hellsinker: hello! welcome to hellsinker. would you like to learn how to play?

me: sure!

hellsinker: alright, so first things first, this is a bullet hell shoot'em'up with three unique playable characters: DEADLIAR, FOSSIL MAIDEN, and MINOGAME, plus one unlockable character. hellsinker has a unique emphasis on strategy and problem solving with a special scoring system and different routes.

me: cool!

hellsinker: you have a weapon, which can charge, a subweapon, and a special move. there's also a slowdown button. you can combine and time these to do different special attacks. when youre holding down fire you'll also have a SUPPRESSION RADIUS around you where some enemy bullets slow down and you can even delete some! if you get close to an enemy, you can SEAL them, which stops them from firing.

me: got it!

hellsinker: on the left side of the screen, you're gonna see a bunch of HUD info. let's break it down. first, you can see how many lives you have left. you can also earn more lives. pretty self explanatory

me: right. so if i lose them all it's game over?

hellsinker: yeah. well no, you'll get a chance to continue. but it's not like a normal continue, you only get one and it changes the game significantly, and you can lock yourself out of a continue. anyway let's get back to the bars. next from the top is SOL. SOL determines the strength of your main shot but is also your DISCHARGE gauge, so you have to balance that. LUNA just below it determines how fast you fire.

me: alright

hellsinker: okay so next up is STELLA. the more STELLA you have, the more bullets enemies will fire. your score will also scale with STELLA. you can increase and decrease STELLA with item pickups, or by aggressive/defensive play respectively, that kind of stuff. you can acquire APPEASEMENT that will help you decrease your STELLA if you graze the requisite number thus spawning two OLD RELICS

me: hm

hellsinker: finally, TERRA starts at 240. you lose TERRA if you die, but also if you avoid LIFE CHIPS and stuff like that. oh, also, it goes down if you finish a level. if it hits zero, as the next segment, you'll be sent to the Shrine of Farewell

me: what

hellsinker: on the other side of the screen, we have at the top your autobomb status, which can be set to ASPIRANT, SOLIDSTATE, or ADEPT. as a reminder, your DISCHARGE and Subweapon will behave differently based on whether you're holding the fire button down, the state of your gauges, etc. after that, you have the Spirit score, one of the three separate scoring systems in hellsinker. it's represented by three bars which represent the base 10 decimal digit values of your Spirit score. you can get a BREAKTHROUGH at 5200 Spirit, unless youve triggered the other BREAKTHROUGH in Kills, in which case it takes 6200.

me: wait

hellsinker: there's also a Kill score, which can also trigger a BREAKTHROUGH at 2500 or 5000 kills. BREAKTHROUGH will reset the threshold of LIFE CHIPS necessary to earn an IMMORTALITY EXTEND (80+40n pts) and sets said bonus to 200. Below that is Token score, which is like the other two but has no BREAK, and is earned by collecting LUNA DROPLETS (which have inverted gravity mind you), which also slightly increases your LUNA, and DROPLETS increase in value arithmetically.

me: uh

hellsinker: okay, so remember TERRA? so the Shrine of Farewell is a bonus stage boss rush but you get infinite lives. STELLA is constantly rising. there are four bosses, and one extra. your Spirit score drops to zero though. oh, also, BOOTLEG GHOST doesnt work while you're here.

me: bootleg ghost????

hellsinker: because your Spirit score is reset (m=0) you're probably worried about your score, but don't worry, you get the chance to earn your Spirit back in the Shrine of Farewell by collecting Crystals. after this, TERRA is disabled for the rest of the run, so make sure to maximize your spirit-to-crystal ratio if you're chasing a Spirit based high-score route, but its also useful if you're going for survival. hard limit of segment 7

me: wait but

hellsinker: as i’m sure you inferred by now, along with executive fire, the primary engagement of HELLSINKER regardless of which GRAVEYARD EXECUTOR you’ve selected (and agnostic of MISTELTOE configuration) is one of: α) management of SOL (DISCHARGE when necessary), LUNA, and SUBWEAPON gauges by destruction, collection, and timing β) safely managing proximity between mutable projectiles while evading needletype and other immutables γ) proximity protocol beta applied to adversaries to reduce production of danger δ) judiciously balancing STELLA with RELICS and transubstantiation of mutables into STELLA, in order to synthesize needs for evasion and for Spirit/Kills ε) maximizing destruction (Kills), Spirit, and Token ζ) achieving IMMORTALITY EXTENDS through BREAKTHROUGH (5.2k(+1k)m || 2.5k(⋅2)d) and LIFE CHIP acquisition η) again, doing all this while evading and using the proper attack protocols contingent on your EXECUTOR and/or MISTELTOE θ) managing TERRA reducing actions in order to deploy the visit to the Shrine of Farewell strategically, such as to maximize Spirit (m) prior: 1 Crystal (i) = 0.5% m1, upper bound of n = 424i (disambiguation: non-summated) ergo maximal execution miΣ(n424) = 2.12 * pre-Shrine.

me:

hellsinker: alright! that just about covers the basics. ready to start playing?

me: i'm still working on the left side of the screen

fuck, croc, i was rooting for you. i really was. you deserved better.

the story goes that croc was originally pitched by argonaut games to nintendo as a yoshi game, as what would be the first ever 3D platformer: Yoshi Racing. miyamoto was apparently enthusiastic about the idea, but nintendo turned them down. argonaut had previously had a very close working relationship with nintendo. they helped make many of their first 3D games on the snes, including the original star fox. but things started to seem iffy when nintendo decided not to release star fox 2, which was already completed. when nintendo turned down argonaut on their yoshi project, argonaut forged forward with the idea and ended up making croc. and nintendo? well, whether or not they took the idea directly or not, they made super mario 64, a game with a similar premise and with a legacy that continues to endure, while croc has faded into obscurity and argonaut fizzled out in the 2000s. jez san, the founder of argonaut, said miyamoto himself apologized to him for how nintendo handled the situation, and that at least croc was doing well for them. but jez san felt that the bridge had already been burned a long time ago.

this firmly solidifies croc as an underdog, a scrappy and ambitious game who had its thunder stolen by one of the biggest gaming companies of all time. we all love an underdog story, i'm sure. but underdogs aren't always good at their job. and croc, frankly, isn't.

it's all so rote as to be asinine to describe: croc consists of running and jumping between FOUR COLORFUL WORLDS and collecting FLOATING ICOSAHEDRONS and saving these little fuzzy critters called "gobbos", which i can't take seriously at all, partially because its a silly name, but mostly because i once stumbled into some erotica about lesbians turning into goblins that was very intensely into body odor fetish and she referred to herself as a "gobbo" and that's all i can think about when i hear it now. the levels are trivially short if you don't go for the collectibles, which at least can make completing this game less painful. but i don't even like 3D platformers that much to begin with, and this game is maligned even among those fans.

i'm sure there a bunch of reviews on youtube or whatever that go into the particular design failures of croc. i don't really want to get into it too deep. but a note on tank controls: i think tank controls are fine. i like them. they do need to exist in a context, though. croc is a 3D platformer, which usually shouldn't have that, but i do genuinely think you could have a decent 3D platformer with tank controls. but this isn't it. controlling croc doesnt feel great, but it could be a lot worse, it's better than bubsy 3d. honestly the bigger issue is his tailwhip attack, where he yells "kersplat!!" or "kaboof!!" or "kapow!!" and pretty much never hits any enemy and dies because the hit detection in this game is terrible. for me the problem of game feel is exacerbated by everything else. it has this classic 3d platformer design, the same kind that underwhelmed me in spyro and crash, and in fact the extension of design in the mascot platformers of the previous era, a game of just "Stuff in Places". its far from the worst example of that design, collectibles are usually framed within some particular challenge or puzzle, but it’s just not enough. everything is forgettable. it instills this sense of meaninglessness to these objects and it doesn't help that along with that, moving croc around never feels great.

i know people have nostalgia for these kinds of games, but there is a very good reason mascot platformers have died out. they were always banking on the likability of their funny animals, but there's only one mickey mouse. there are some great ones, sure. but do you like mr nutz, kao the kangaroo, donk the samurai duck? probably not, and if you do, you probably stan gex ironically. because when you're banking on the character, you're not really spending much time on everything else. i dont know what most of these enemies are supposed to be, the levels mostly look the same, couldn't hum you any of these songs. but that doesn't matter. just look at the funny animal, go through 8 levels in green grass forest place collecting MAGIC GEMERALDS and then 8 levels in the sewer and then 8 levels in ice world and then the end of the game. these games lack so much personality even though that's the exact thing they're trying to cash in on. croc, my friend, i'm trying to give you a chance, i'm listening to you when you say "kersplat!!", i want you to be the clumsy yet triumphant underdog, but theres so little to care about, i dont care about the secret jewels, and every single time i save one of these little gobbos all i can think about is that goblin lesbian porn i read. how did i even find it? i can't even remember, but it was about a virus that turns people into very stinky goblins and orcs. ive got no problem with the green lesbians, i respect and cherish them. but i have so many questions. why "gobbo"? is that seriously sexy? why was it so clearly a reference to covid-19? with quarantine measures and such? how would a virus even change your bone structure? maybe it can, im not a doctor. and why did it then frame the virus as something that would project into social standing? it constantly highlights prejudices and judgements cast on those who become smelly goblins. are there unanswered issues with racial politics within its fantasy? why was it also very deliberately using an epistolary style, as if on reddit? are cockney accents for goblins supposed to be sexy? why was the stinkiness so important? are goblins and orcs particularly stinky? they were always talking about the smell, i'm not even sure what smell i was supposed to imagine. i know that's a fetish but like why? is reading about the odor enough to illicit a response? i'm not even really disgusted by it i am just trying to process it. there are so many weird twists and turns with the interiority of the characters that we see, how they respond. stinky gobby girl and her big giant smelly orc gf. im happy for them but also what. is it supposed to be a metaphor for something specific? queerness, transness, disease, disability, racism, classism, something else entirely? who is all this even for? is it for me? did i like it? i don't THINK i liked it, but i definitely found it somehow, and i definitely read it to the end, and i definitely am still thinking about right now when i'm trying to play croc: legend of the gobbos and i’m definitely considering reading it again

“They’re just lines of code.” That’s what my friend tells me. I wasn’t allowed to play Halo. It was too violent, and my parents, either in spite of or because of their relative progressiveness, did not want to allow or encourage me in playing violent video games. I remember googling about Red vs. Blue and my dad informed me that I “shouldn’t be looking at that.” I was a kid, after all, not even in my teens at the time. It’s not like I wasn’t able to get my hands on violent games; my crusade to play violent games, though, is a story for another time. The point is that our house never had Halo in it. And when, on that rare occasion, I did get to play Halo at a friend’s house, I was very careful not to tell my parents. So, in my mid-teens, I was at my friend’s house, in their thoroughly air-conditioned basement, with the lights off, and we played some Halo. I’m sitting close to the screen in an awkward chair. I’m awful at this game; I only know how to play these games on a mouse and keyboard. I see a grunt, fleeing with its arms in the air, and say, “Poor guy.” That’s when my friend chuckles and says, “They’re just lines of code.”

Interactive Buddy was a mainstay for any kid looking for ways to goof off in computer labs. This is what you see: four gray walls, a gray background, and a chubby little figure made six gray balls. That’s the buddy. You use your mouse to nudge and move the buddy around, generating a small amount of money. You use that money to buy new tools and what not: bowling balls, fire hoses, Molotov cocktails. And in doing things with the buddy, you can acquire more money to buy more weapons and tools. You can choose to play with the buddy and be kind, and you can choose to torment the buddy and be cruel. Cruelty usually wins.

This is how Interactive Buddy is remembered: a torture chamber. The buddy seems to be modeled after other programs like Bonzi Buddy or other digital pets. Its UI conjures up images of Windows XP. But while a virtual pet usually exists to be cared for, the buddy has no needs. You can’t feed it, and it doesn’t want food. So what is the buddy’s reason for being? The game has an opinion. The buddy exists to be hurt. The game description instructs you to beat it up. It’s more like a Bobo doll than a pet. I would venture to say that the vast majority of players used the game as a sadistic time-waste and little more.

The internet in the 2000s was rife with violent Flash diversions. Madness, Whack Your Boss, Happy Wheels, these jubilees of juvenile hyperviolence were everywhere. Interactive Buddy came out during that time, and it shows. For one, the game is filled dated and niche reference humor (how do you even explain StrawberryClock?), but it also has a fascination with violence. This was in the wake of things like Jack Thompson’s lawsuits, after Columbine and September 11th, where the notion of violent video games still felt a little transgressive. The developer of Interactive Buddy is literally called Shock Value. It revels in violence intentionally. And hey, why not? It wasn't hurting anybody, after all. They’re just lines of code. But our attitudes (or at least mine) have shifted dramatically over the years.

I’ve seen others comment that they feel guilt for what they did to the buddy, that it was cruel to harm the buddy. And truly, the buddy did nothing to deserve this, right? It merely exists, a floating jumble of orbs, and we come in and brutalize and beat it. The buddy expresses fear and dislike for the explosions and drubbings it’s put through. It doesn’t like “boom!”, and it’s mood gauge will slowly become a frown. It is clear that the poor thing is suffering. That would make it cruel to abuse it this way.

So that’s the obvious corrected position, right? That hurting the interactive buddy is bad, and you shouldn’t do it? Well, I’m not quite convinced of that, either.

See, to adopt that position is to take up a pretty serious assumption: that a simulated action correlates directly to a real one. We suppose that the buddy is harmed, but the buddy cannot experience pain. It’s a digital object. It’s just lines of code.

It is false to say the buddy dislikes pain. The buddy doesn’t like or dislike anything. The buddy is not an animal. It has no desires. It has no consciousness or qualia. It doesn’t breathe or even bleed. It is a simulated object with simulated movements that imitate that of fear, pain, and joy. When the buddy recoils from an explosive or shakes as it is tickled, these are only animations, programmed and procedural gestures that bear a likeness to animal behavior. As far as we can tell, there is no real suffering occurring. There is no evidence of a computer having consciousness, probably won’t ever be for a while, and certainly not the buddy. Even a Kantian would struggle to find an argument against it; after all, the buddy has no rationality to which we are to hold ourselves to respecting.

There is therefore no harm in hurting the buddy, nor is there a duty to be kind to it. All there is is a symbolic charade of a hedonistic dichotomy. The simulacra of pain and pleasure, entangled with each other as a binary pair. It is an imitation. It’s just lines of code. It is in fact less than an imitation of pain, not of the sensation, but only an abstract impersonation of the response to pain, the superficial choreography. A simulacra, of Baudrillard’s third or fourth stage, which signifies either absence or deference to other signs. And to accept the simulacra of pain and pleasure as equivalent to their corollaries in reality is to accept simulation as reality. At what point does the magic circle give way to our realized actions, then?

It should not be said that causing pain in Interactive Buddy is in some capacity related to causing harm outside of it, then. As such with pleasure, too. To do so is to open the floodgates; any digital harm must be condemned. Is it ethical to shoot aliens in Halo? Is it ethical to kick turtle shells in Mario? Is it ethical to eat ghosts in Pac-Man? Is there any virtual action in most video games that does not carry profound guilt? This is the necessary extent of this argument.

So, that’s my conclusion then, right? That it’s okay to hurt the buddy, and you should feel free to remorselessly bully and mutilate any digital denizens you encounter, because they’re just lines of code? Not quite. That doesn’t really work for me either.

Even if they are just lines of code, these are lines of code that have been given faces. Scott McCloud created this pyramid of representation: the realistic, the abstract, and the iconographic its three corners. You might be able to argue against this model, but let’s adopt it for now. The buddy is abstract and iconographic. Again, by default, it’s six orbs floating in a blank room. But the absence of realistic features does not mean it is no longer representative and recognizable. Its orientation and movements imbue these orbs with a humanity. While the buddy is so iconographic to be merely six floating balls, it is still immediately clear to most that it is a chubby little humanoid. You can call it pareidolia if you want, I guess, but that’s lying by omission. Pareidolia is the recognition of a sign (usually faces) in nebulous stimuli. These video game characters, on the other hand, were sculpted with the intent to invoke this response. We recognize a level of humanity in them, and that’s why we have empathy for them. This is what Jesper Juul might call the game’s fiction. The fiction of a game contextualizes its action and engagement. Without it, they really are just lines of code; floating points and vectors in a fog. But the fiction condenses the mist into a concrete, intelligible, and recognizable form.

When I saw the grunts fleeing in Halo, I did not see an array of code and polygons. I saw a creature fleeing in fear. My mirror neurons responded. And so my body and my mind instinctually, if only a bit, felt sympathy for it. It may be a computer generation, but I am able to recognize the simulacrum of a soul. Once again, it is important to know that these are only representations, but how we respond to representations still could mean something. We engage with signifiers in a simulated world. Does how we engage with them signify something, too?

There is not much evidence as far as I’m aware of that being exposed to violent media makes you more violent, nor that enacting violence within a digital space does, either. But the effect of media on our behaviors is something that has bothered people for years and years. Rap music, hard rock, comic books, television, even theater are all of a family of reviled media. Well before Mortal Kombat’s moral panic and Jack Thompson, Plato expressed the opposite skepticism about drama and poetry as mimesis, as imitation. Aristotle agreed that poetry was founded on imitation, but considered the disjunct between art and life to be a strength, too, and not just a weakness. And is it not, on some level? Despite the moral outrage, violent video games have not heralded a sharp rise in violence in the world. Anecdotes, maybe. Heightened aggression, possible. There is no real empirical evidence that I know of that shows violent art encourages violent behavior. So what unnerves us still?

With his name still in our mouths, let’s refer to Aristotle again with virtue ethics. Virtue ethics frame ethics as a product of one’s character. This may be the key to unlocking the modern controversy of violent video games: the virtue of simulated violence. Harming the buddy may not produce any real negative consequences per se, but the fear is that it produces or is produced by a vicious player.

The question is then not a matter of ethical utility, but of motive and virtue. It is quite literally a question about virtual reality.

What is it that purpose of harming the buddy? What is its virtue, its vice, its extension? Even outside the confines of Interactive Buddy’s torture engine, there is no shortage of cruel ballet in digital worlds. The subjects are not harmed, and as far as can be told, it doesn’t seem to have any broader implications for the ethics of the player. It affects nothing. All we see is mimicked anguish. There is nothing, good or bad, that comes of it. So why do we do it? Why do we want to see depictions of violence at all, let alone participate in them?

The cliche answer is that there is some immutable darkness within humanity which feeds on suffering. This is the kind of answer you’d hear from a Jordan B. Peterson or whatever Freudian charlatan. I’m not sure whether to call this most significantly naïve or presumptuous. I suppose it is both. It is presumptuous because it assumes this aesthetic tendency is universal, something that we all experience. It isn’t, and there are plenty of people who do not enjoy violent art. It is naïve because it implicitly posits that this correlates to a desire to enact the imagined actions and not merely fantasize about them, just as discussed. That the simulated darkness is in direct relation to a real darkness. So what does that mean? What makes a simulated darkness?

They are fantasies, but why do we strive to blur the line between this fantasy and reality? There has been a race towards the most realistic blood and guts we can find. Even if we want and need the magic circle as a boundary between reality and game to enable our violent impulses, there is also a culture of delight in hyper-realistic blood pouring out of our screens. We may have grown bored of it, sure, but the remnants are there. An example? Interactive Buddy gives you an option. For a price, you can make the buddy bleed. It changes nothing other than flecks of red appearing on the screen. So do you choose to? Do you choose to make the buddy’s pain feel more real to you? Do you make the fantasy more real? Why?

There’s an example from Slavoj Žižek (I’m sure you can find it somewhere, I’m not sure if it’s been written down) where he offers an interesting inversion. He presents the cliche of a gamer who in real life is meek, milquetoast, and bland man, but within the world of a game, he is brash, a womanizer, a marauder. The typical interpretation is that the real life person is the real person who lives out a fantasy in the game, but Žižek asks: what if it is the meek version of him is the one where he is pretending, and in the game he is truly himself?

It’s an interesting twist on the thought. It’s undeniable that virtual spaces offer ranges of expression which we desire in the real world but can only access there. This is one of games’ many powers: not just a lusory attitude, but an attitude of realization is possible. The boundary between game and reality is what enables this, that allow us to inhabit new and foreign attitudes of any kind. This extends to violence. The initial deconstruction Žižek offers asks us to consider that the truer nature is one of cruelty that is merely suppressed by the context of society. But games are games, and their disjunction from reality is freeing because it is a disjunction. It is precisely the division between game and reality that allows the average person to engage with this sadistic charade. Should the digital world become reality, how many players would actually continue the abuse? Would they become a marauder? Would you? I doubt it.

You might at first compare it to the way an actor speaks and moves as a character, but does not become them. Like Plato and Aristotle before him, J. L. Austin recognized that the act of speech was transformed by the stage. Austin wrote on the concept of speech act, things we can say that perform actions in and of themself, and highlights this. While the actor’s monologue is quite literally a performative utterance in one sense, it is not in the sense Austin uses that term. The speech does not, and cannot, perform an action it could otherwise; it is not intended to be taken in the same way as when the actor is off the stage. This is sometimes called the etiolation of language. It blanches the language; it is understood to not have the same seriousness behind it. This notion has been properly interrogated by jolly old Derrida, who in turn was interrogated by Searle -- that whole scuffle. Regardless, it is essentially of intention, of what action is intended or unintended by the use of language. A similar thing happens in games. The lusory attitude we adopt not only changes the actions we perform, but also changes how they are received and understood. But we don’t just speak or write in games. In fact, we mostly make movements and perform actions. What is etiolated, then? A gesture.

The question of how one engages with Interactive Buddy is a question of gesture. What is the extension of these actions, and their meaning?

When philosopher of communication Vilem Flusser sets out to define “gesture”, he begins describing a scenario in which he is punched. He initially defines a gesture as “a movement of the body or of a tool attached with the body, for which there is no satisfactory causal explanation.” What Flusser means by causal is specific. His project is to establish foundations for a study of gesture’s meaning, elaborated to a wide range of sociological phenomena. The causes of a movement that are physiological or even psychological are not satisfactory for a gesture. The gesture has a component of meaning which Flusser does not view as fulfilled by those explanations. He then goes on describe being punched, and his arm recoiling in pain. This motion is one he declares a gesture, because it is representation of something: “My movement depicts pain. The movement is a symbol, and pain is its meaning.” This is seen in the buddy, but only as a simulation.

Let’s return to McCloud’s pyramid. While this system identifies images, it does not identify the images in motion. What of images’ gestures? Animation, too, could be put along such a pyramid. The motion of this buddy is what lends its verisimilitude. Lines of code parodying behavior. The buddy’s movements have an adequate causal explanation in the game itself, but when we extend this question to the programmer, it becomes a gesture. This is the intent of the designer: to communicate the concept of intention and interiority. We may recognize the buddy as just lines of code, but we still recognize the buddy’s behavior. Their gestures, while mere imitations, are recognizable as those of pain and of pleasure. But when we play Interactive Buddy, are these communicative gestures? When we express through the game, express through actions on the buddy? The buddy may communicate to us; maybe it’s more accurate to say that the designer communicates through the buddy. The buddy is a puppet of the code, the meanings expressed therein designed by a programmer. But in our engagement with the buddy, as we poke and prod at it, is this communication? If so, to what are we communicating?

Play may not necessarily be communicative, but when we make the choice to interpret it as such, and as gesture, we butt up against an issue. Communication, generally, implies at least two people. A person who transmits, and a person who receives. Communication theory also recognizes the store of information, such as in a diary, as a form of communication, as well, as it communicates from the past self to the future self. But in a game like Interactive Buddy, the movements we make ephemeral. They cannot be saved and cannot be retrieved. Like speech, it is uniterable and impermanent, eddying away in the wind. If a movement is neither made for communicate, nor capable of being retrieved, is it still a gesture, or just a random convulsion? Can a gesture be non-communicative? Or, is it possible that in this gesturing--or speaking for that matter, anything ephemeral and solitary--that the action itself is communicative to my own immediate experience? Do I gesture to myself, then? Is that what it means to entertain yourself? When we play a game on our own, are we gesturing to communicate with ourselves? What am I trying to say to myself then?

Consider a diary. When I write in a diary, I communicate to myself through written language. When I doodle in that same diary, I communicate to myself through images. The constraint of the medium informs what I communicate to myself. In some ways, the constraints are what create the possibility for immediate this self-communication to exist at all. When I open up Interactive Buddy, I communicate to myself through my gestures within the game. The buddy is just lines of code, but my way of interfacing with it is also made up of code, too. The tool of gesture is not just the mouse, not just the computer, but also the buddy itself. Flusser later defines “gesture” as a movement which expresses freedom (and even later, paired with the freedom to conceal or reveal). The cause of the gesture is the desire to make it and the freedom to do so. But any movement is going to be constrained in some capacity, the gesture by the body, the diary by the letter, the soliloquy by the spoken word. My freedom of communication is necessarily, to some degree, interpellated by its medium. In a game, this is the entire conceit of play. The constraints are what make this self-communication possible. The game's unique limits then directly inform what I am capable of communicating to myself through it. I am only allowed to express what the game allows me to express. My gestures are limited.

When we say that the buddy didn’t do anything to deserve this pain, what do we mean by that? The buddy does do something to deserve it: it exists. Let me explain. Video games are full of teleological universes. In most games, everything is instrumental. The platform exists to be jumped on, the enemy exists to be killed, the coin exists to be collected. Everything has a purpose. It is incredibly difficult to make a truly nihilistic game in a mechanical sense, because to do so is to weave between any instrumentality. It’s possible to tell a story about nihilism, or that lacks meaning, but its mechanics will have bespoke purposes. The universe of the game has a rhyme and a reason.

The world of Interactive Buddy is constructed for violence. Not in an architectural sense, but in a cosmological one. When Jacob Geller describes worlds designed for violence, he is describing the architecture of digital spaces, how they create affordances for violence, what they look like in the real world. The archicecture of Interactive Buddy is never more complex than four grey walls. Instead, the make-up of its reality is designed for violence. That is the destiny of its teleological universe. The buddy, of course, has no free will (and thus cannot truly gesture in the sense Flusser uses), for one. But the buddy also has a destiny. The buddy has an infinite capacity for suffering and cannot die. It’s lines of code that respond to what we do. By hurting the buddy, we gain more money with which to buy weapons to hurt the buddy. Its suffering is a tool of its own propagation. Even pleasure can be instrumentalized in making the buddy hurt. That is the monad of Interactive Buddy’s world: pain.

It is not only reasonable, but entirely predictable that players would abuse the buddy. When we begin to play Interactive Buddy, we enter a playground designed for the express purpose of violent gestures.

But did it have to be this way? Immediately, there is an ambiguity: the open hand. That’s what is equipped to your mouse at the start. What does an open hand do? It can touch and hold, and it can strike. In the closing of a hand, one can either grasp or form a fist. The open hand is a pharmakon, an undecided gesture, which the player disambiguates in their choice of what to do with it.

We will always be left with more questions than answers. By what virtue do we harm the buddy? Since it is not a true act of harm, what is the extension of the act that it is gesturing towards? What is the precise purpose of this gesture? What does it signify, and to whom?

Games create virtual realities. In them, we inhabit virtual bodies and disembodied forces. We inevitably make gestures with them. It is not merely the etiolation of gesture. The machine is made not just a tool of gesture, but the system of parameters that limits our gestures, too. Its confines yet also create, as a segmented reality, the possibility of new and alien behaviors and expressions. Their unreality is what defines them. They are virtual in every sense of the word. They are not just gestures, but gestures towards.

Whether or not to hurt the buddy is not really a question of ethics at the end of the day. The suffering of the buddy was a foregone conclusion. It was borne into a world that was made for torture. But that’s okay. Because it can’t be hurt, not for real. There’s no harm in it. They’re just lines of code. But why do we do it, anyway? What drives us to these fantasies? I don’t know, and I’m not sure I ever will truly understand the impulse. All I know for sure is the question we ask ourselves: do you choose to hurt the buddy? And why? It's not a question about ethics. It’s a question about virtual realities. It’s a question of what the gesture of the open hand means to you.

https://link.medium.com/rYQbDiTDjrb

Tender Frog House, a game which is described by its creator as "a forum post of a game", is cynical. It's not that it's technically wrong about many of its comments on wholesome games. In fact, its response to wholesome games which view themselves as a unique political statement are incisive in their own way. These aren't wholly original ideas, but they are conveyed with a precision and a bite that calls attention. And they have truth to them. Certainly, being cozy is not a radical act. Those who make this claim are fooling themselves. But Tender Frog House comes off as taking a very broad swing against not just a particular subset of wholesome game creators, but about twee art, and eventually the purpose art itself. And this is where the incisive critique turns into a cynical rat's nest.

Tender Frog House pre-empts my response by refuting the notion that this perspective is cynical, that this is simply a knee-jerk response that defends a conservative mindset. Well, guess what? It is cynical. But it's not cynical for the sake of its perspectives on wholesome games, but rather, its perspective on their ethos. Tender Frog House more or less explicitly states that those who create so-called "wholesome games" are in fact engaging in what amounts to a deeply conservative pastiche which only serves to perpetuate a fascist capitalist society. Further, those who find joy or pleasure in this art or view it as a means of expressing themselves are in fact experiencing a false consciousness which only furthers that fascist capitalist society.

This is an exemplar of cynicism: calling people phony. I refuse this. I refuse to adopt a worldview where people who find and make art that makes them happy is fascist. Tender Frog House seems to find no room for this; either your art is revolutionary praxis, or its reactionary propaganda. Could it simply not be that people make games about cute frogs because it makes them happy? Is that not enough? Why must art only serve the purpose of political action? Art serves many purposes, and just because it performs either an ineffective or maybe even ever-so-slight counteraction does not mean it is not ultimately worthy of being enjoyed. Art acts on us in innumerable ways, in the mind and the body. Not all of these experiences are worth politicizing. That which is anodyne may not cure anything, but that doesn't mean it won't pair well with some wine. As I stated, I think the notion that coziness, sincerity, and self-care are in-and-of-themselves radical is false. But that doesn't mean they aren't worth having.

Moreover, I haven't found supposedly more revolutionary "serious games" to be effective on that front, either. Tender Frog House certainly doesn't inspire me, either as an artist or as a political actor. Maybe I am projecting, but it seems it instructs me to adopt a realpolitik of aesthetics, where I may only offer affordances to or create that which is unequivocally revolutionary. Well, personally? I have found little of that art enjoyable. I have played the Molle Industria games, and others. These games do not invite any transformative thought, and they are incredibly didactic (and frankly, not particularly persuasive). I don't think art is a particularly effective form of praxis, whether it's cozy or cynical. I'm not convinced any of these serious games bring us any closer to a better society than a cute game about frogs.

Let's stop pretending art is a uniquely precious vector for political action. I doubt that line of thinking leads anywhere. But who knows. There is a reason Adorno hated jazz. I think time has proven him wrong. We'll just have to wait for time to pass to see about Tender Frog House.

I am called to revere Elden Ring out of spite. I once heard someone I no longer speak to for various reasons say, upon seeing a then new trailer, that they wish FromSoft would making something interesting like King’s Field again instead of this. Now, I was playing the King’s Field games for the first time when they said that, and I happen to love those games a lot, and I certainly want them to make another one or something like it, even though they never will because the games industry is full of cowards. But I also happened to know that this person had never played King’s Field, and were probably only saying it out of a smug sense of superiority. And this made me angry.

Yes, yes, the familiar gang is here. Yet another lowly warrior usurps the eternal cycle. The fallen order, the god-kings, corruption, the moon, the flame. Invasions, summons, messages, bloodstains. Tragic sidequests, Patches is there, and multiple endings. Magic is blue, holiness is yellow. You can parry and backstab enemies. You upgrade your weapons to scale with your stats. You dodge roll and stagger. These are familiar. They are played out, to a degree. And yes, they are not exciting in that old way. But I don’t really care, because I’m a “fan of the genre”. I am enthusiastic about the new things that come from this company, and the genre they’ve inadvertently spawned, and I’m always ready for innovation. But that doesn’t preclude me from finding joy in the familiar. Because it was never the uniqueness that mattered most.

There’s this kind of jealousy surrounding the Souls series. The fans (myself included) view them as special, unique, and precious gems. When something besmirches their name, it is a disgrace, because there is something transcendent about these games that we hold sacred. But as the series has become a prototype, a whole genre sprouting from its seedbed, the things that made a game like Dark Souls special have become no longer so special. How many games can we find that are trying to be exactly like it? Those qualities, whether it be difficulty, inscrutability, atmosphere, even specific mechanics, they’re not special anymore. How quaint does Super Metroid feel now? How cliche is The Shining now? Are The Beatles run of the mill? Is Seinfeld funny anymore? It’s like the old joke: “I don’t get the appeal of Hamlet. It’s just a bunch of famous saying strung together.”

It becomes difficult to vindicate why these games are good. So, we get jealous. We get protective. “No, you see, these games are special. How else could I love them so much if they weren’t? They are doing something different. They are beautiful in a way only I can understand.” Everyone thinks they are the sole prophet of Dark Souls liking, and that everyone else is some misguided mystic. I do, too. But I know I’m fooling myself. I know these games are mortal.

See, I’m not sure these games were ever that special to begin with. I remember, years ago, sitting on a couch playing Demon's Souls, and wondering out loud how they made this game, how they reached something so specific. And he said to me that "it had to have come from someone with a vision". As years go on, I find that statement less and less true. They were and are unique, sure. But they didn’t come from nowhere, sprouting from Miyazaki’s forehead like Athena. They were made by people in a company making a software product. Elden Ring was building off of Dark Souls, which was building off of Demon’s Souls, which was building off of King’s Field, which was probably building off of Ultima Underworld or something, and yadda yadda. Iteration is underrated. I think what ends up getting underrecognized, ironically, is that these are good video games. It’s not because they’re special. They haven’t unlocked a secret to games that no one else can know. These games don’t have to be special to be good. They can just be good. Which they are.

Anyway. I liked Elden Ring. I thought it was fun. I thought it was cool. I liked exploring its world. I liked crawling through its dungeons. I liked fighting bosses. That’s enough for me. And so you might ask, “Is Elden Ring even that special?” And I’m going to say, “Who cares?”

I have been surrounded by puzzles my entire life. I mean this literally. My father is a bonafide puzzler. Not jigsaw puzzles; I'm talking pen and paper puzzles. His peg is wordplay. Crosswords, cryptics, anagrams, cryptograms, all of it. He has taken my family to puzzle conventions often. He's a prolific constructor, too. He's been published in a certain major newspaper multiple times and even runs puzzle hunts regularly. It gets annoying, sometimes. I don't mind the test solves he asks of us. It's the other stuff. He'll turn a simple dinner conversation topic into a riddle, a game of guessing, hamfisting puns and clues. I think in my teenage years, that frustration with parents dripped down onto puzzles. I considered them geeky, dorky, not something I would ever like, no no no. Alas, my hat is thoroughly chewed; puzzles are fun. I'm nowhere near the kind of puzzler he is, not even close, but I've come around on it. I'll toy with a crossword, I’ll knock out a KenKen, I'll give a cryptic a shot (and fail), and I'll play Wordle.

Wordle is Mastermind but with letters. It's not a complex or new idea; this has been done before and will be done again. That's not a criticism. It's just a fact. It's a slick, well-made version of it created by Josh Wardle for his girlfriend. It works. It's fun. The key difference was the ease by which you could share your solutions online. Presumably, this was a huge influence on its popularity, which abruptly skyrocketed in the tail end of 2021. Seeing people post their scores is near ubiquitous, whether you were on Discord or Twitter. It’s a fun daily distraction to toil over. The limit of guesses encourages some strategizing. On Discord, we crafted theories and ran simulations. It became a delightful little problem of probabilistic reduction and linguistic statistics.

But I’m not here to talk about Wordle, but rather what’s happening to it. Puzzles seem to be on an abrupt uptick. I have no clue why. In the past year, I've seen people I'd never expect to talking about daily crosswords in the New York Times. Spelling Bee in the New York Times Magazine is also wildly popular and served as an inspiration for Wordle. If I had to guess why, it would have to be due to the global pandemic having a lot of people down-time they would typically spend doing something else. As well as, perhaps, the NYT's strategy of pushing their Games publication. Maybe you’re noticing something.

A few weeks ago, Microsoft bought Activision Blizzard. A bit later, Sony bought Bungie. Now, the New York Times has bought Wordle. Maybe this seems unrelated to you. But I can't help but see it as part of a pattern of rapid consolidation of gaming markets. Obviously, this is a widespread issue not limited to games, or media for that matter. Mergers and acquisitions seem to show up every few weeks. Anti-trust law isn't what it used to be in the US, and companies are constantly cannibalizing each other. By all means, Josh Wardle made the right choice. He was probably losing money by hosting Wordle, and he was smart to cash out. Good for him.

The NYT did not buy Wordle because it was a novel invention. The NYT bought it because it wants to be the only thing you think of when you think of the word "puzzles". Don't think of just any old newspaper, don't think of other websites or apps, don't think of GAMES Magazine or Nicoli or even those airport pulp bricks, think of the New York Times and the New York Times Magazine only. They could have easily made a Wordle version of their own. They wanted the name and the brand recognition. They want you to remember where the puzzles are. The only puzzles. Are they succeeding?

Wordle won’t die after this. It’s going to live forever. It’s been assimilated into the Borg. “Join us or die.” Even as folks burn out on it, or it’s fad-fame withers, there will still be countless players. It’s in the New York Times, after all. Will it stay popular? Probably. To some degree, certainly. And what of the countless Wordle-likes? The leagues of distractions, too numerous to list, ranging from copies to inventive reimaginings? Will they rise above it all? Well, I’m not optimistic. As much as I’d like to be able to say I think a wave of independent puzzles will come crashing down on the shore, spreading an anarchistic jubilee of puzzles on the sands, I don’t think that’s going to happen. It’s not going to happen in games, either. These moments result in flares of creativity and then a quiet march into obscurity. I’ve seen how hard it is to fight against cultural monopolies. Call it path-of-least-resistance, call it the Pareto principle, call it a process of preferential attachment, it’s gonna end up the same way: the slow oligopolization of cultural commodities with straggling indies. I’m not optimistic. I hope to be proven wrong. There’s a time for everything to come crumbling down. But until then, Wordle is fun. While it lasts.

Atomic Heart wants desperately to be like Bioshock Infinite. Everyone knows this. Everyone says this. It oozes it from the first seconds of the game, pushing you through an idyllic world-building hallway in a floating city before everything turns to shit and the havoc begins. There’s even a fucking lighthouse. It’s so obvious it’s actually pathetic. The Bioshock series (itself deferred to System Shock 2) is sort of messy, wrapped up in gestures towards depth, both narratively and mechanically, that are ultimately flat. And this hit an apex with Bioshock Infinite, a game I truly despise, which was utterly vapid and utterly hateful. When it comes to depth, these are the equivalent of a Road Runner tunnel painted on a wall. So what of Atomic Heart? What happens when you imitate an imitation?

There’s that famous Putin quote, “Anyone who doesn't regret the passing of the Soviet Union has no heart. Anyone who wants it restored has no brains.” I doubt I will ever really understand this sentiment; I’m not Russian and my ancestors left there long ago. But Atomic Heart is the most I’ve ever seen it manifest. The game is fascinated by Soviet aesthetics, the socialist realism, the hammers and sickles, but rejects the values that formed them. Marx statues and Lenin busts are easy to find, but they’re just set dressing. It loves the utopic visions of Soviet communism, but is disgusted by its own nostalgia. It is trapped pining for the aesthetics of past without its politics. It wants badly to be able to be superficial.

I struggle to explain the exact way this game is so facile. At first I say that Atomic Heart isn’t sophisticated enough to really have an ideology, but that’s not true. Everything has an ideology, and this game often makes it very clear where it’s coming from. So, maybe it’s not sophisticated enough to have a message. Okay, maybe, but it definitely seems to be trying to. So I just land on this: Atomic Heart is not very smart. It really, really thinks it is. But it’s just not.

Dumb games aren’t intrinsically bad, but I think Atomic Heart is. Like, look, aesthetics count for more than most of us want to admit. And, if nothing else, Atomic Heart has a stunning visual style. The robot designs are creative and eerie (and sometimes horny), and the environmental design is almost Seussian at times. That’s why this game’s trailers blew up: it looks sick. If this game was all looks and middling gameplay, I wouldn’t be writing this. Hell, I might be doing a cheeky review of Pink Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother, instead. But it’s worse.

The problem is that this game never shuts the fuck up. It’s annoying bland protag never stops talking. The glove never stops talking. It does the time honored faux pas of complaining about mechanics it makes you perform. The motherfucker keeps saying “crispy critters” like he’s trying to make it a thing. I tried to play the game with Russian audio but the constant chattering made the game almost impossible even with subtitles. The game is very much interested in its plot and its plot fucking sucks. All of its twists are predictable and none of its ideas are new. Some twists are cribbed directly from Bioshock. I’m withholding some of the absurd spoilers, but there are a few moments that had me laughing to myself, saying, “I hate this game.” And god, it really is not that original. It’s the most run of the mill sci-fi plot you could have cooked up for this game. Its beats are so obvious and so rote. I think the glove literally quotes Animal Farm at you. It’s so fucking annoying. The messages, vapid as they are, are hammered repeatedly and obnoxiously, conveying its shitty politics piecemeal. And its politics really are shitty. There’s the undercurrent of nationalism and of anti-collectivism. This is not to mention the way female-coded robots are sexualized, and the apparent presence of anti-Ukrainian propaganda. I’ve even been told there’s a racist caricature hidden away somewhere in the cartoons that run on loop in this game. It is dripping in bad vibes.

And you know, I’d love to sit here and virtue signal about how I reviled the game and hated every moment, sneering “mid” and patting myself on the back. But I’d be pretending. Because there are fun moments to this trash heap. Like, yeah, it’s a 2010-ass game in a lot of ways (linear, parkour, quicktime events, minigames), but with a post-boomer revival combat sensibility (fast, hard, lots of enemies) and I don’t think it really quite works all said. I could get into it, but I won’t. Regardless, there’s glimmers. Even beyond art assets. In particular, there are some unique mechanical elements to the robot ecosystem. Granny Zina is cool (it would have been a better game if we could play as her). And I actually really liked most of the conversations with the corpses. There are brief moments, when they finally choose to shut the fuck up, where I had genuine fun. But those moments felt rare, where I was left to my devices to revel in silent aesthetics and mechanics, in a constant deluge of its overbearing sci-fi shenanigans and questionable choices, and by the end, all I could remember was the muck.

But doesn’t this all remind you of something? An alternate history sci-fi game, that had really impressive trailers to garner interest, with a very strong art direction admittedly steeped with nationalist visions of the past, that is an extremely watered down immersive sim, that is so enamored with its cliched plot about free will filled with garbage politics, where the game pontificates about agency while robbing you of it and espousing empty platitudes about power, with constant dumb twists and undercurrent of misogyny and centrism, resulting in a game that is inexplicably lauded despite all its glaring flaws and horrendous pretensions?

Atomic Heart wants desperately to be like Bioshock Infinite. And the worst part is, it’s succeeding.

"Destroy the darkness of delusion with the brightness of wisdom. The world is truly dangerous and unstable, without any durability. My present attainment of Nirvana is like being rid of a malignant sickness. The body is a false name, drowning in the great ocean of birth, sickness, old age and death. How can one who is wise not be happy when he gets rid of it?" - Gautama Buddha

Rain World is not a game about living. It's not a game about dying. It's about samsara.

Why do so many yearn for annihilation, for silence? Why are we caught between quiet and din? What are we tied to? How do we remember the past? How permanent is history? What is it made out of? Is it in objects? Is it in something spiritual? Is it in technology? What are the driving forces of technology? Can technology be spiritual? Why do we make machines? Why do we make them look like us? Why do we make them look so different from us? What do they do when we are gone? How different is technology and nature? What is nature in the first place? Is nature cruel? Is nature kind? What does it mean to be cruel, to be kind? Is there such a thing as morality in an ecosystem? What is nature made out of? What is an animal? What is the life of an animal? What is the life of two animals? What is the life of a thousand animals? What is life at all? What does it mean, really, to be living? Why is it so painful? Why do we go on? What do we need? What do we want?

"Say a body. Where none. No mind. Where none. That at least. A place. Where none. For the body. To be in. Move in. Out of. Back into. No. No out. No back. Only in. Stay in. On in. Still. All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." - Worstward Ho, Samuel Beckett

I am not, nor have I ever been, a spiritual person. I don't think I ever will be. But Rain World helps me understand why people become Buddhists. This game was a spiritual experience for me. I mean that. I hate it, I love it, I am endlessly fascinated by it. It is an utterly singular game. I don't think there has ever been or ever will be another game quite like Rain World.

One of the best games ever made. Beautiful, fascinating, haunting, terrifying. But it's hard to recommend. It's one of the hardest and most grueling games I've ever played. It's profoundly frustrating. But it's a masterpiece. Even without my unique connection to it, it is full of incredible ideas, beautiful art, and shocking design. It's a vast ecosystem full of wonder and terror. It's stunningly beautiful on almost every level. I feel it on a visceral level. It's constantly on my mind. I cannot escape it; it's inside me. It's one of the best games ever made.

I'm not giving this a low rating to be contrarian or whatever. Genuinely think this is a bad video game.

It starts out really strong then immediately nosedives into a corridor shooter, and soon nosedives once again as the narrative pivots to just terrible territory.

Absolutely dreadful by the end.

“An American tragedy. An odyssey of debt, of grief, of broken promises, of hope. A painful, melancholic fable composed of fables and more fables, spreading out and weaving in and out of itself. A dream ebbing back and forth between memory and fantasy. A plea for you to care about something.”

...This was my original review for Kentucky Route Zero. I still think it’s a good description. But on consideration, I feel as though I need to be bold and say it: Kentucky Route Zero is not only one of my favorite games, but one of my favorite things ever made.

This is not an assessment of quality. I am not telling you what to feel. I am telling you how I feel. And Kentucky Route Zero makes me feel a way.

I specifically say “Favorite Thing”, because Kentucky Route Zero doesn’t affect me like a game. When I think about many of my favorite games, I often think of them as games. They are full of mechanics, of challenges, of systems. That’s certainly not all games are, and games can be many things, but in the capacity that they affect me, enchant me, or fascinate me, it is often within this vague category of “game”. But Kentucky Route Zero is different. To call it “my favorite game” and leave it at that misses something. It’s certainly a game, but it doesn’t make me feel the way games usually make me feel. First and foremost, Kentucky Route Zero is a story. It’s unlike most. The main body of this story is a game, but it’s also a multimedia saga. There’s something quintessential permeating my experience of Kentucky Route Zero that transcends that category.

It is a hauntological melancholy. It conjures a world more like a memory than a reality. Kentucky Route Zero tells the story of people who seem familiar but you’ve never met, with jobs that were never really secure, in situations that could never happen, in a version of Kentucky that has never existed. Magical realism constructs a vision not of reality, but of memory, of a sensate fabric that you swear could have been but never was. Americana is a mythic entity made visible, standing in front of me within Kentucky Route Zero, and it’s on its last breaths.

It’s a hopeful story. That doesn’t mean it’s happy. The world around you is a wasteland. Everyone is dying. Everyone is suffering. Everything is weighed down by debt, pulled deep down into pools of darkness. To live is to work, work, and die. But there are other ways to live. There always have been. Should we move on? I think the answer is clear. But that doesn’t make the pain go away. We have to be willing to feel both grief and hope in the same breath.

All of its blemishes are dismissable. Fleeting problems with UI, incidentally clunky writing, weird mechanical tangents, overwhelming scope, these melt away when I take a moment to remember what Kentucky Route Zero is and feel the frisson travel up and down my skin. I'm trying to not be too longwinded here, but it's hard. I can't get into specifics. So I wax poetic instead. I could write thousands of words on every minute I spent with Kentucky Route Zero and still feel like I was forgetting to say something. It is a multitudinous masterpiece, refracting and reflecting endlessly, timelessly, quietly.

Kentucky Route Zero is one of my favorite things.

CW: death, depression, suicide, mental health, religion
Spoilers: Yume Nikki, :THE LONGING:, The Draughtsman's Contract, The Beginner's Guide
----

Yume Nikki precedes itself. There is likely nothing I can say about it that has not been said, that has not been thought, that has not been insinuated. It’s been scrutinized endlessly on forums, on fan wikis, in videos, in chatrooms and private conversations. There is nothing I can say about it that has not been said. That is why so much of what you are about to read (assuming you do not choose to leave, which I wouldn’t blame you for) won’t be about Yume Nikki at all. It will be about me. I can’t offer a clean thesis. Because inevitably, when new interpretations dry up, the ocean of meaning turns into a xeric lakebed, the gaze turns downward toward the navel, and what is beneath it. When the door will not open, and the world is your room, hermeneutics turn into an exercise in philosophy of self.

“There are always hidden silences
Waiting behind the chair
They come out
When the coast is clear
They eat everything that moves
I go shaky at the knees
Lights go out
Stars come down
Like a swarm of bees” - No Self Control, Peter Gabriel

“No Self Control” is about depression. So is this piece of writing. (Don’t worry; it will be about other things, too. To a fault, in fact.) The recurring line in this song is “I don’t know how to stop.” That was also the original name of the song. He describes impulsive hunger, calling friends, walking in the night. He doesn’t know how to stop. There’s a possible inversion of this reading, though: one of executive dysfunction. When he says, “I’ve got to get some food, I’m so hungry all the time”, he does not actually describe eating. Instead, it could be a failure to stop stopping.

Executive dysfunction is life-controlling. That is not an overstatement. It is suffocating. Everything is too much. My whole life, I have been in a losing battle with it. Since I was a kid, in the morning, I find myself paralyzed the awful possibility of having to get out of bed. The anxiety, the sopor, the blanket, all shroud. The act of doing, of having to begin, of having to be. It’s too much. So I usually crumple. I understand why Madotsuki stays in bed so much.

The bridge is in my bones. The marimba is steady, the beat is a solitary bass drum, Kate Bush chants in waves, a distorted sax and bassline interplay. And then, like a big breath in, and the drums come thundering. They come in like gunshots down a stairwell. The brooding guitar flanges and growls. “There are always hidden silences.” It always pulls at something deep in me, the nerve in my stomach which causes my knees to buckle and my arms to move.

Peter Gabriel’s third album, colloquially called Melt due to its cover, was an obsession for me. For about a two months, it was the only thing I wanted to listen to, the only thing I wanted to hear. I couldn’t tear myself away from it. His iconic voice, the bassy cymbal-less beats, the dark guitars and synths. It was all I wanted at the time. It wrapped around me and cradled me in brooding. I have a custom listening order, even: move “Start/I Don’t Remember” to the beginning, move “Intruder” to before “Games Without Frontiers”. You can also throw “Milgram’s 37” from So in there, which I’ve heard was originally recorded for this album. I’ve been told there is a light concept to the whole album, “states of mind.” Is depression a state of mind? Maybe, but it feels like more to me, a state of the body, which is hung over the bed like a wet shirt, interminably sad and sodden.

Peter Gabriel was not the first obsession I have had during the pandemic. First, it was Castlevania. I went through as many as the games as I could. The Igavania structure is satisfying; there’s a rhythm to the exploration, intoxicating and immediately validating to those familiar with its tricks. After that, it was the games of Treasure. I played nearly everything I could by them. This is not a new pattern for me. In the throes of summer isolation, I would hyperfixate on genres. Arcade puzzlers, traditional Roguelikes, shmups. And my affairs with music are almost always like this, throughout my life. As for the pandemic, after Peter Gabriel, I wrapped around to Genesis. Eventually, I got around to Cardiacs, too. Then there’s random stuff. Watching old episodes of Countdown or Robot Wars on YouTube. Trying to figure out how to make liangpi. Fixation is a sort of guiding light through the murky air of whatever swamp this is.

Sometimes I get obsessed with specific words. Sometimes phrases. Sometimes entire paradigms. But the words, they get inside my head, they become a way of describing everything. They are often bodily. For a while it was “blood”, a term for that which permeates something. Then “bones”, the underpinning structure of something. Now, it is “rotten”, an odious decay. I call many things rotten, though I do not know for sure what I mean by it when I say it.

I am not obsessed with Yume Nikki. I want to be. I want to dive teeth first into it. I want it consume me. I want to explore every room, cross through every door, catalog its biome on my spinal cord. But the dedication is not in me. And the pull isn’t there, the temperamental pull. I do not hear its call seducing my stereocilia. I drift away from it, longing to be marooned. Fixation is fickle. As I write this, when was the last time I played Yume Nikki? A month? Two months? How long will it be when I write the next sentence or paragraph? Will I finish it before I publish what I write here?

If there is a single thesis to what you’re about to read, it’s that Yume Nikki doesn’t make any sense. That’s a big part of why I have to bring myself to the text. But of course, that’s standard fair for games. Players are often co-creators in the meanings of text, more so than in other mediums. Conveyance is a bit of a misnomer in this way. Games criticism is inevitably saturated with the critic’s own identity. Criticism in general, though, is like this; the myth of the objective critic is of course a myth. But with games, this interplay is forefronted and almost unavoidable if we are to try to make a serious effort at all. And this is especially true with any art as sparse as Yume Nikki, which eludes context, an affront to traditional interpretation. So here it is: myself, borne so brazenly and blemished, for the sickness of it, for the need to make some kind of meaning here.

I could try and force myself to bring a sociopolitical analysis here. I’m sure I could figure something out. I’m sure people would like that. I know for some people that’s the only kind of criticism they’re interested in at all; I personally have a gated fence around it. And while I’m engaged in constant comparisons, it would be nice and fitting if I talked about Uboa’s The Origin of My Depression wouldn’t it? Or about the ever-mentioned David Lynch, or Egyptian surrealism? That would be lovely. Maybe even insightful. But it would be dishonest. Now is not the time for my darling pretensions. I will say what is in my head, tangents and references all, whether I welcome their stead or not. Let be be the finale of seem.

“Home, this my own receptacle which has seen better days
And a cap full of wind for assistance moves my sea
When pace is easy under sail, though it's taking a while
Better watch better watch I don't blink and...

Blink!
Isolation goes on, happy as the day is long and it drag it's slow length along
…
(blink)
Isolation comes again in the shape of a child made of plastic
Put tears on its stupid face” - Mare’s Nest, Cardiacs

Tim Smith of Cardiacs’ lyrics are notoriously cryptic. I wouldn’t dare to confidently announce that I’ve decoded one of his songs, as I would never say I think I’ve decoded Yume Nikki. But in my little view, “Mare’s Nest” is about being a child home alone. Childhood was a recurring theme in their early work. “In my home, my daddy TV brings in all mother world”, who are your companions in isolation? Toys, TV, imagination. Madotsuki plays video games. She lies in her bed and imagines a dreamscape of friends and foes. But she does not ever leave. A child alone at home searching for meaning.

Cardiacs (or all of Tim Smith’s work, for that matter, he was involved in other projects, though Cardiacs was kind of the head of the family) were an incredibly abrasive group, and not in the traditional sense of abrasive music. It’s not as much that their music is particularly aggressive or angry. Their music is carnivalistic and chaotic. It’s atonal, fast, and childish at times. Everything about their music is offensive at first blush. They dressed up as dipsomaniac clowns in their early years; I don’t think they’re going to earn a ton of fans like that. I’ve heard it described as atrocious, stupid, annoying, irresponsible; one review I saw described listening to their music as “like being worked on by four ugly dentists.” By all means, I am rarely shocked when someone says they hate Cardiacs.

There is some hope, I suppose, that they will be more venerated; Cardiacs seem to be getting more attention over these past few years, with celebrities like Mike Patton or Dave Grohl promoting them. Some publicity also came with a tragedy. Tim Smith, after a My Bloody Valentine concert in 2008, had a heart attack, during which oxygen loss damaged his brain, and suffered from dystonia for the last decade or so of his life. He couldn’t play any music during this time; he was unable to walk or do most tasks, and in constant pain. He even struggled to compose during this time. Even so, he received and honorary doctorate in music during this time. Most if not all proceeds from Cardiacs merchandise went to supporting him during this time. Beautifully, despite this notoriously weird band, people came together and raised funds for him. Tim Smith died in 2020, his final work with Cardiacs, LSD, still unreleased, but it seems that there has been a continuous spread of this band’s strange influence, like a psychedelic miasma spreading across message boards.

Yume Nikki seems to be well-liked. That’s kind of surprising given how experimental it is. Fan favorite games generally don’t tend to be deconstructive surrealist art games. But lo and behold, the fandom carries the torch. A game being well-liked does not mean it is approachable. Yume Nikki is confounding, not in spite of but because of its simplicity. Games that are unapproachable are typically difficult. Yume Nikki has effectively no win-state or fail-state. Instead, the difficulty of Yume Nikki comes in managing to try to figure any of it out. Difficult, arcane, and confusing art is often more likable than people will give it credit for.

What is so attractive about Yume Nikki? What hooks so many people into it despite its unapproachability? There’s a few things that stick out. For one, it’s free. There’s this kind of mid-aughts internet vibe that the game is dripping in. There’s a sort of pseudonostalgia to it. It’s hard to explain, the way things are rendered, the way the music sounds, the the kinds of world we see. Yes, the game itself, but also its history: an anonymous developer (KIKIYAMA) created this arcane, confusing, mysterious game and more or less disappeared. Engaging with this mystery, both in its production and its ever confusing contents, are part of the experience. Mystery, like secrets, keep our minds active; we return to a locked door, whether or not we were the one to lock it. So much to say, so much to guess. I suspect it would take much more time to just pore through all the various analyses of Yume Nikki than it would be to play through the game. Its eeriness and uncertainty call forth this kind of dissection. And around that comes a community. Forums, wikis, video essays, digital yeshiva. Despite that, it all remians a mystery. And then there’s fangames, some of which are as beloved as the original title, which attempt to capture the strange sensation we get from Yume Nikki. It’s so different from any other game, even now, that many feel called to try to reproduce it, which is no mean feat. How do you truly emulate that which defies dissection? These contributed to its success, but I also think to only highlight these would also be a disservice to the game, which I do believe is something special. It’s pretty singular, and that is part of why it is so beloved.

Let us talk, for a moment, about Uboa. It’s reputation is no doubt essential to Yume Nikki’s legacy. Upon flipping a lightswitch in a house in the snowy forest, there is a chance that Poniko, a young blonde girl, will transform into Uboa, and transport you to a strange, distorted world from which there is no escape. Uboa is often recognized as a black blob with a white face. I think this is an accurate read, but I often wonder if all I’m looking at is a smear of pixels with no meaning. Is it an it? A they? Does it have a gender? In any case, this little interaction, tucked away in a corner of the game, with no special items behind it, is one of the most memorable and well-known parts of Yume Nikki. Why is that? There’s a couple of reasons, I think. It’s one of the most overt “horror” moments in the game, although there is not much to fear, and it contrasts with the initial twee state of Poniko’s room. Uboa’s “face” also produces an ambiguity of intention, confusion about what it is it wants or is trying to do. We end up getting “trapped”, which feels menacing, but there is no direct threat. It’s frightening, but also mired in unease. I think this moment is also a good encapsulation of what makes Yume Nikki so special. In a random room, for no discernable reason, a strange creature(?) appears and whisks you away. It seems to come out of nowhere, and it does not explain itself. This is why so much theorizing has been dedicated to Uboa. It’s a haunting mystery in a game that is already packed to the brim with mysteries.

So many mysteries, and we want answers. Sisyphus pushes his rock. So, we craft theories. We dissect and analyze it. In an attempt to interpret, we encyclopedize its contents. We produce an almanac of Madotsuki’s dreams.

It’s always a stroke of luck when something experimental gets love. But it kind of breaks my heart that there’s nothing I can say that will make you like Cardiacs. Either you vibe with Tim Smith’s work, or you don’t. There is a very high chance if you give them a listen you’ll quickly turn it off. That’s fine, of course. I wish I could transfer it, I wish I could get others to understand what I hear. So often I feel compelled to want to cough this up, convince someone to see the beauty that I see int he art I love. Why? Why is it so important to me that I am able to share this with others? Why on Earth am I spending this much time writing about them here? Seriously: why? I can easily find a whole community of Cardiacs fans, but that’s not really what I want. I want to share it with those who are close to me, who I hold connection with outside of just this. Where does this compulsion come from? To connect through this vector? Why not any other? Is that my failing? Is it wrong to want it? Is that selfish? Is it sad? Either way, it’s futile. There’s no sequence of words I can say that will make you feel the same goosebumps I feel on my skin.

The first time I heard Cardiacs, I didn’t really get it. Their debut studio album (A Little Man, A House and the Whole World Window) was carnivalistic and spastic, and Sing to God left me nonplussed. But obsessions aren’t always immediate. I kept listening, and found myself more and more fascinated and engaged with every minute. They are now easily one of my favorite groups, and both those albums are some of my favorite albums of all time. There is a total freedom in their chord progressions, a heart-pounding thrill to their rhythmic shifts, a sick charm to their stylings. It seems undeniable to me now, but it took time to warm up to them.

Isn’t that strange? Why is it that some art needs dedication? Time for the love to gestate? Should that not be the sign of bad art? I don’t think so, but there was a time when I did. At one point, I believe I even said that art that disengages an audience might as well not even exist. I would never say that now, of course. I recognize not only that art is entitled to be adverse, but that adversity is sometimes what stokes enjoyment. People seem to obsess over art that is confounding or difficult. Be that a labyrynthine novel or cacophonous fugues, or, well, Yume Nikki, a game that eludes understanding. Games being difficult often literalizes this: when a game is difficult to beat, people often attach themselves to it in a new way. But Yume Nikki isn’t difficult in a traditional sense. It’s not a twitch reflex game and there’s no combat, and barely even success or fail state. The difficulty comes from interpretation; it is a perplexing and confusing game who’s true intentions and meanings are arcane and unclear. That is in part why it has such an enduring legacy. We get into a kind of Stockholm syndrome with art that refuses to be easy. There are lots of reasons for this, from the joy of creating meaning and discovery, or a sense of pride, but I also think that a key element of that is that it allows us to take time. It asks us to be patient and allow our feelings and responses to take time to develop. Sometimes love is a slow burn. That seems more natural, wouldn’t it, to derive love from developed relationship to something rather than an immediate instinctual spasm in your ganglia. Affection is just as often at first sight as it is stoked slowly over a fire. It can take time to ignite it, time to develop that relationality, to allow the interplay in your mind between you and the object. Sometimes it’s a slow burn.

Yume Nikki wasn’t like that, in any case. I loved it before I even tried it. Again, it precedes itself. It’s like I had to love it before even playing it. It was always-already a favorite. There’s other things like that for me: Greenaway’s The Falls, Vision Creation Newsun, Kentucky Route Zero, Borges, In A Silent Way, Irvin & Smith’s EXILE, Obayashi’s House, Slaughterhouse-5, Woman in the Dunes, the list goes on and on. I’m pretentious, I know. But you get it. Sometimes you decide that you want to love something, and it lets your love in. Maybe that’s stupid. I don’t know. When I think about Yume Nikki, I feel like it’s obvious that it has to be a favorite. That it’s obvious I love it. Maybe that’s dishonest. I try to suppress mentalities like that. But maybe it’s dishonest to pretend that I’m not driven by that kind of impulse all the time.

I struggle in general with music criticism; that old adage about dancing about architecture. Any time someone begins talking about good or bad music, I begin to get lost. I hate music reviews. They make me furious. Even on the off-chance I agree with the assessment, it turns my stomach a bit. I tried writing album reviews last year, including for a Cardiacs album, and while I did get something out of the process, it kind of formed a knot in my intestines. I know that no one cares about my music takes. That was thoroughly hammered into me in high school. But it still feels like begging. I keep private when it comes to music most of the time. I don’t talk to people about it much. It saves me the embarrassment and I can feel as cocky as I want in my head.

Why are games different for me? I’m not sure. I have, for some reason, gained a meager following on this site. I enjoy the validation, but I hate the way I leech onto it so easily. Maybe they’re not so different after all; I’ve seen my fair share of infuriating game reviews, and had the misfortune of reading Tevis Thompson’s work. It just so happens I play a lot of games, and don’t read as many books or watch as many movies, and have no inferiority complex around them. But I worry I turn myself into a cliche. I am constantly worried I am somehow phony or my prose is somehow purple.

I’ve moved to writing more on Medium (you can read this over there by clicking here) but the attention marketplace is brutal and I am, unshockingly, desperate for validation. When I have no friends to reach for, no partners to reflect with, sometimes I just want to throw myself against the screen and scream, “For the love of God, look at me.” I avoid posting things sometimes because I’m afraid no one will care. A desire to be perceived tends to conflict with my equally strong desire to not be judged. I am torn, the empty space between two sides of paper ripped in twain.

“...I didn’t think anything and I didn’t say anything to myself, I did what I could, a thing beyond my strength, and often for exhaustion I gave up doing it, and yet it went on being done, the voice being heard, the voice which could not be mine, since I had none left, and yet which could only be mine, since I could not go silent, and since I was alone, in a place where no voice could reach me. Yes, in my life, since we must call it so, there were three things, the inability to speak, the inability to be silent, and solitude, that’s what I’ve had to make the best of. Yes, now I can speak of my life, I’m too tired for niceties, but I don’t know if I ever lived, I have really no opinion on the subject.” - The Unnamable, Samuel Beckett

Beckett’s trilogy is a challenge. I would say it is nearly unreadable for most people. It consists of three books: Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnameable. He said of his play Not I, a fever dream of a monologue, that The Unnameable is an expansion on the subject. And, as linked by a trilogy, the theme seems to come into focus: the interminable din of interiority. Other themes emerge, of course. Theology is as often a subject of Beckett’s work, too, making a kind of emergent quietism. A professor of mine mentioned, as well, that the politics of Beckett’s work are often underemphasized, but undeniably present on examination. While better known as a playwright (and, in truth, probably where he is best; his novels are good but he really shines on the stage), Beckett’s prose is distinct, typically marked by an uncompromising structure and pessimistic solipsism. A specific brand of solipsism, too: an overbearing sensation of isolation, not out of skepticism but out of duress, where the extent of the universe and the self is horribly contained.

So many of his characters are trapped in small rooms, staring out windows or writhing in beds. If we read Madotsuki’s dream diary, perhaps it really would be a lot like his stuff. Beckett’s work in general so often finds characters immobilized in some capacity: stuck waiting, stuck in dirt, stuck in a trash can, locked in a room for some reason, staring out the window. What immobilizes them? And as for myself? I am stuck. My feet are impudent soldiers. I have a window, but I do not look out it often. Madotsuki will not leave her room. Her name literally means “windowed”. Madotsuki perhaps would fit in well with Beckett’s narrators, had she a voice, had she words.

Allegedly, when asked about one of his last works, What Where, Beckett said, "I don't know what it means. Don't ask me what it means. It's an object.” I admire this willingness to distance from the facet of his work, even though Beckett was apparently unhappy about its state. Sometimes, when we are making art, we aren’t privy to the exact machinations that take form in it. Cecil Taylor, the free jazz pianist, describes the creation of music as a trance-like state, almost like “levitation.” What Where does have overt themes and intention, but Beckett still felt distance from it, a level of inscrutability, a willingness to call it an object outside of him.

Now, I am reminded about one of the few things KIKIYAMA tells us about Yume Nikki: “There is no particular story or purpose. It is simply an exploring game.” Do we take them at their word? Nabakov said about Gogol that “he has nothing to tell you.” How literally do we take KIKIYAMA’s description? Is it lacking in purpose both in meaning and in mechanic? Is interpretation of Yume Nikki even worth doing?

There is this paradigm often that sees art as a key to understanding each other, a unique passage into someone else’s humanity. This is fraught. For one, art is a meditated construction, and that meditation is a form of moderation. Not all art is going to be someone bearing their soul. Even if we take it as such, media mediates, it transforms and transfigures. All art has its own distortion and reframing of whatever sensation was indelled into it. But even with all that, everything is still subject to interpretation and misinterpretation. I bring myself to the text and twist it everso slightly or everso much. That doesn’t mean we can’t try. I can try to understand what KIKIYAMA was trying to say, what they felt, who they are or were. But I’ve played Yume Nikki quite a bit. I’ve seen the dreams and heard the music. And I can say that I don’t think I know much about KIKIYAMA.

Misinterpretation is everywhere. All interpretation is misinterpretation. Some are further off the mark than others. The classic adage from Beckett, “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” It’s misinterpreted as a quote about endurance, courage, spirit. It’s not. It could be about many things, but isn’t about that. It would be clear from the first glance at the full text of Worstward Ho! And if there were games that embodied this quote, it would not be a roguelike or a Soulslike, it would be something like Yume Nikki. Something incoherent, inscrutable, cryptic, confusing. Something that says nothing and says it often. Worstward Ho! inhabits language, and Yume Nikki inhabits games, and they are unfathomable in their own ways.

Now, here’s the irony: I havent actually finished Beckett’s trilogy. I’ve read Molloy, but was unable to finish the second two books, Malone Dies and The Unnameable. I want to, of course, but I have brain problems that prevent me from doing so so easily. I’m able to understand the themes, the outline of it, but I cannot say I have indeed read them, at least to completion. Similarly, the majority of what you read here is written well before I finished Yume Nikki. Perhaps it’s the same reason that I didn’t finish Beckett’s trilogy that I can’t fixate on Yume Nikki. They are filled with nothing, by design. They are so quiet. When it is quiet, I am left with myself, my thoughts, my pangs. I do not want to dwell on them. Times like these, yes, make it worse, but it’s always there. So my eyes go bleary and I cannot focus. So I haven’t finished them. Is my interpretation incomplete? I’m not sure. I go back and forth on this. On one hand, there is a lot of meaning you can make without experiencing every inch of a piece. But on the other hand, isn’t any interpretation of a piece going to necessarily be lacking if there is critical information you may be missing? But where do you draw the line? Yume Nikki is non-linear, sprawling, and lacks a critical path. Is “finishing” it really in the spirit of the game? It’s an exploring game, after all. But in trying to make sense of it, do we need to seek out a more complete picture? Do you have to finish Yume Nikki before you can make anything of it?

Once again, I remind myself: “the danger is in the neatness of identifications.” Is thinking you need to finish it a symbol of that neatness? I insist that I must heed this warning, some of Beckett’s first words as he entered the literary scene, which asserts that identification and classification, despite being clean and reliable, is not sufficient on its own for interpretation. These words have haunted me ever since I heard them. I cannot escape their shadow. I always feel it cast over me. Resist the urge to equivocate the actions: to catalog and enumerate, and to interpret. Dreams, in particular, are vulnerable to this. How much pontification has been dedicated to the interpretation of dreams? From Zhuangzi to Jung, from biblical hermeneutics to new age pondering, everyone seems to have an opinion on what dreams mean. But over time, I’ve grown more and more hostile to the fetishization of dreams. Perhaps I dream differently.

One thing I never really understood about surrealist art is how it purports often to be derived from dreams. My dreams do not look like Salvador Dali paintings. Matter of fact, they don’t look like any kind of paintings. They’re weird movies with meandering plots and memorable architecture. I can always remember the architecture in my dreams. I never understood why. Surrealist imagery instead invokes to me a different sensation; typically one of mirth, actually. They often feel like the realization of a collage, an amalgam of stuff, a Bosch-like tableau. My dreams, too, are slapdash assemblies, but not of objects. They assemble emotional beats and ideas. “Kettle logic” after all (logic premised on contradictions) is was outlined by Freud to describe the logic of dreams. Perhaps if I literalize my dreams, it would be surreal to an outsider, but as the dreamer, they make a kind of perverted sense.

Yume Nikki is explicitly surrealist in that sense. It is explicitly about dreams, perhaps the most quintessential subject of surrealism. For me, there is almost something Dadaist about it, though less politically inclined. And, in truth, surrealism in general, as I have been told, has historically been more political than its evolution belies. Surrealism, like Dadaism, was often used as a tool to disrupt the status quo and the paradigms asserted by authority. It is a shame that in many ways surrealism has been disconnected from these roots, at least in my experience. So much surrealist art I have seen isn’t concerned with the status quo or politics. It’s usually concerned with interiority and perceptions of reality. Yume Nikki feels what way at times, for sure, but there is something else still. Perhaps it’s because, like surrealism challenged the status quo of what art should look like, Yume Nikki challenges the status quo of what a game should be.

There is a very direct comparison to make with LSD: Dream Emulator. They are almost shockingly similar games. Both are ostensibly about exploring dreams. And they both operate on a similar logic. Objects and spaces seem to defy sense, both mechanically and metaphorically. The rules of the world are similar, objects and places leading to objects and places, full of strange, surprising images with an undertone of horror. And there is a large overlap between their fandoms. But I can’t help but feel there is something fundamentally different about them. I struggle to name the difference. Maybe it’s mirth. Maybe it’s the direct presence of Madotsuki that is absent in LSD. Maybe it’s the quietness. Maybe it’s their similarity that makes them so different.

Comparisons are dangerous. Like identification, they can serves as thought-termination in the guise of interpretation. In fact, it is a form of identification, just one across the aisle. We identify similarities and corrolaries. In comparing, we can receive a warm glow in are chests, knowing that we have drawn a line between two disparate dots. But that act of comparison doesnt need to be the end of the line. Comparative studies are powerful and revealing, but they serves as a canvas. Each piece is their own dimension on a plane, and it is in their interplay, how they reside perpendicular and orthogonal to one another, how they intersect and diverge, that is where we can paint something beautiful. That is where we can learn. And maybe that’s why, despite their innumerable similarities, I find myself completely unmotivated to compare LSD and Yume Nikki: the space they make is flat.

I find myself making comparisons very often. A teacher of mine told me he viewed it to some degree a strength, a sign of critical thinking. But I often worry it’s a flaw, endlessly pulling from wells and mills of reference. Do I speak in references? Why is so much you read here dense with allusion and citation? I’ll gladly summarize a wiki article. It is so easy for me to cough up a Simpsons quote. I loathe reference humor, but the connections always spring out of me, strands of twine, prehensile, strangling thumb tacks. I worry it is a sign that I am so bereft of character that I can only quote, cite, and graft. I am skeptical of this fear, but it’s still there.

I mentioned him as an unmentioned earlier, but like dreams, this piece is allowed to contradict itself: David Lynch is perhaps the most popular and distinctly surrealist figure of the era. A peer of mine in a class once compared Beckett to Lynch, which I sort of balked at, and that comparison irks me to this day. Their main similarities are that they are both “weird” and they are both skinny white guys with gray hair. The closest thematic parallel would be an interest in quiet, but while Lynch is interested in quieting the questions, Beckett wants to quiet everything. Beckett’s absurdism does not, to me, appear comparable to Lynch’s almost orthodox surrealism. (Though, I must confess, my initial reading of Waiting for Godot arguably read it as a surrealist text; “Was I sleeping…?” initially read to me as a Cartesian query.) Routinely explored in Lynch’s work is the relationship between dreams and reality. For him, dreams are portals to other worlds and scrying pools. Personally, while I like Lynch as much as the next terminally-online queer, I find this subject consistently dull. I am not moved or fascinated by the interpretation of dreams, because I do not ascribe value to them. I do not percieve them as more than hallucinations. I don’t have this kind of mystical or metaphysical attachment to dreams. I always have interpreted them as stampedes of images, stews of thoughts, an unclear montage. For me, I think of a dream more like the way Christian Metz thinks of a camera shot. “Here is a thought. Here is an image.”

I have had dreams that have affected me deeply, of course. Disturbing, delighting, melancholy and bittersweet, terror and tittilation. I will not share them. Absolutely not. My dreams have also served as creative inspiration, too. A lot of ideas I have originate from dreams, or hypnagogic muses just before sleep. But I wouldn’t call my work surrealist, not in this dream-like sense. It’s rare that I am interested in disrupting the perceptions of reality within my work. Dreams feel a little played out, like sex and suicide. But I don't know. My cynical and skeptical proclivities leave the oneiric in the humdrum.

That’s perhaps the reason I find myself more respectful of mysticism than orthodoxy. Because it is personal, I am not asked to believe their interpretation, only respect it. I am extensively atheist; I do not think there is any god or gods to become one with. But I find mysticism, whether that be Sufism, or the Kabbalah, or whatever, or even faiths that encourage this like Quakerism or Buddhism, while still within the confines of their respective faiths, typically turn to a form of epistemology founded more on direct experience, rather than on institutional frameworks. That is, at the least, respectable to me; after all, I can’t really challenge what someone else has experienced, even if I would interpret the same experience differently. This is what they call “universal priesthood”, I am told. If Fayerabend wants us to bring epistemological anarchism to science, why not bring it to faith, too? Where we are all engaged in a process of discovery, just this time with the spiritual?

Still more ironically, I too respect Talmudic scholarship and the like in this other way. Religious scholarship requires a lot of dedication. Perhaps it’s my Jewish blood flaring up, whatever that would mean. (I mean, hell, kabbalah is also the subject of rigorous study. (Kabbalah wants to have it both ways sometimes: both the mystic experience and the mastery of identifications. (Though I’m no Kabbalist.))) The endless scrutiny and careful interpretation at the very least calls forth a careful reading. Theologians often end up citing Derrida and Habermas, and some key philosophers of communication in the 20th century, like McLuhan and Ong, were deeply religious. Religion, after being about the divine, is about the transmission of that knowledge. A careful eye ought be brought to that transmission, no?

These both have their issues, of course. For one, direct experience is unreliable beyond the self. That is why, in part, we have the story of the oven of Akhnai in the Talmud. At the same time, scholarship often devolves into apologetics; in the rigorous study of a religion, one inevitably encounters propositions that can only be justified through faith. But apologetics insists that there is no faith at play, that there is empirical and rational justification for everything they believe, a dishonest denial of faith itself. These two angles are in conflict: one, in unverifiability, and the other failing to verify itself. And there’s a key thing these both share: the disconnection from others. Often including the world around you. That was Spinoza’s main drive, after all, celebrating the divine through the study of nature, and there’s a story of how Feynman marvelled at the scholarship on display in the Talmud, but was bothered by how little the rabbis showed interest in the natural world. Mystics are often so focused on the abnegation of the self that they become enamored with its destruction, not giving anything else attention. Religious scholars are often holed up in a monastary or yeshiva or whatever little religious hovel they’ve made. Should isolation truly be so essential for spiritual knowledge? Does turning away from others really give us access to anything more profound?

In general, I am torn between ecstasy and study. Both appeal to me. I desire both rigorous analysis and experiential knowing. But these are often incompatible in the same breath. One can have both, but only apart from each other. But more often, I find myself without either. But I share this with them: I am often alone.

It is tempting to go one way or the other with Yume Nikki. Either we decode and demystify everything we can, or experience it as a kind of ecstatic experience. I believe, in this case, the latter is more fruitful. Of course there are hundreds of wiki pages and forum posts identifying and analyzing every corner of the dreamscape. But Yume Nikki is an exploring game. The state of exploration, of discovery and experience of images and sounds. Is it perhaps missing the point to dissect it? The danger is in the neatness of identifications.

But how about the in-between? As Martin Buber asserted, it is possible to both consider the tree and be in relation to it. How can I hold them both? But what about something else? Neither the ecstatic nor the catalogic. Instead recognizing it as an object? How can we access this golden mean? Or is it not a mean at all, instead a new vector to experience it through? How, in the first place, do we go about interpreting Yume Nikki? Do we interpret it as we would a dream? As we would scripture? How can we interpret it as an object?

A great deal of interpretation of Yume Nikki will rely on the interpretation of the image. Non-verbal storytelling is pretty common in games, but I would hesitate to call what this game does storytelling. Most of what we experience in the game is disjointed, connecting only by space. We have to rely on disjointed images in a medium where visual language is yet thoroughly established. This makes interpreting Yume Nikki a particularly challenging endeavor.

Peter Greenaway’s filmography, if it could be said to have core mission, would be to rethrone the position of imagery in cinema. This can be seen as an extension, I think, of his early formalist work, which positioned the structure of cinema first, too. The Draughtsman’s Contract acts as a thesis statement of sorts, a statement of purpose. It is a period drama of conniving aristocrats in which the protagonist’s tragic flaw is his failure to acknowledge the potency of symbolism. He is revealed as the pawn in a game when the symbol of the pomegranate is explained to him, a thought he was not only oblivious to but was ignorant to even the consideration of. In Rembrandt’s J’accuse! (a film entirely dedicated to analysis of a single painting), the ever-snobby director, himself an artist, says it outright: “the interpretation of the manufactured image in our culture is undernourished, ill-informed, and impoverished.” He might be right. I am not sure I would call myself visually literate. I am not sure I am good at interpreting paintings. Maybe I ought to learn. Maybe Yume Nikki would make more sense after that.

Film is composed of image, of course, and sound. And no doubt video games typically are as well. But these images are the fiction, the paint, ironically the “text” which Greenaway rails against in its respective medium. The irreducible building block of games, the atom of the medium is the mechanic. In the futile search for the syntagm, that is what we will likely find. But most will find this insufficient for interpretation. It oftent relies on “fiction” (as Juul would put it) to frame these mechanics. The mechanic is fertile for meaning but still needs seeds to be sown. We can try to interpret mechanics on their own, and Yume Nikki is a challenge to this. It is sparse and unclear. Whither conveyance?

For example: there’s a room in Yume Nikki they call the “stabbing room”. In it, there are dozens and dozens of NPCs crowding the room. Only little pockets exist between them that Madotsuki can squeeze through. These pockets move around randomly with no pattern; you just have to be lucky. Or, you know, you could equip the knife effect and start stabbing the NPCs. And that’s what most people do. That’s why the call it the stabbing room. I did not have the knife effect when I encountered this room. So what I did was just hold down the direction I wanted to go, and waited, hoping that eventually the opening would come my way. I remember setting up an arcane solution, where I flipped my keyboard upside down, so the arrow key was being held down (up?) by a battery I had balanced to support it. In either case, no matter how you manage to get through that room, all you’ll find at the end is a weird blue lump. No door, no item, no prize. Waiting that only knows itself in vain.

We can offer an interpretation to this: KIKIYAMA says your efforts were in vain. “And there comes the hour when nothing more can happen and nobody more can come and all is ended but the waiting that knows itself in vain.” Or, if you stabbed your way through, that your penchant for violence will go unrewarded. We can offer those interpretations, or more. But they do not feel satisfying to me. In fact, when I imagine this room, the more likely explanation to me? I think KIKIYAMA just thought it was funny. There’s an implicit paradigm always here: that meaning usurps aesthetic impulse. So much of Yume Nikki feels like it has no bespoke purpose, like it is just there because the creator wanted it there. Why does KIKIYAMA need to justify any of this with meaning? What if they just wanted them there? Is that enough?

And, you know, the effects, we can make an assertion there. How Madotsuki’s body is malleable in the dream world, how that flexibility could serve as an escape. How she might be dreaming of worlds where she can feel self-actualized. (This is where the trans reading of the game can come in.) It’s a little unorthodox: the effects are not what we often think of as ideal selves. As a frog, or a lamp-post, as a munchkin, or whatever. But they offer a flexibility to embodiment which could be read as freeing. Madotsuki’s dreams offer a unique and freeform space of self-acutalization, where her body and essence are subject to her whims, but they are still trapped within the arcane logic of dreams. Is this revelation the key?

That’s an interpretation we could bring. It has weight, and it holds water. It might even true to how I interpret it. But something about it feels off. It’s not that it feels incomplete, but it feels unnatural. Like grasping for straws. These kinds of formalist interpretations often make me grimace a bit. Even beyond just games, but especially in games. I feel like the narrator in The Beginner’s Guide, so enamored with my own interpretation as to lose sight of reason, to lose sight of experience, to lose track of what Susan Sontag might call an “erotics of art”. Particularly when I feel as though I must bring an application of my own experience or bring in social or political issues. They feel forced, like I’m performing, like I am clawing for an interpration that I can posit holds value, for an audience or interlocutor. That I can find a reason that Yume Nikki is important, whatever that means, to be important. But it doesn’t need to be important. It’s a bare bones game, there’s no boss fights or power-ups. When grasping for meaning in its mechanics, I find my fingers move through water. And so I find little, in the mechanics of Yume Nikki, that I can say I feel as though have bespoke meanings.

So, we can resort to the image. That, at least, we have frameworks with which to analyze. But there is this naive quality to Yume Nikki that make this difficult, too. Tools like composition seem to be in the toolbelt for KIKIYAMA, and if they are, they are used sparingly. The way the game wants to show you things are not typical; the structure of RPGMaker and video games in general operate in a distinct aesthetic code from that of painting or cinema. Our analytic tools can’t be so easily applied across mediums. But even within the medium of games and RPGMaker stuff, Yume Nikki is weird in every capacity.

Let’s enumerate some images: A stairwell surrounded by hands reaching up on long, wavy arms. A neon chevron with a smiley face. A maze of geometric shapes. A dwarf. An empty mall with wandering denizens. A giant, monster with limbs sticking out of it and a quivering jaw. A lamp with legs. A decapitated giant. A dead body on the road. A black-and-white handdrawn desert. A hand with an eye in its palm. These some of Yume Nikki’s most striking images. They all can be interpreted in this immediate sense; I can identify what their subject is. But the second order of meaning, in which I interpret the interrelations of these images, begins to leave me befuddled. And that’s not counting the abstract imagery. A structuralist approach to meaning would find an abundance of signs but an arcane syntax that defies traditional readings.

There’s an area in the sewer where you can look at posters on the wall. They’re weird, awkward doodles, a bit disturbing, lots of strange bodily shapes. Surely, if there was ever a time to interpret an image, it’s when the game throws them in your face. But still they elude interpretation. I don’t know what these drawings are supposed to be. I don’t know what they're supposed to mean. It almost feels like a taunt.

This is the kettle logic of Yume Nikki. Not of propositions but of images. The visual and mechanical languages of Yume Nikki are inconsistent, contradictory, and incoherent.

The constant inscrutability and confusion of Yume Nikki that makes the act of interpreting it so difficult is also precisely what makes it such an enduring work of art, and why interpretation of it often turns inward. We are often called to difficult and challenging art. Sometimes it is because of density, but with Yume Nikki, it is because it is cryptic. It has no shortage of imagery but is bereft of structure. The absence of context, events, make it a rich soil for interpretation, despite it being almost impossible to interpret in the first place. It is the impossibility which calls meaning making forth from the inside.

“As long as there is time, there will always be longing. And once all longing has ended, the world will no longer need time… And those without longing will no longer need the world.” - Face in :THE LONGING:

:THE LONGING: is a game I have written about before. You are a shade, created in the palm of a massive stone king, and the king asks you to wake him up in 400 days time. You have a few choices of endings. You have a lot of time to consider them. I will not explain them too deeply: a hopeful ending, a handful of tragic endings. I chose an ending many would describe as the bad ending. The shade, torn between a desire not to succumb to the king’s wishes, and knowing that nothing awaits it above the subterranean kingdom, throws itself off a cliff into the abyss. I chose this ending, knowing I could choose something else, knowing that I could give the shade a better life. I made that choice because it felt more honest to how I was feeling at the time.

At the end of my little write-up on :THE LONGING:, I said: “As I write this, my longing has not finished. I am still wandering the dark kingdom. Searching for an exit, for fulfillment, for an escape, for purpose, for something to do. Maybe I am speaking in metaphor here, maybe not. Time marches on. Let it march. I shouldn’t dwell on it any longer. It’s time to move forward.” That was a lie. I keep telling myself things like that. It’s never been true. It’s always been a lie. I’m still here.

And before anyone gets the wrong idea, I’m fine. I’m fine, really. This isn’t a cry for help or anything. Like Danny says in Beeswing: “I have bad days, and I have better days.” I’m just describing the bad days. Some of this was written on bad days. Other parts, good days. Trace it, if you can. Words can be deceiving. But I’ll tell you: don’t get the wrong idea. I’m fine. I’m used to this. This has been how I have felt for as long as I can remember. I’m fine. I’m safe. But all this is a part of being honest and saying what is inside me. At least some of it.

Time is often understood by event. Bergson would perhaps assert that “event” is antithetical to the essence of time, as it implies some instantaneous and indivisible moment. But duration, even if a legitimate understand of time, ends up being punctuated by the event. It is disrupts the heterogeneity of time by being cleanly divisible by our mind. My point being that, within the confusing ontology of duration, the event situates duration in some form of intelligibility. In other words, time makes more sense when things are happening. That was my main takeaway from :THE LONGING:. Blink, isolation goes on, happy as the day is long and it drag its slow length along.

Time and plot are similar. They are understood, again, by event and continuity. Yume Nikki is almost entirely plotless, and as such it’s chronology is disjointed, if it exists at all. No events happen for the majority of Yume Nikki. Things occur, sure, but events? Not quite. An assembly of objects and images and sounds that are unsituated in time and plot. But I say “almost entirely” because the final moments, the ending of the game, retroactively constructs a plot. There is an event, and the event thus situates the game’s reality in time and plot.

Today, as I write this, I learned how Yume Nikki ends. I don’t exactly know what I was expecting, but I wasn’t shocked. Suicide has become a trope in a lot of art, which makes me feel bummed to say. It is used as a cliche, a signifying gesture which depicts a vague state of affairs. It often feels cheap. Death is a card in an author’s pocket so they can command the audience to feel something. It feels cheap. But that is the ending, we can’t act as if that trope doesn’t manifest itself in the ending moments of this game. A game so profoundly dense with inscrutability abruptly shifts to a profoundly easy to understand image: a blood spatter.

I hate confessional soul-bearing art. I hate what I’m writing now. I’m sorry. I do not want to see my own soul, let alone someone else’s. I don’t want to hear about your queer experience or your mental health problems. I’m too busy drowning in my own. You should write about them, no doubt, sing, paint, make games about them. I think they are necessary and good. I want you to make them. But I’m probably not going to like it.. There are exceptions, but they are rare. It’s almost like twee for me. It’s too clear. I need muddiness. I don’t even like poetry that much, honestly. I like writing it. I don’t enjoy most poetry I read or hear. It eludes immediate sensation and I am made to have to apprehend it. When too am I afforded the sublime? I see the soul born and I write this, which I hate.

“I took a walk, I got tired,
I turned around and I got almost home
but then I got tired and turned around again
I wrote this down, I erased it
I was filled with remorse for both
erasing it and also for writing it down” - Less than One, They Might Be Giants

They Might Be Giants are probably ipso facto my favorite band. Between them and Pink Floyd, they have been with my the longest (the latter a bit senior), and both I have an unimpeachable place in my heart. Cult rock bands like TMBG, or Cardiacs, or Guided by Voices, or The Fall, or what have you, tend to have a fandom of people who are immensely committed to their work. And that commitment tends to result in a rigorous and constant encyclopedic record of their work and history. I think a big part of that has to do with the immediately recognizable idiosyncrasies of these groups; they are immediately recognizable as different, even if the causes of that difference aren’t clear. But it tends to be the only place you can go for that specific vibe. Sometimes this is described as being “weird”. Such things get applied to games like Yume Nikki. Since they defy expectations, and experiment with imagery and subject matter that isn’t typical, the only word we can offer is weird. I’ve expressed my frustrations with this category, and John Linnell of TMBG has, too:

“I think that we, y'know, have had this periodic problem where we try to do something that's interesting and new, and it comes off as weird… but we're really not about being weird. Once you're familiar with what we're doing it's not weird at all… it's just something interesting and new.” - John Linnell

It’s of my opinion that John Linnell is one of the greatest lyricists of all time. Of the writers that have influenced me, though he has not published a book of any sort to my knowledge, he is easily one of the most paramount. Dense with allusions, wordplay, unreliable narrators, jokes, just constant biting wit. I struggled to pick just one little lyrical excerpt from his work to put on display here. There are so many choices. Open Mike Eagle, in an interview with Vox, identifies the band’s ability to voice sorrow with mirth as a deep influence on his work, and I think this is undeniably a pervasive quality of TMBG’s music. And certainly songs like “It’s Not My Birthday” and “The End of the Tour” brought me comfort in my sadness. Are these sad songs?

I would not, at first, categorize Yume Nikki as a sad game. There is unease and disease, but it is only in its final moments does a sense of sorrow truly set in. That image retroactively permeates the game, casting its shadow on the experience. Like this event retroactively creates plot, it retroactively instills sorrow. But it makes sense, a bit, doesn’t it? Madotsuki’s life is a montage of flickering dreams, a parade of strange images with no overt meaning. When she is awake, there is little to do. And when there is finally so little to do in her dreams as in her room, when the possible selves she can imagine are gone, what else would her option be? Go outside? Heavens no.

Suicide is hard to talk about. It turns into an acorn in your throat the second it comes up. When we talk about it, we talk about the act. The act itself is a painful subject. But I believe we focus on it because it is easier to talk about than the real issue: the state of being suicidal. I cringe when someone says something like “suicide is an epidemic”. This sentence makes no sense to me. Suicide is not a disease; it is an action. The conditions that cause that action are the epidemic. This substitution defers the issue to the symptom. I believe this is dangerous. But I understand the impulse: the state of being suicidal is an ugly and uncomfortable subject. Camus called it the “only serious question”, and it is a difficult question, at that. How do we justify to ourselves that life is worth living? Another way of asking it: is there a good reason to wake up? Everyone is going to go about that differently.

Emil Cioran perhaps was the most precise writer when it comes to the subject. I ought read more of it than the occasional excerpt. We could look to Durkheim for his methodologies or modern therapeutic approaches, and there’s immense import there, but as a personal subject, Cioran’s writing on suicide addressed the subject with a clarity and a bite that serves as an unguent. I always remember this: “It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.” His writing, full of quips that are deeply pessimistic and depressing, for what it’s worth, did not ever shy away from the emotional state of being suicidal. And that’s important, because that, after all, is the problem. Suicide is not the issue; being suicidal is. Ironically, it’s a bit comforting.

せまいせまいあなぼこで
夢を見せあうぼくたちは
あの世もこの世もいられない
あの世もこの世もいられない
ああ神様　子どもの神様
ぼくらはあなたの遊んだ砂場の中ですり傷だらけです

Inside a cramped, narrow hole,
the two of us show each other our dreams.
We can't be in that world; neither can we be in this world.
We can't be in that world; neither can we be in this world.
Dear God-the god of children,
we are covered in scratches in the sandbox where you amused yourself.
穴ぐらぐらし [Hole-Dwelling], Kikuo

I am trying to remember who or what said it, but I remember the assertion that death is in great part the absence of community. It’s a kind of exile. And what is it, from The Sunset Limited? “You can't be one of the dead because that which has no existence can have no community. No community! My heart warms just thinking about it. Blackness, aloneness, silence, peace, and all of it only a heartbeat away.” A thought I keep coming back to lately is that grief is tied to the severance of communication. Community and communication: they share roots, literally and figuratively. I struggle to find any community I feel truly comfortable in. There is always a sense in me that I do not belong. When my social anxiety gets a hold of me, and I manage to forget all the joy socializing gives me in service of anguish over some embarrassing foible, I write an apology letter in my mind to everyone I’ve ever spoken to, and I vow never to speak to anyone ever again.

I can’t help but find myself, now, thinking about moon: Remix RPG Adventure. Love-de-Lic’s debut game (and arguable magnum opus) satirizes and deconstructs the genre of the JRPG. Yume Nikki does much the same, by taking the skeleton of the JRPG and interpreting it as something almost unrecognizable. I could spend a long time talking about moon, but I will spare you most of it; after all, I’ve already spent a long time talking about other random things. For me, though, one of the key themes of moon is the, for lack of a better term, extensivity of games. A game designer friend of mine said one of the biggest revelations for him was when his partner asked him what happened after people were finished playing his game. Games are not one-way streets, and the experiences we have inside and outside of them mingle together. The plea “open the door” serves a unique meaning in moon in this way. Madotsuki, meanwhile, will not open her door. Happy days. Blink! Isolation goes on. Inside a cramped and narrow hole. The game shall not extend into reality. This is the room. This is the game.

I do not think I’m agoraphobic. I am told it is most frequently exhibited by a fear of being unable to escape. I don’t really feel that compulsion of egress, I don’t think. But I wonder, sometimes, why I struggle to do anything other than stay in the dark. I know I have depression. I know I have social anxiety. I know I have ADHD. It’s hard to explain my horrible schedule as the product of something other than a sleep disorder. I might have other mental quirks, too, yet undiagnosed, existing in a pocket of undecidability. Maybe I have OCD, hell, maybe I have autism, I don’t know. The doctors I ask shrug and they often disagree with each other. It’s impossible to know sometimes. I keep asking myself if I’m faking it. If I’m just a lazy, pathetic worm who is enabled by a handful of vectors of privilege to be so pathetic. I don’t know.

Why did I write any of this? Who is this for? Is this what you want? Is this what anyone wants? Is it what I want? Is there an audience for this? Is this what people want? Am I feeding the mosquitos? Will anyone read this? Is there a good reason to read this? Does this make anyone happy? Who is fulfilled? Would this be worth doing if I knew it couldn’t save me? What does that mean? What is this? Are these questions doing anything? Am I learning anything? Are you? Is this worth doing? This endless, deliberate tanning? This sopor for succor, this animus ex logos? The rotten? What do these words mean to you? Is there a reason, a good reason to keep writing this? Or is it time to stop?

I will say it again. There are always hidden silences waiting behind the chair. They come out when the coast is clear. They eat everything that moves. I go shaky at the knees. Lights go out, stars come down, like a swarm of bees.

I understand why Madotsuki stays in bed so much. If you don’t get out of bed, the day never has to start. I wouldn’t say I spend a lot of time asleep, I don’t think I sleep more than the average person. But I have always had trouble falling asleep. When I was younger and had to wake up at the crack of dawn for school, I would be running on a couple hours of sleep typically. I would spend hours in bed, music playing sometimes, in the dark, alone with my thoughts. My horrid thoughts. So I found things to do. Things to imagine. It’s not daydreaming. For the majority of my life, nearly every night, before bed, I close my eyes, and imagine a different life. One where I am loved, where I feel love, where I am successful, where I am self assured, where I do not hate my body, where I am living a life that feels authentic. I imagine worlds where I do not have to stay in bed and dream of better lives.

I keep telling myself this is the last time. This is the first time. That I’ll finally get out of this hole. That I’ll change. That I’ll get better. That I’ll get on track. I keep telling myself that. I keep telling myself that. It’s never been true. It’s always been a lie. I’m still here. I can’t stop stopping. I can’t move. My body and my soul is paralyzed in styptic. I hit my head. I gasp. I writhe without sheets. The past is repugnant, the future is unthinkable, and the present is unbearable. The honest truth is a desire to give up. But giving up is an execution. So nothing. I keep telling myself this is the last time. This is the first time. That I’ll finally get out of this hole. That I’ll change. That I’ll get better. That I’ll get on track. I keep telling myself that. I keep telling myself that. It’s never been true. It’s always been a lie. I’m still here. I’m not sure if I’ll ever finish Yume Nikki. I’m not sure Madotsuki will ever leave her room.