Else Heart.Break() Is a videogame about programming and computers, or maybe it’s a videogame about community and relationships.
Now I am primarily a writer, so I don’t understand how those work: but I do understand how the human heart works. It’s my gift, or maybe a little bit of my curse. Maybe i’m just a narcissist but if I am than you need to take a look in the mirror, pal, and fighting me will never get her back.

Where’s the adventure come from in Else Heart.Break()? – something relatively down to earth and simple. There’s no murder to solve or Crypt of Atlantis to raid. You’re young and careless in the world, and you’ve just moved to a new city for a job where you don’t know anyone. I’ve done that before, and the thing that immediately will grab you is just how big the relatively small world seems at first. When you don’t know anyone or anything about a place, every street corner has a different possibility around it. If you’re the kind of person that believes meeting people is an adventure: I think you’re going to rub my shoulders and say some shit like “but how do you feel spirit brother?” next time we meet. ESB is also a game about getting what you want, or maybe not getting it at all. 

In ESB you get a device called a Modifier. It lets you dismantle the world of the game like code. It lets you, in fantasy terms, pluck at the strings binding the world together. In a moment you go from a hip cyberpunk to a mage, a wizard. The world is only as material as you don’t know the commands to make it bend to your will.

What’s a guy to do with something like that? I imagine I’d use it to get all the free latte’s I want, because I’m playing a game about a person in an expensive jacket who has lots of bougie, cool friends, and videogames will let me project all I want. I’ll never have friends like that and I’m willing to bet neither do you, unless you live in LA.

That’s the central conceit behind everything that happens in Else Heart.Break() – you’re not cool when you show up and the world is Weird. At the end of the game you’ve met and done something for everyone that matters in the *scene and you’re one of the cools, invited to every  party. The players journey is of an outsider finding a community to belong to.

One problem that persists, is that no matter how hard you try, no matter how much you bend the rules and pluck at the strings, the person you want doesn’t want you. That’s like real life? Tough! I’ve never loved anyone, because I’ve got a website to run. What’s important in the story is just as important in real life, and that’s the idea that you can’t make people like you no matter what.

And here we are: now I can talk about when I actually played it. ESB is based on the idea that if you know the rules of the game, you can make yourself cool to anyone.
I’d like to think the meaning behind DEEP-HELL dot com is that the only thing videogames can teach you is bad things, and here it is again. ESB is a game that tells you there’s a right combination of words and social affectations to become friends with anyone, and then pulls a Funny Games right before the end and tells you: it’ll work on everyone but the people you desire most.

What about that ending, though? I only know it because I watched it, and I’m here to tell you something: There are dozens of us that will never know the right words or behavior to get in with the groups we think we belong to. The phrase “outsider art” just means “a kid who went to art school and didn’t use the connections for an actual job” afterwards.

I never beat ESB as much as I broke it, never getting far enough in the right way to get my modifier. Maybe I missed it at the beginning, or somewhere in the middle. Does the ending a videogame gives you matter as much if you decide to put it down in a specific spot? My journey in ESB feels a little more true than the fantasy pitched to me by the game itself.

What was that journey then? Well, it was one with no resolution. It’s one where I moved to a new city and it was just as awful and terrifying as you’d imagine. There was no community waiting for me because I was an outsider through-and-through. With no decoder ring to help me figure out what to say to who and where to be when, I just drifted.

ESB’s world is low-fi and filled with deliberate anachronisms. Some parts of it are vacant and boring, others are cozy and you want to walk around in them for hours. It reminds me of cities I’ve been to and places I’m nostalgic for. The life of the city is in the colors and the sound, the experience you get when you’re present there.

Maybe some of us don’t fall in love when we move to a new city, and that’s okay. You can wander through a world you love and just be a part of it – you’ll find that it’s infinitely easier to fit in where you belong when you’re not trying to find that community you crave. When you really move to a new town, it’s more like the latter than anything that happens in ESB.
There certainly was a peace to wandering the streets as long as I did – not knowing what was really going to happen to me next.

We all know we can’t make people fall in love with us, but maybe we should stop letting feel-good stories lie to us about our other relationships too.

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