’s personal gains. And likewise, Only Up tears down the players, leering with fake-profound dialogue. It is never fair, it is all spectacle. It is a journey in the way “venture” in venture capital is a journey. Only Up is the dream of capitalism, on full display, in all its unbecoming, illegitimate, unfair, and straight up criminal glory. But we can’t look away.