i had some mixed expectations going into this. on one hand it seemed not to my taste; i looked at the flashy geocities/angelfire era it was going for and was worried it would just feel like a kind of nostalgia pandering to me, seeming too over-the-top ironic with its cheesy autoplaying midis and brain-melting scrolls thru choppy 3d gifs. on the other hand i saw a great deal of sincerity and consideration in dropsy, a game jay tholen made before this, so i felt like i needed to look past my weird hangups towards its aesthetics, and a couple years later i felt like i could.
turns out i was way wrong and it easily surpassed the positive expectations i had from his previous game. not only does hypnospace greatly amplify the subtle worldbuilding and christian faith of dropsy, it sets that up with a more critical take on irony poisoning seeping thru the cracks as not representative of the whole, and this allows its own sincerity to shine through even more strongly. truly affectionate depictions of the most innocent cringe are interspersed with people's real flaws and sins put on full display: children's digital growing pains causing them to express themselves violently and angelically in ways we all recognize, old people's sweet prayers and sorrowful mourning are taken with their absolute inability to take in what the net throws at them with any nuance, creatives both humble and full of themselves do their best against the corporate sanitization that threatens their spaces. tholen and co's love for people and how they interact with the virtual world, combined with a frankly staggering attention to detail with those numerous interactions among many characters, is really something to behold. they made a character out of hot dad and gave him pathos.
there's a lot said about this game as replicating 90s internet and yearning for a time of more wild and unrepressed expression, before more entrenched social stigma and algorithms, but what drew me in to hypnospace was the feeling of how little things changed at their core. it understands that pining for "the good old days" can be blinding, and goes to great pains to make clear that it wasn't all that pure in many ways; what's mourned is that its problems were only superficially cleaned up rather than compassionately solved most of the time. the cliquey conflicts and cruel mockery and cynical capitalist machinations in the background in hypnospace just felt like blunter versions of whats still here, well after 2000. yet there's some resemblances of naivete and sincerity and love that still exist in the net too, no matter how small it must feel, and the game wants you to understand your own self and others in the here and now through those moments. try to forgive the faults of all of us as individuals on the web if you find it in you, including yourself, because it's y2k that let us down.
turns out i was way wrong and it easily surpassed the positive expectations i had from his previous game. not only does hypnospace greatly amplify the subtle worldbuilding and christian faith of dropsy, it sets that up with a more critical take on irony poisoning seeping thru the cracks as not representative of the whole, and this allows its own sincerity to shine through even more strongly. truly affectionate depictions of the most innocent cringe are interspersed with people's real flaws and sins put on full display: children's digital growing pains causing them to express themselves violently and angelically in ways we all recognize, old people's sweet prayers and sorrowful mourning are taken with their absolute inability to take in what the net throws at them with any nuance, creatives both humble and full of themselves do their best against the corporate sanitization that threatens their spaces. tholen and co's love for people and how they interact with the virtual world, combined with a frankly staggering attention to detail with those numerous interactions among many characters, is really something to behold. they made a character out of hot dad and gave him pathos.
there's a lot said about this game as replicating 90s internet and yearning for a time of more wild and unrepressed expression, before more entrenched social stigma and algorithms, but what drew me in to hypnospace was the feeling of how little things changed at their core. it understands that pining for "the good old days" can be blinding, and goes to great pains to make clear that it wasn't all that pure in many ways; what's mourned is that its problems were only superficially cleaned up rather than compassionately solved most of the time. the cliquey conflicts and cruel mockery and cynical capitalist machinations in the background in hypnospace just felt like blunter versions of whats still here, well after 2000. yet there's some resemblances of naivete and sincerity and love that still exist in the net too, no matter how small it must feel, and the game wants you to understand your own self and others in the here and now through those moments. try to forgive the faults of all of us as individuals on the web if you find it in you, including yourself, because it's y2k that let us down.
8 Comments
ty. i have been listening to that song non-stop since i finished lol
so happy you enjoyed it, I had such a similar experience with this game; what i anticipated as a fun looking but kind of eyerolly throwbacky simpsonswave m e m e s t h e t i c thing was actually such a moving paean to archivism and eroded intimacy with like, staggeringly well carved out specificity and personhood in each of its homepage vignettes. totally agree that the lack of rose-tinted goggles about pre-2.0 net is needed and strengthens the message, I really appreciate how it's not portrayed as some 100% beautifully free wild webst and all the same telltale signs of platform consolidation, inescapable advertisements, corporate mismanagement, and general human ugliness are on full display from the get go
^^exactly exactly, and that is p much the perfect description of why i hesitated with it before. looking at it now i shouldve had more faith in the devs, dropsy has this psychedelic grotesqueness to it that i was also uncertain of it being my thing, until i actually played it. the ugliness and grime is part of what made it beautiful at its heart to me, and its even more thoroughly accomplished here.
I think you put in words what I couldn't after playing the game. Despite being fictional and somewhat satirical, the tone of this game almost feels like a documentary to me in how well it captures all the facets of that time period. Of course, I didn't really live through that period being as young as I am and only saw glimpses of it after it was over. I think this game and your review manage to convey that sense of reconciliation with the past and its relationship with the problems of the present in regard to human communication and culture in general while still maintaining an eye for the issues that were still ever-present in the past, which are really the root and origin of today's issues stemming from capitalist profit-led goals conflicting with an unpreceded movement in culture and communication.
I had no idea about the christian spiritual motifs in the game or the developer and it's changing my perception of the game now, I'm really curious to read more about how it influenced the philosophy of the game.
Your last paragraph resonates with me a great deal. If there's one thing I do remember from the internet of my childhood, it's that I remember a sense of real optimism. While the 90s surely looked like the wild west of communication and cultural osmosis, and after the existential fear of imminent millennium-shifting of the y2k scare had subsided, there was a sense of absolute optimism in what the future could hold. With more polished 3D technology, CG getting into the swing of things, web encoding becoming a bit more standardized and the widest proliferation of internet access across the world, in addition to the outburst of the MMO genre, youtube, online libraries, and so forth, I remember a sense of "building for the future", when sentiments like that truly felt sincere instead of cynical. That anything could happen now that the tools and ideas of 90s tech had finally been just reaching "standardization" (for lack of a better word). It was almost in complete contrast to the state of the physical world post-9/11 which had the highest amount of global paranoia and militarism probably in history. Both cultural memetic sentiments are probably equivalent products of that mass communication boom, two sides of the proverbial coin, the paranoia of the enemy you never know and always fear is there, and the embracing of the friend you never met but can't go without now. If there were a spiritual sequel to a game like this, I would want it to explore some of those ideas personally.
Yet I can't forget that optimism that came with everything and how sometimes I feel I am sorely missing it now. The pandemic's made it worse, but everything now feels cynical. It's impossible to use social media without the everpresent knowledge that the platform has an ulterior financial and political motive, with big data and communication being spearheaded by corporate and lobbyist interests. Advertisers mimic the speech of users. Mass media and entertainment has also been a let-down compared to the dreams of that old optimism, both hollywood and AAA games have opted for fewer releases per year with higher budgets that require more returns, creating sanded-down visions and works that require an appeal to a more global audience across nations, resulting in an entertainment culture void, with fewer themes and less of social voice, at least in that mass cultural space, and I personally cannot disassociate that feeling of a "global culture homogeneity" with the character of today's CG visuals. That polished look of today's CG just brings me back to those feelings, compared to the feelings of optimism I get when I look at 2000's era CG, and feelings of freeform expression and experimental roughness I get when I look at the CG of the 90's.
But yet I know that really, it's not all that different now than it was back then. It's simply more controlled (for better and worse) and more transparent than it was back then, about who runs what and how and for what reasons. And really the main different is that transparency. I'm not saying I want to go back to how it was before, but it's almost like now that we know what we know (and all the post-snowden world entails), that optimism is just hard to find. BUT, I do want to end on the most positive note of all, I do really feel that sense of optimism on sites like this one. It's new, the community is tight, the ideas are flowing, and sometimes I get that early 2000's internet optimistic rush! But, it's not exactly the same, it's a bit more aged, more mature, more articulated, and I'm so glad it is. I love it here :)
I had no idea about the christian spiritual motifs in the game or the developer and it's changing my perception of the game now, I'm really curious to read more about how it influenced the philosophy of the game.
Your last paragraph resonates with me a great deal. If there's one thing I do remember from the internet of my childhood, it's that I remember a sense of real optimism. While the 90s surely looked like the wild west of communication and cultural osmosis, and after the existential fear of imminent millennium-shifting of the y2k scare had subsided, there was a sense of absolute optimism in what the future could hold. With more polished 3D technology, CG getting into the swing of things, web encoding becoming a bit more standardized and the widest proliferation of internet access across the world, in addition to the outburst of the MMO genre, youtube, online libraries, and so forth, I remember a sense of "building for the future", when sentiments like that truly felt sincere instead of cynical. That anything could happen now that the tools and ideas of 90s tech had finally been just reaching "standardization" (for lack of a better word). It was almost in complete contrast to the state of the physical world post-9/11 which had the highest amount of global paranoia and militarism probably in history. Both cultural memetic sentiments are probably equivalent products of that mass communication boom, two sides of the proverbial coin, the paranoia of the enemy you never know and always fear is there, and the embracing of the friend you never met but can't go without now. If there were a spiritual sequel to a game like this, I would want it to explore some of those ideas personally.
Yet I can't forget that optimism that came with everything and how sometimes I feel I am sorely missing it now. The pandemic's made it worse, but everything now feels cynical. It's impossible to use social media without the everpresent knowledge that the platform has an ulterior financial and political motive, with big data and communication being spearheaded by corporate and lobbyist interests. Advertisers mimic the speech of users. Mass media and entertainment has also been a let-down compared to the dreams of that old optimism, both hollywood and AAA games have opted for fewer releases per year with higher budgets that require more returns, creating sanded-down visions and works that require an appeal to a more global audience across nations, resulting in an entertainment culture void, with fewer themes and less of social voice, at least in that mass cultural space, and I personally cannot disassociate that feeling of a "global culture homogeneity" with the character of today's CG visuals. That polished look of today's CG just brings me back to those feelings, compared to the feelings of optimism I get when I look at 2000's era CG, and feelings of freeform expression and experimental roughness I get when I look at the CG of the 90's.
But yet I know that really, it's not all that different now than it was back then. It's simply more controlled (for better and worse) and more transparent than it was back then, about who runs what and how and for what reasons. And really the main different is that transparency. I'm not saying I want to go back to how it was before, but it's almost like now that we know what we know (and all the post-snowden world entails), that optimism is just hard to find. BUT, I do want to end on the most positive note of all, I do really feel that sense of optimism on sites like this one. It's new, the community is tight, the ideas are flowing, and sometimes I get that early 2000's internet optimistic rush! But, it's not exactly the same, it's a bit more aged, more mature, more articulated, and I'm so glad it is. I love it here :)
sorry for the disorganized long rant but your review really had my brain fired up
no its really good to read!!! thank you seriously!!! i also feel like i missed the boat w internet at the turn of the millennium and also struggle with the back and forth of "it mustve been better back then" and "was it really?". like i know its the latter but you sometimes feel like you missed something very special.
and im realizing from what you said that i kinda feel similarly abt a site like this as you do too. the place has a LOT of problems but its often easier to fixate on them detachedly and get all ironic about it (i do that and i don't necessarily think i'm gonna stop anytime soon) than to admit to myself that im ultimately v happy for somewhere to share my thoughts n hear alot of good ones from others, in a way that lets me put the worry about getting seen as snobby or autistic or whatever to rest a little!! that optimistic feeling has to be tempered with some self-awareness at this point in history yeah, but rarely to the point that it overwhelms how much i appreciate a space to write about art i care about n think about most :') its really nice
also yeah the christian aspects of these games is fascinating and sweet. think i read an interview where tholen said mr rogers was an inspiration and that most clearly shows in dropsy with the protag as an example of an ideal christian, but even hypnospace shares a humanism and a capacity for wanting to see good in everyone. both are also critical of hellfire and brimstone type shit as diluting the message of god's love; its common in hypnospace, and its easy to see it as purely satirical on how that violent fearfulness and conspiracies bleed into each other on the web. but its also placed in conflict with more positive and deeply felt depictions of faith that, in hypnospace's more tragic take on it, threaten to be undone and subsumed by the former as what christianity is to people. always thinking about that one squisherz girl as one of the best examples of this. fuck i love this game
and im realizing from what you said that i kinda feel similarly abt a site like this as you do too. the place has a LOT of problems but its often easier to fixate on them detachedly and get all ironic about it (i do that and i don't necessarily think i'm gonna stop anytime soon) than to admit to myself that im ultimately v happy for somewhere to share my thoughts n hear alot of good ones from others, in a way that lets me put the worry about getting seen as snobby or autistic or whatever to rest a little!! that optimistic feeling has to be tempered with some self-awareness at this point in history yeah, but rarely to the point that it overwhelms how much i appreciate a space to write about art i care about n think about most :') its really nice
also yeah the christian aspects of these games is fascinating and sweet. think i read an interview where tholen said mr rogers was an inspiration and that most clearly shows in dropsy with the protag as an example of an ideal christian, but even hypnospace shares a humanism and a capacity for wanting to see good in everyone. both are also critical of hellfire and brimstone type shit as diluting the message of god's love; its common in hypnospace, and its easy to see it as purely satirical on how that violent fearfulness and conspiracies bleed into each other on the web. but its also placed in conflict with more positive and deeply felt depictions of faith that, in hypnospace's more tragic take on it, threaten to be undone and subsumed by the former as what christianity is to people. always thinking about that one squisherz girl as one of the best examples of this. fuck i love this game
I read this review while listening to KillSwitch Engage's track "My Curse" on repeat for 20 minutes as I read through this. I think I've invented a new mental condition. This review is tremendous.
Believe in the net!
Believe in the net!
dwardman
3 years ago