Dear Player: Everything and All the Things
We've all gotta start somewhere.
David O'Reilly's award-winning game Everything allows the player to be everything-but-human as well as everything and human. The artist's fascination with games stems from an interest in 'being' more than 'doing,' and throughout the experience of Everything he draws on the late philosophy of the (late) Alan Watts, to provoke thought in the player with a smorgasbord of 'things.' What this game proposes is a wobbly re-jigging, even full inversion, of our common Weltanschauung.
It lets the player flop around as everything from a bear to a quark until their ontology is as flat and floppy as a nematode. As you dance and sing and switch your avatar between all things, an economy of animation spreads and conflates game objects at radically different scales. As you roll around as both a rock or a cow, thrifty design brings a lightness to an infinity of beings. Watt's calm and cosy voice spills from his lectures of 1965-73 into a surreal space: depressed crystals; introspective castles; terrified clones. While the Thing theory here is a direct challenge to Humanism, and the Enlightenment's anthropocentrism, there is something of Voltaire's 'smile of reason' here, stretched and deformed into pure laughter. Good thought - crunchy concepts - need humour and not self-seriousness. A combination of micro-narratives in the form of randomised thought bubbles and the player's purposeful re-scaling and replication of Things make us chirp with understanding - we revel in the thought, we don't stand at a distance with our brows furrowed. But what is it we grok, what are we learning?
These mammoths know what it's all about.
Dancing and singing are the player's amorphous verbs, and they gather, breed and choreograph elaborate symmetries of all the Things the player passes through. Ants march and rotate, planets orbit and all can (and do) happen at once, and at the press of a button. This cornucopia is alternately Dadaist and psychedelic, and could plausibly function as illustration to Deleuze and Guatarri's Thousand Plateaus. However, the message here isn't Deleuze's singularity of being but rather its multiplicity. It would also be wrong to read Everything as a simple declaration of 'all is one', or 'everything's connected.' What's here is closer to what Bogost terms 'tiny ontology' and what Graham Harman and others would call 'flat ontology' - a universe without hierarchy. In his book, Alien Phenomenology, Bogost contributes to the spread of Thing Theory over the past decade by encouraging us to focus on the infinity and equivalence of 'being'. All Things 'are.' Humans aren't the centre of anything or everything or Everything. God didn't give us dominion over animals, and only human values privilege our human perspective over that of a whale, or a star. This philosophy, and this game, encourage us to take everything a little less seriously, and marvel at our ambiguous identity - everything is an elaborate intersection of 'stuff' both unique and never discrete. We are all wibbly-wobbly-spacey-wacey bits in a world that dwarfs our understanding.
Paolo Rivera (2005)
Games often place the player at the centre of everything. 'Man' is the measure of all things - especially in designing narrative experiences for VR. Like the Vitruvian Man or one-point perspective, games put humans at the centre. Jonathan Blow's The Witness takes this Enlightenment Humanism to an extreme, claiming the whole world - even beyond the game - can be deduced by human logic. Blow even suggests a universality to the scientific method by appropriating quotes from a wide spectrum of ideologies - everything, he claims, can be reduced and deduced and dominated. The anthropocentrism of games is not just the privileging of cis-hetero-white men, but is present in the anthropomorphisation of animal characters and even the bridgeable nature of the gaps in a platformer. Most games challenge us, but few question us. Even seemingly-uncaring games only have eyes for you.
Dark Souls is loved by many not because it is hard, but because it is both hard and fair. For all its rugged exterior the series has a soft-spot for us - it is made to be mastered. A love of '1999-mode' or a return to difficult technical platformers, or the lauding of trigger-finger esports, may stem from an interest in stretching ourselves, but rarely from an interest in breaking and rebuilding ourselves. Challenging games are masochistic in that they are wish-fulfilment, they are about our own desires and our own self-importance, not the desires of other Things. Challenging games encourage mastery, not doubt.
Yet games don't have to be like this. Unlike other media which labour under very human notions of space and time, and limited models of viewer/reader/protagonist, games can let us be radically alien Things. We can be bread, we can be a mountain, we can be a colony or a code or an idea, experiencing synaesthesia between colour and sound in a VR game like Polyphonia or echo-location in a game like Unfinished Swan. In Everything we grow as trees and undulate as islands in a carnivalesque experience of beings qua being. Eventually we learn to migrate things into different dimensions and different universes, inside every neutron lies a galaxy, but the game never descends into self-seriousness.
Be your cake and eat it too.
Indeed the game is fully self-aware, in the mode it encourages the player to assume. Everything in Everything is a playful collaging of Things, even at a textual level. Alongside snippets of lectures in randomised order the player can 'generate' thoughts. Hold a button and a new Watt's 'quote' will appear, algorithmically generated from his transcripts. At once profound and nonsensical, these snippets show us a system concerned with the translation of being - one that is content to flounder and wobble. This game does not pretend to be transparent, to be perfect or complete, it's a game about trying to break things and break ideas.
It's Things all the way down.
Embracing a non-anthropocentric world-view may well be impossible - we are human, and our games are human made, but in moments of hilarity, surreality and chaotic collapse this game brings us closer than most to understanding a radical ontological Otherness. In the words of a one-dimensional being I encountered on my last playthrough: "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA."
Merlin Seller