by Karin Malady

There is something about my memory that doesn’t work. I can remember the whole of Isle Delfino better than I can Tales of Symphonia, which had a story that made me cry as a preteen with little experience in JRPGs outside of the Paper Mario series. Likewise, I can remember Life is Strange better than We Know The Devil despite liking it more. I can remember a little bit of movies I’ve seen and I usually have a good grasp on the anime I’ve watched. So I can’t say there is something inherently forgettable about the medium. Afterall, I have friends who will give me a play-by-play of the entire Metal Gear Solid series for the eleventh time and Elder Scrolls fans need to remember the lore of Morrowind so they can talk about how bad the next game is when they pump 800 hours into it. Honestly, I can barely remember anything before 2015 so I’ve had to say goodbye to the first twenty-one years of my life.

Memory palaces and places are interchangeable. It’s common to walk through a door and forget something. The room is imposing itself onto us, making our mind contorts to its walls. Memory must then be stored in a hodge podge map of every place we’ve ever been. Imagine how many memories are stored inside of a Wal-Mart. No wonder people long to go back to their highschool years, they’re already there. When I sleep, rarely do I find myself in open places. I’m always in semi-familiar rooms or buildings. Lately, my dreams take this further by making the setting a combination mall apartment complex that always looks different but feels the same. That strange pink goop we call a brain must also consider virtual places to be physical locations. pl_badwater is placed right outside the window of your childhood home. Is that why my thoughts keep returning to Isle Delfino?

A lot of time in my childhood was spent playing Super Mario Sunshine. It’s one of the few games I have 100% completed. I don’t remember what exactly was happening in my life when I was playing. Like a parallel set of memories – a pocket dimension in my mind where I kick back and sip fruit smoothies while I relax on Gelato Beach. That sounds chill, right? At the same time, it feels like I’m stuck here. Sure, I can ride the rollercoaster of Pinna Park over and over but what does that do for me? I can check out of Hotel Delfino anytime I like but I can never leave. Another place I can recall as well as that island is Drangelic of Dark Souls 2. A witch tells you that you will wander that place without really knowing why. An element of the darksign is that your memory fades the more you die. Memory loss is the same, affected by stress, depression, and trauma. It’s not much different than Neo in The Matrix Resurrections recreating his past over and over as a game developer. He didn’t seem to know why he was doing it either – just the inherent sense that something was missing.

Second Life has always been in the background of my life. When I was a teenager, I had friends invested in the promise of fantastic worlds, exploration of the self, and sexy vampire BDSM roleplay. I would eventually see it used as surrealist tourism for screenburned Something Awful users who won’t admit they want to be furries and then later for the McElroy’s Monster Factory. 2020 saw yet another shift of relevance for the virtual world as it became the hotspot for queer hyperpop raves. I joined with the intent of going to a similar event, yet in reality I just spent my time wandering and observing. It was melancholic but I found the ways I could express myself compelling. Various media show the internet and cyberpunk equivalents as a vibrant, colorful place of self expression. There is an implication: when people can look however they want, they choose to look queer. Compare this to Zuckerberg’s Meta, where the users’ souls are revealed to be as bland and tasteless as they are. The technocrat cannot imagine a brighter or more vibrant world,  because they ultimately like the world as it is. The way they reflect that ends up looking like a flavorless, gray nutrient paste. He has miraculously envisioned a virtual space less appealing than Ready Player One manifesting as Fortnite. Imagination reduced to a choice between the erasure granted by the river Lethe to visit the Asphodel Meadows, or to partake in eternal nostalgia drunk on the fruit of the Lotus-eaters. Live Forever As You Are Now With Alan Resnick presents a program that preserves the faces and personality of your loved ones in an animated AI. Yet as the video goes on and it dives into the Uncanny Valley, the faces of the actual humans feel less real than they originally were. The eerie feeling that the barrier between these worlds is eroding and the demons already walk among us. Digimon Fusion has Wisemon explain that there is a plane of existence older than humanity, and the Digital World is a small portion of that transformed by technological interference. A related question emerges from Croneberg’s eXistenZ, “Don’t you think the greatest game artist ought to be punished… for the most effective deforming of reality?”

Zetterstrand, Kristoffer. Wanderer (2008)

One time I stumbled upon a fake conspiracy. There was a tweet full of disjointed yet evocative phrases that implied meaning without painting a bigger picture. Any single one of these phrases could be searched to uncover a deeper web. I spent a month following all these dead end concepts that looped into each other. Each piece implied something big and amazing, weaving itself into events from the last 20 years of internet history and technological advancement. Yet this was a narrative with no resolution. No beginning, middle, or ending. It implied the existence of each step, even though they didn’t exist. It only ended when I was bored and gave up on trying to unravel it’s riddles. The fair lady synchronicity directed me to a page that explained what it was I found shortly after. It turned out to be a modern Discordian project. The intent was to submerge a person in symbols and see what emerged. Ultimately, things like that only send your third eye spinning.

Is that meaningfully different then the time I’ve spent with ARGs? Imagine spending months delving into an elaborate world and purposely thinning your sense of reality to truly connect with the mystery you’ve been presented, only to find out someone is trying to sell you a fucking video game. At least there are other suckers along for the ride with you. That sense of connection is powerful stuff. It’s powerful enough that getting out of the Escape Room together makes you forget you just spent an hour arguing with coworkers you hate. Not too different from Sartre’s No Exit where the characters could leave the suite at any time but are instead bound by obsessions with each other that can never be fulfilled. Before they leaked into reality, Escape the Room games were just interactive fiction and flash games – a lonely, contemplative experience. Maybe you would look up a guide. After all, humans are always walking paths others have been on before them. In that sense, looking up a recipe isn’t much different than a video game walkthrough and breaking out of a confined space isn’t much different than enlightement. Mystery requires a catalyst, something to set you off with the sense of something being wrong. The white rabbit of Alice in Wonderland, the spiral symbol of Dark City. Oedipa Maas of The Crying Of Lot 49 sets off in this way and finds herself perpetually pulled between confinement and enlightenment. She is set off by a single stamp and finds a conspiracy sprawling through centuries of postal drama. No matter how many questions she asks, the answers only imply more. Her conception of femininity is as a maiden in a tower tortured by invisible, malignant forces. Someone made to dance by powers beyond her understanding. The Scurvhamites introduced by the narrative are presented as an obscure Christian sect with a dualist worldview. For them, the world ran off the will of God, and He protected them. “The rest ran off some opposite Principle, something blind, soulless; a brute automatism that led to eternal death.” Yet in the end, it was their fascination with this Scurhamite anti-God that led to their doom. Gnostic implications abound, it creates the assumption this malicious entity is the only God. A Demiurge blind to the spiritual nature of its own creations.

The game. 228x200cm. Oil on canvas. (2009)

Right now, you can pay to get mailed mystery subscription packages with murder case clues available every month. In the future, you won’t need to. The algorithm is gonna slurry up a personal narrative from your metadata so that you can be pulled by the Pepsi logo’s gravity directly. And it’s not going to feel that different from what’s already happening with media. Everything has a wiki, full of inbound links to lore and concepts to submerge yourself in forever. Movies have been replaced with cinematic universesI. If I took a plane off the Delfino Airstrip, where would I land? The DC Extended Universe? I want out entirely, but paradoxically the real world is both frozen and on fire simultaneously. The worst thing about this is I realize how useful it makes me to be doing nothing. To know you’re plugged into the Matrix and realize you don’t really have any other option. Even if I had people to talk to or meet with, what would we do? It feels like all I’ve ever done has been talking about corporate media and jobs I hate. It gets easy to resent everything that exists and hard to imagine anything else. In Night in the Woods, Mae describes her disillusionment with video games and with reality as one in the same. Maybe I’m not just stuck on Isle Delfino. The picture is starting to look clearer, the place I’m stuck is starting to look bigger yet also somehow smaller.

In St. Elsewhere, the whole world is revealed to be the dream of an autistic boy staring into a snowglobe. We’ve been trapped in our own imaginations longer, maybe since the twist first showed up in the 1600’s. The Tommy Westphall Hypothesis was created from all the crossovers other dramas had with this one. A certain kind of person would claim that all of those shows (and everything they crossed over with) all took place within this child’s imagination. Amature media analysis on the internet always winds up coming back to this, finding ways to discount everything that happened in a series. If this is all made up, there must be a secret, better reality implied by the events. There might still be a nugget of wisdom here. It reveals that all fictional things are equally fictional. Which seems obvious spelled out loud, but when you’re growing up in a world where media properties exist as dotted lines of copyright marking intellectual territories, it can seem unthinkable. Fanfiction authors have long understood this and have gained the power to make anyone they want bang each other. The internet has long been a place where the line between fiction and reality is thin. With advancements in AI and deep fakes, that line continues to get blurrier. In spite of the unappealing identity mush that Facebook and NFTs are now serving, there is still room to create any appearance you want. In the past few decades, we see celebrations of that experiment with furry fandom, plural community, otherkin, and more. We also see people who entrench themselves in obscure ideologies and get the pure haptic feedback conspiracy sends directly to their brain. If all fictional things are equally fictional, and our self is at least partially fictional, who’s to say we can’t be anything we want? What that amounts to is that we can be Us but More. Whether you’re a 9 foot sparkling rainbow fox anthro or a grayscale carbon copy of one of the richest men on earth, the true dream of the internet fulfilled is that everyone can be Don Quixote.

There are countless franchises that love to claim there are rewards in exchange for the time sink. It cloyingly promises fulfillment, enlightenment, “fun”, blowjobs, emotion. Every bit of it amounts to ash slipping through your fingers. The Backrooms creepypasta isn’t scary or interesting, but it does get one thing right. This place we’re stuck is about as spiritually nourishing as a rancid highway motel. A maze is built to confuse and disorient those who walk the path. It’s own shape is a circuit that forces you to follow its currents, to look for an exit that might not even exist. It doesn’t matter if you can’t get out as long as it feels like you can. You might wonder who this was built to keep in when you realize: you’re in here all alone. The fact is, we’re all the minotaur now. So why don’t you moo for me, baby? The only way out of a labyrinth is to not be there in the fucking first place.

I don’t know about you, but I want to start tearing the walls down.

Zetterstrand, Kristoffer. Among the Remnants (2014)

header image is de_dust2 by zetterstrand kristoffer