(Note: I am just putting a general content warning here as I feel that is the right thing to do.)
Everything this game tries to tell you is all wrong.
And yes, it is a game. When I was really young, I had a passion to try and make an adventure game and I used this really awful little program called TADS to make a demo for something called Gates to Purgatory. I only coded a starting area, some basic puzzles and interactions, and an "ending." After that I never touched it again. You can still view the TIGsource thread for it and even play it. (Don't play it.) It's nothing but a bunch of nonsense text, but I still consider it a work of art; a work of creativity. We can argue at length about the intrinsic qualities of art, what constitutes art, what constitutes specific types of art. Entire schools of philosophy discussing these intangibles but in the end its easiest to default to broad interpretations.
Maybe there is no real art to either my game or Notch's, but there is "passion"; in Drowning in Problems there is a passion to appear extremely profound, a passion to sound smarter than everyone else, a passion to express how much of a tortured soul you are. Notch released this in 2014, the same year he jumped ship from Mojang and the creation that had made him a literal millionaire. The game's thesis boiled down to the absolute futility of life and death- baby's first rumination on nihilism. Nothing matters, what's the point?
I went through this exact same conversation with myself well into my mid-20s, dealing with the worst depression of my life. Two inpatient stays, many medical leaves, some broken hearts (I guess it would be 3 on Drowning's meter). I don't look back at this as a deficiency, but I learned from it and grew from it. Notch was 35 years old and rich as hell, and two years later he decided to double down on his prejudices towards the others he felt had somehow wronged him. Going into social media tirades and projecting his own extreme self-hatred on people much more at risk than he is. Notch can pay for therapy. The entire groups of people he chose to antagonize and target, a lot of them cannot. He never learned or grew from Drowning in Problems, he just channeled it into cruelty. This is one of the major problems with adults who choose to be defeatist and nihilist; when all that discontent and dissatisfaction gets funneled through the pipeline of hatred.
You get +Body at the start of this game... there are people who are born into this world without a fully functioning body, or mind. People who can never walk, talk, see. What does Notch propose here? That they have even less in their inventory were we to gamify their existences? There are people born with nothing. Born without any of the comforts or conveniences that you and I share, who still choose to greet each day with courage and strength. People in Gaza are drowning in more than just self-pity and yet they continue to resist in the face of overwhelming death and despair. If nothing matters, what's the point of them doing what they are doing?
Life is worth much, much more than Notch implies it to be. You do not need to be told that what you do doesn't matter. Your actions will affect people no matter what. This tantrum of his could come from the most sincere place of extreme depression and that would not change anything about how fundamentally wrong it is. When I was depressed, I didn't go around telling other people they didn't matter. I felt that about myself, but it was all a product of extreme self-hatred. I knew even then how irresponsible it was to extrapolate my own psychosis and apply it uncritically to everyone else. With the benefit of hindsight, it just feels like Notch is trying to absolve himself of the consequences of having to exist in a world that is always going to be "political" in the way he didn't want it to be.
Just like Notch himself, Drowning in Problems is trash, and as such, belongs to the dustbin of history.
Everything this game tries to tell you is all wrong.
And yes, it is a game. When I was really young, I had a passion to try and make an adventure game and I used this really awful little program called TADS to make a demo for something called Gates to Purgatory. I only coded a starting area, some basic puzzles and interactions, and an "ending." After that I never touched it again. You can still view the TIGsource thread for it and even play it. (Don't play it.) It's nothing but a bunch of nonsense text, but I still consider it a work of art; a work of creativity. We can argue at length about the intrinsic qualities of art, what constitutes art, what constitutes specific types of art. Entire schools of philosophy discussing these intangibles but in the end its easiest to default to broad interpretations.
Maybe there is no real art to either my game or Notch's, but there is "passion"; in Drowning in Problems there is a passion to appear extremely profound, a passion to sound smarter than everyone else, a passion to express how much of a tortured soul you are. Notch released this in 2014, the same year he jumped ship from Mojang and the creation that had made him a literal millionaire. The game's thesis boiled down to the absolute futility of life and death- baby's first rumination on nihilism. Nothing matters, what's the point?
I went through this exact same conversation with myself well into my mid-20s, dealing with the worst depression of my life. Two inpatient stays, many medical leaves, some broken hearts (I guess it would be 3 on Drowning's meter). I don't look back at this as a deficiency, but I learned from it and grew from it. Notch was 35 years old and rich as hell, and two years later he decided to double down on his prejudices towards the others he felt had somehow wronged him. Going into social media tirades and projecting his own extreme self-hatred on people much more at risk than he is. Notch can pay for therapy. The entire groups of people he chose to antagonize and target, a lot of them cannot. He never learned or grew from Drowning in Problems, he just channeled it into cruelty. This is one of the major problems with adults who choose to be defeatist and nihilist; when all that discontent and dissatisfaction gets funneled through the pipeline of hatred.
You get +Body at the start of this game... there are people who are born into this world without a fully functioning body, or mind. People who can never walk, talk, see. What does Notch propose here? That they have even less in their inventory were we to gamify their existences? There are people born with nothing. Born without any of the comforts or conveniences that you and I share, who still choose to greet each day with courage and strength. People in Gaza are drowning in more than just self-pity and yet they continue to resist in the face of overwhelming death and despair. If nothing matters, what's the point of them doing what they are doing?
Life is worth much, much more than Notch implies it to be. You do not need to be told that what you do doesn't matter. Your actions will affect people no matter what. This tantrum of his could come from the most sincere place of extreme depression and that would not change anything about how fundamentally wrong it is. When I was depressed, I didn't go around telling other people they didn't matter. I felt that about myself, but it was all a product of extreme self-hatred. I knew even then how irresponsible it was to extrapolate my own psychosis and apply it uncritically to everyone else. With the benefit of hindsight, it just feels like Notch is trying to absolve himself of the consequences of having to exist in a world that is always going to be "political" in the way he didn't want it to be.
Just like Notch himself, Drowning in Problems is trash, and as such, belongs to the dustbin of history.
moschidae
2 months ago
Anyways this review is lovely. Sounds like a disgusting game but you put your heart into this anyways. And youre right, theres nothing worse than a (depressed) nihilistic adult pushing their self pity and hatred onto everything else. Your speech here is probably the most impactful thing to come out of this game, lol