This is the text contained in the free browser game TIME REMOVER
You should play it before reading any further.
I watched two people make out in the s-bahn today. Minutes before, when they had not started kissing with what seemed like genuine passion, she’d been enclosed around him, hand on wrist, curving into his side. He’d been turned 90 degrees away, face slumped forward, neck bent slightly above the shoulders in the currently common way, staring blankly through pale, watery eyes into the blue glow emanating from his hand.
Don’t worry. Nobody’s coming for your dissociatives.
The knitting needles and crossword puzzles, the various screens and projectors and lenses and whatever elses are safe. Especially as history reveals itself to have been a continuously ongoing event even to the most dedicated of nonlookers. Constant contemporary chaos drives desire for distance.
Scratching into cheap paper can remove you from time as effectively as twitching at semi-expensive plastics. Reaching back into the crevices of your mind, rotating through the three letter abbreviations you’ve memorised to find the one that fits can obliterate reality just as well as repetitive reptilian response-reactions to calculated cues.
Wether you tear up the paper in boredom or reel away from the lights in illness, like the depressingly boring majority of conflicts conducted in the name of taste,is a simple question of what you’re used to.
Resistance can be built up and torn down, consciously. It should be. Remaining in flux is the only way, always one step ahead of either depression or mania, playing the two against each other when it suits you. The horrible, perpetually shifting middle ground of pragmatism. A thick skin, crucial in one state of being, proves callous and isolating in another. Relativisms sprout abundantly near discussions of withdrawal and indulgence alike.
One can’t imagine life with, the other without, the very same thing. Both should try.
Now, with all urgency of taking a clear stand in the overarching issue temporarily removed, let’s look at the matter at hand.
While the abstract forces of engagement and awareness, god-shaped by costant invocation through popular psychology, duke it out over our collective consciousness, indie game design had to change to keep up with the competition. The AAA response of becoming more and more of everything is paywalled behind being big enough to outsource labour to places with lower wages than the targeted market, but free-to-play also means free-to-peruse.
There used to be oceans of metaphors to be trawled here, but the whales, dolphins and turtoises have long been abandoned for more precise, probably discussed in terms of plankton by now, formal models of exploitability.
Now that everything is neatly segmented and cartographised in mobile-land, the real work must be in maintaining these extraction machines, in the constant adjustments and laboratory experiments, making sure that you’re always vibrating closely enough to around 3hz, mirroring the ketamine mice. Maintaining mice-vibration, honorable tradition that it is, must earn a decent living, but exporting that knowledge into the heart of the very indie scene that always pretended to frequent higher frequencies is kind of funny.
This is important: When I talk about the indie scene, I actually mean something akin to a crime-scene, which is not really connected to the other crime-scenes at different edges of different cities, even if it the details of my specific scene feel so vivid and real that they must surely stand in some sort of reverb-relation with everything else. There simply are large groups of people who use the internet everyday, and very intensely, but who use it from very varied positions in life, who use it in completely different ways and who share, essentially, no quick to recognise snippets of culture with each other.
Basically, there has always been a secret undercurrent of games that do extremely well but that nobody talks to me about, so my point here is not that, suddenly, hyper casual mobile game design worked well on steam, because it’d been doing that for years, my vague, and, by the way, potential, gesture in the general direction of a clear expression would be alluding much more to the general vibe shift that has undoubtedly taken place.
Our yearning for the void, once laid bare, made repeatable and sold for cheap, has proven as profitable as expected by the people who’ve been staring at spreadsheets until, repetitive analysis ploughing deep lines into the brainfield, they became them.
The first fix isn’t free, but it’s the last time you’ll pay, constituting a fairer deal than most, to be honest. It’s a testament to the compulsive power of what we used to call flow, but what is now probably referred to by a more convoluted term. The idea is what counts, anyway.
Constantly being challenged just enough to remain interested, but not too much to become frustrated would be the key to a happy gaming experience if we were all the same all the time, which we are not, but it’s something that has been clearly defined and leads to continuous engagement, which seems a more reliable metric than the vague notion of fun, which is a great thing to discuss for a very long time by the way.
There is just the problem of the deep-seated knowledge that, as you watch the hundreds of colorful shapes blip and blop out of rendered existence, you are kind of wasting your time and, as you notice your fingers muscle memories conforming to the new motions required of them, that you are kind of being conditioned.
Neither is bad, of course, as such concrete-ness is reserved for a more deserving, less easy to explain thing that I will hopefully get to later, down the line. Our yearning for the void is earnest and we should heed it’s pay honestly. Still, there can be a tiny feeling of unease as you depersonalise after a certain time of colors flashing into your eyes, as the only part of your body that feels real are the fingers that repeat their prescribed motions with automatic duty, the commands given too quickly to register in whatever sliver of reasoning survives the onslaught of stimulation.
You’ll spiral here, if you lose control, eating yourself alive for not being able to get up and move and do something more commonly acknowledge as worthwhile, refusing to get up and to move and to do something. It’s a kind of paralysis of shame and bewilderment.
Too much cognition. Too much awareness. Add audio.
This is not unique to software. Any mechanical business, be it scribbling lines on a piece of paper, gently raking sand inside of a little box, chopping onions or performing rhythmic stabbing motions at plastics, becomes more dissociative by addition of a separate layer of audio. Disconnecting what you’re hearing from what you’re interfacing with creates a powerful tear in your ability to take in the current moment. Your brain, splayed between two inputs, ceases processing reality as usual.
The more unfamiliar, the less predictable the additional layer of audio is, the more it will cleave through your brain. You can get used to anything, of course, relaxing to literal noise, but there’s probably a reason that all content creation personalities develop a very specific voice that they always speak in, a kind of reliable source of sound, meant to provide not provocation, but background chatter. You dissociate softly.
What this does to the way in which the people who we’re listening to with half an ear for half of our day are speaking is pretty interestening. There’s no point in making concise statements, that would just ruin your ability to generate minutes, and so we’re living with a surprise abundance of hypnotic mnemoticism, where the modern equivalent of the wise druid elder repeatedly mumbles the same 5 truths in a loop while you perform the equally looping ritualistic inputs of dissociation until you’ve opened your subconscious to the mantras, slowly imprinting you with their patterns of speech and vocabulary and ways of understanding the world.
Voluntarily conducted subliminal reconditioning through fugue states deliberately triggered by repetitive interactions. Bach is laughing up and down and up the grave again. The age of auto-hypnosis is upon us and we are pretty fucked up, but hey, public transportation has gotten a new teleportation update, so it’s something.
If you can hear me, which you have a much higher chance of doing by not consciously looking at the blinking lights, I would recommend you to try your hardest to create as much silence around yourself as possible while you’re here.
Maybe, if you’re lucky, there are big and chunky noise-cancelling headphones, but it’s much more likely that most convenient way to increase silence is to terminally decrease the volume of the music you’re listening to. Whatever, this is risky territory for me. I can’t be seen for too long, talking to you directly. It’s kind of bad form, no?
In any case, it’s okay to destroy all the squares on the screen while you adjust your audio settings, really, don’t worry. You’ll see all of this again and again anyways; like, you’ll grow tired of reading this part and scroll ahead later. And also, there will be a nice little pattern if you don’t do anything for a while.
Silence.
Relative silence, of course. But it’s a kind of sum total lack of really compelling stimulus that allows me to unhook my brain and let it dangle peacefully.
Consider: The hypnotism of the campfire, the sparks against the night, fading out individually but creating constant collective motion, flickering flames, seemingly hanging upwards only to blink out of existence immediately to be replace by a cousin, chunks of wood turning into red embers and white ash over time that seems to flow differently, in little cricks and cracks and clouds of pine-smell.
And: The bright shimmering of a birch tree, shaking in an impossible to not immediately compartmentalise constellation of cascading leaves and shadows and shades of green, rustling in the gentle wind, reflected in the lake, where gentle rings, calm consequences of invisible motion, carve only the softest of valleys in the water.
But then, also: The alien emptiness of the jagged stone panorama, formed by forces too subtle to be seen, wind slowly carrying the landscape itself away, following rhythms that elude our grasp by the simple evasive maneuver of taking longer than our lives to loop. There is a silence here, a deep, howling silence, the complete absence of anything, the absolute annihilation of the little flimsy pieces of dust you called yourself.
This is the cold terror of the eventual but inevitable realisation that the vast majority of everything is, actually, made out of nothing and that we are on our way towards it. Better put on some music. Dance a bit. Enjoy the flashing lights, shake yourself with the vibration strangers, loose track of your moment as it oscillates in the motion, push the silence out, drown it in action, make it go go go away, please, anything to stop the silence in which we fail to hear even only the echo of our insignificance.
And so sometimes, when the wind blows from a nicer direction, it truly does seem like we are living in the age of smaller games with worse graphics, made by fewer people who work less to get paid more; it’s just that most of those games are about gambling. You can’t get them all, I guess.
The point is this: Indie game design, like a lot of other stuff, has accelerated.
One way to measure this acceleration, without having to actually do any research, fueling the word-typing-machine with pure and raw instinct, is to look at how juice, the indie-scene word for things seemingly unnecessary things happening in response to your premeditated actions, has stopped being a kind of cool and stylish thing and has turned into a precisely wielded machine of visual noise. Instead of shaking the screen in response to indvidual actions, as hath been proscribed in the year of 2013, the screen itself stays comparatively still while everything on it never ceases to move.
It’s a function of the cheaper to make - harder to master itch.io horror aesthetics as well, the crunchy pixels, the shifting textures, the vortex snapping, it’s all trying very hard to be visually noisy, never staying still, always shimmering and glitching. It’s all aggressively aggressive.
On the back of those aesthetics the still ongoing wave of content generation and socialisation focused indie multiplayer experiences is differentiating itself from the various roblox game modes I’m too old to know, that they are adapting for a more sophisticated audience. There’s big money here, seemingly suddenly accessed by teams of surprisingly small sizes. This profitable part of indie is being supported by steam, which has silently taken care of some of the more annoying problems of hosting online multiplayer games for friends.
Eventually, the hold-out developers of finite games, always severely overestimating their importance to the average player, recognised a shift in the dynamic as rivulets of cash flowed towards games that, while reskins of social games and slotmachines, were definitely indie and also unabashedly themselves, and they responded.
Where the single-coin slotmachine beckons with the blinking lights of endless progression-as-a-circle (PAAC), low/lower/no budget games with more bourgeois interests have become tighter. This manifests itself as a slowly accelerating process of self-concious integration of the desires and discourses that are extremely important to comparatively tiny groups of people.
When we’re not busy yearning for the void, we yearn for our childhood, I guess. Why not, sure, it’s sometimes described in cultural shorthand as a beautiful time where possibilities were endless, which, hm, yes, it’s true, but it’s also actually pretty much not true, like being a child must be super scary and strange, a weird trip for sure, but I digress.
Childhood. Being a child. Experiencing things for the first time. That’s it.
When the void has to nonexist without the immediate attention of our yearning, when our yearning is directed towards memories of experiencing something new and mastering it, understanding it, taking it apart and realising that it is a maybe not extremely subtle machine designed to make you do stuff and that, when you do the stuff you actually do get rewarded with what you really wanted all this time, which was competence, a function of being able to know what the movie character will say next.
The people that you see succeeding economically in this area have spent years financing the development of their artistic practice with varying degrees of amoral behaviour, stumbling into what, yes, is the era of the spreadsheet beats, but which also, perhaps because of the percepteable impersonality inherent in smooth engagement calculation, is a time relatively open to experiences that come from a hyperspecific perspective, as long as they don’t overstay their welcome, eating into precious void-time.
Familiar enough to be recognised, new enough to entice. There has to be a genuine update, a kind of deep personal alignment with the area you are messing with. Or a total disgust. I’m just covering my tracks here. Mainly, it has to be condensed. Something that delivers on a specific experience, explained in almost formulaic detail by a couple of helpful essayists, liberated from the larger context of it’s existance and then accelerated, made more immediately accessible. Or, at the very lowest bottom rung of least, it directly advertises the specific codewords that everyone in the target audience is aware of, because we all watched, like, the same 6 videos and played the same 4 games.
So, let’s get back on track. Game design is more psychologically knowledgeable now, or more A/B tested by the child-developers, or more specifically attuned to contemporary culture and probably, actually, all three at the same time. Everything has been becoming more of itself lately, kind of bursting at the seams, a heavy armory of distraction, fine-tuned and upgraded, trying to keep up with the increasing irreality of life itself. There is a genocide in Gaza. Potent noise is needed.
What are you going do?
There are many different ways to remove yourself from time until, statistically inevitably, time remove you.
As you might’ve guessed, the construction of this waterfall of words has been quite tasking on me. Today, it being one day after the couple in the s-bahn and a whole night of feverish fugue typing, I woke up at 18:00 and am now interrupting writing this paragraph because the water for my cup noodles has reached the boiling point and is ready to be added to the glutamat. I am not feeling fully corporeal, as if I was somewhat lagging behind myself, shifty, wraith-like.
This is bad. I am not fully present, stumbling, mumbling, lost in a confused world of abstraction, I talk to myself, etc etc but it’s also kind of fun in a hazy way, like when I abused sleep depriviation in my very late teens and would always misjudge the position of my body and run into stuff all the time.
I’m blinded not by visual, but by a more internal type of noise; trying to order and understand and combine and express a lot of (how fitting!) dissociate parts. Intense involvement in something that is, but only in maslovian terms, as far away from the basement as possible creates a feeling of disconnection from reality that is longer and deeper than what I can inflict upon myself through only playing video games, listening to a podcast and watching a show at the same time. That’s entry-level dissociation, sorry.
The actual good stuff is the coctail of various internal stress and reward hormones that you get from making something of your own with all your focus and attention. That’s the real deal, sister, that’s the thing we’re all hooked on here. Right? Right?!
This is the most intense engagement for me, this extreme focus on a challenging activity that blots out the contemporary self through the same, even if much stronger and more lastingly nutritious, high as the slop based overstimulation of interfacing with a multitude of discordant audio, video and input devices.
Extended existence in this fugue of flow, in the embrace of engagement, no matter how you induce it, will fuck you up real bad. The longer this kind of intense internal isolation lasts, the more it will shrink you down to a single focal point, reducing you to an agent of the thing you are offering your brain to.
Facts jump at you. Connections. There was discourse amongst egyptian monks, in around the year 400, about wether the meditative act of basket-weaving was bringing them closer to god, or wether the repetitive motion was distracting them from their more abstract, spiritual duty.
Watching someone spend hours of their life as they perpetually re-traverse an intentionally rage inducing obstacle course is not so far removed from watching someone masturbate for hours, bringing themselves close to climax and letting themselves fall down again, again and again, while looking at the hypnotic patterns of perspectives created by the conventions of pornographic cinematography.
Everything has been becoming connected to this text, for the last few days, but nothing has really cohered and so conclusions have to be assembled by anyone up to the age of 99, mileage may vary, objects in the mirror appear exactly as they are.
Don’t worry.
I’ll be fine again. It’s going to take a bit of conscious effort, but once I apruptly decide to stop adding words to this thing I will begin a deliberate detox-type routine. The pent up physical energy, the lack of visual variety, the general disorganisation, accumulated lack of concretely feeleable personhood, the lack of awareness of the general state of affairs, all of this will be taken care of slowly, over time, as I nurse myself back to human interactibility. A part of that process will involve zoning out while playing a game that I know so well that playing it is more like humming or dancing, an activity performed automatically, bodily rather than consciously.
This will give me something to hold the completely contradictory consciousness, the high-alert-state of constant action, at bay. Something familiar and non-active, something I can use to wane my fingers off of the high perspiration type typing I’ve been spiraling into here while my subconciousness, sore from being pushed into these letters, can finally, like, chillax a bit. Breathe. Remember. Ponder. Reflect without immediate interpretation. Sort through the stuff. Contextualise memories, order emotions.
You can stabilise yourself with the aid of whatever works, even through one of these accursed videoed games you’ve been hearing so much about. It’s just a matter of sliiiightly understimulating yourself, kind of engaging yourself, but not completely, staying juuust a bit below your noise resistance so that you can form the subcoherent thoughts, barely even registering, which make you less insane and more capable of looking outside of your own immediate emotional landscape.
Like with all pre-dosed things, it’s the pattern that makes the poison.
Personally save and secure for various amoral reasons, I like to ride these waves, kind of, rythmically im- and emersing myself, pulling tight and letting go, going in too deep and then staying out of the water completely for a while, or exploring the forest instead. A stable instability, sometimes balancing at the edge of disaster, always pulling back before the consequences become terminal, then recovering slowly, hoping that any accrued permanent damage is going to take it’s sweet time with manifesting.
And so I will become present within myself again, aware of the generally non-hostile agents that make up my social surroundings. I’ll be able to see people again, really see them as the friendly mazes they are, instead of only catching fleeting glimpse of them from behind the curtains that, covered in tiny black dots of perpetually scrolling text, currently control my cognition.
That’s all I have to say on this matter.
Anyways.
How have you been?
A game by Stuffed Wombat With help from RollinBarrel, Fakefrogsonly and the lovely people of Paradise and NotSoSolo.
Thank you for playing