Transcription
Before we start, a lot of games and movies and stuff have strobing lights and seizure warnings. TAKE THIS ONE SERIOUSLY. Some of these games are going to seem like they’re challenging you to not have a seizure. Also, if you can, watch this one on Nebula because there’s a big chunk of this video centered on licensed music I can’t play on YouTube, and you’ll get a whole bonus essay as well. Thanks!
You know, it’s kind of miraculous that “LSD Dream Emulator” is named something as obvious as “LSD Dream Emulator.” I say this because almost nothing else about the game is self-evident. There is no clear progression, there is little predictable navigation, even the menu is near-incomprehensible. Nothing within the game explains what it is, why it’s there, or how you should interact with it– nothing, except the title of the whole project. LSD Dream Emulator.
Released on the Sony Playstation in 1998, the game only ever came out in Japan. Maybe publishers thought that American and European audiences couldn’t handle the overt drug reference, or that the content was simply too esoteric, too weird. Or maybe they had no idea how to market it. Because it requires a playstation, it’s controlled with a controller, and yet the Japanese ad boldly proclaims, THIS IS NOT A GAME.
What is LSD Dream Emulator, then? It’s a series of rooms, or buildings, or great outdoor spaces, all linked together, seemingly at random. The first bit is always in this small yellow interior, a window and fireplace and bookshelf and door to the bathroom. There’s nothing obvious to do here– there’s certainly no “interact” button– but bump into anything, any object at all, and the screen will fade and you’ll show up somewhere else. This is it, this is the whole thing in terms of player control. Walk around, look at things, bump something or walk down a tunnel and show up elsewhere. After a few minutes of exploring like this, or if you fall off a cliff, the sequence– the dream– will end. You’ll be shown a chart with “Upper, Downer, Static, and Dynamic” as its cardinal directions, with a square placed somewhere between them as an indication of where you ended. Then the next day starts the process over again.
However, what this mechanical description misses is the whole goddang point. The places you’re taken to in Dream Emulator are astonishingly weird. Foggy villages with floating denizens, or a sort of pattern-hell theme park, or what feels like the inside of a body filled with jumping babies, or plains being traversed by polygonal horses, or an ominously empty cityscape. Gradually, these places, like in dreams, become familiar. The temple interior. The field full of international landmarks. The bridge into the sun’s mouth. And yet everything continuously warps, the music different every time, the NPCs there or not, the textures themselves lose their grip. Once I walked into a place that should have been a grassy field, except the grass and rocks and structures had all been replaced with endlessly tiled text. Once a sumo wrestler chased me through the halls and pushed me into another scenario. Once I found a woman in a red dress in the empty city, and as she walked towards me, her head fell off.
The pulsating intro to Dream Emulator gives a half-dozen different meanings to LSD. In Limbo the Silent Dream, In Lunacy the Savage Dream, In Linking, the Sapient Dream. This has led some to claim that hey, the title “LSD Dream Emulator” doesn’t actually refer to drugs. But it does, of course. The game’s lead, Osamu Sato, said in an interview that “LSD goes back to that LSD, the one that was popular in hippie culture in San Francisco and so on, like what we all said the Beatles used.” It’s not not about mind-altering psychedelics. But it’s also for people who “suck at games,” Sato says. The inspiration for Dream Emulator came from failing at racing games for the Saturn and Playstation. Sato said he was repeatedly driving into walls and wondered what would happen if, when he hit a wall, he “would be launched into the next world.” The architecture of each level from a desire to teleport all over the globe instantly, but also from ten years of Sato’s own dream journal. The soundtrack, experimental, kaleidoscopic, never-repeating, was released alongside Dream Emulator in an album called “Lucy in the Sky with Dynamites.”
Although LSD Dream Emulator sold poorly in Japan and was never released anywhere else, it’s not hard to see why it’s achieved cult classic status in the decades since. It’s a weirdo indie, a classic itch.io experiment, before either that genre or that storefront existed. Getting your hands on a physical copy is absurdly expensive today, but that doesn’t make it any less remarkable that it was printed physically, that it was allowed to be one of the few thousand Playstation games released, even when it so proudly proclaims “this is not a game.” LSD Dream Emulator is one of those Velvet Underground titles, a piece of work not validated by raw sales but rather the scale of its influence. I’ve talked about the wonderful 2:22AM before, which almost certainly owes its empty cityscapes and surreal interludes to Dream Emulator. The spike in popularity of “haunted PS1 discs” play in the same surreal valley. The Gray Man who unexpectedly and frighteningly shows up to erase your memory is basically the template for a dozen creepypastas, hell Alt-J even used a screenshot of it for one of their album covers.
Above everything else though, when I think about it, I think about the boldness of that trailer, THIS IS NOT A GAME. On first blush it feels like a connection to Magritte’s Treachery of Images, this is not a pipe, except instead of questioning representation, LSD denies its entire medium. But a more accurate translation will tell you that it still does, in a way, recognize its status as a game. You could read the ad as “A game such as this is not a game,” that it’s simply so different from everything else that attempting to categorize it would be meaningless. But that doesn’t mean I’m not going to try!
In 2012, Stephen Lavelle released- It’s a free game you download from his website- It’s kinda like being in a club- Okay sorry let’s go somewhere quieter. Slave of God is a 2012 thing released by developer Stephen Lavelle, also known by his studio “Increpare.” Lavelle, who might be best known for the puzzle game Stephen’s Sausage Roll, put up well over 400 experiences on his website between 2008 and 2022. One such title is “Running Memories,” released on August 8, 2017, in which the player moves constantly forward through a sort of fog of imagery, environments flowing into and on top of one another. You can turn to one side or the other and jump, but never slow down. The instructions say “Explore until you’re done exploring, then press escape to quit.” Another such title is “battlegrounds,” released on June 6, 2017, a sort of browser based flipbook of images depicting a game of Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds. Or there’s “Oh shit, the camera man ist arrived,” released August 5, 2009, where you control one small circle that appears to bother another small circle with a camera for 38 seconds.
Slave of God, released December 30, 2012, isn’t titled as self-evidently as “LSD Dream Emulator,” but it wouldn't be hard to suggest other drugs to match its vibe. Slave of God is a nightclub emulator, a deafening, blurring, strobing club, a neon point of concentration centered in an otherwise confounding interior space. Other figures bathed in colored auras float around the club or thrash about on the dance floor, or watch from the DJ booth. Stumbling through the colors and shapes, you might fall into a pit with a couple guys that kinda look like gorillas, or glimpse a little floating baby thing, or you might just find the urinal. Most interesting is the sound design, which is typically dominated by that pulsing beat, but is also strongly locational- wander outside the center and the bass will be replaced. In the bathroom you get a robotic series of beeps, on top of the pile of speakers a chiller electronica, and way back in the corner the soundscape becomes almost serene as you look down from above all the particles, look down on the dance floor and all its occupants.
There’s even less overt “gamification” present here than in LSD Dream Emulator– no chart to show your supposed progress, no navigation between maps or characters to assign personalities. If you want, you can try to stay in time with a partner on the dance floor but nothing much happens if you do. Slave of God is an experiment in overstimulation, a reckless use of textures and particles and shaders. And its existence– hosted on a website with 400 other such experiments– honestly makes more sense than Dream Emulator, a title which had physical copies stocked in stores, a title which was advertised on television. The similarities between the two games are obvious, which makes the differences, differences in scale and support and corporate buy-in, all the more fascinating. Things like Increpare’s website or itchio make it easier for anyone to release their own experiments, but the lack of such a website in 1998 meant that LSD Dream Emulator’s improbable release got to be more mainstream than anything Lavelle has made.
But two years after Slave of God though, another thing released, released wide, and kickstarted more of a debate than either of these titles on whether you could possibly call it a “game.” The most traditionally “interactive” part of Mountain is before it really even starts. Draw “art,” it tells you, with black lines on a white canvas. Draw “forgiveness.” Draw “Your purpose.” And then from these prompts, somehow, inscrutably, the program produces…a mountain. This is Mountain. This is the whole thing. A floating rock in space, dotted with trees, a changing time of day. And more than anything we’ve talked about thus far, this is it. You don’t even need a controller, an input method. You can manually rotate and zoom in or out, or you can let Mountain do that for you. Your time for input on this piece of land is over as soon as it's begun.
Mountain was made by David OReilly, who already held some level of prestige as a filmmaker and would go on to later make Everything– the game, that is. It was announced at the Museum of Contemporary Art in LA. It was published by Double Fine. And as such, its release made an improbably big splash for what you could, not inaccurately, refer to as an interactive screensaver. Ian Bogost wrote about it in grand terms, “You are not mountain; rather you are Mountain. You play as the abyss between the human and the alpine.” Andrew Webster of The Verge wrote about the strange emotional attachment he formed to the piece. Carolina Miranda wrote for the LA Times that since the action of the game is nonexistent, it “leaves the player with plenty of space to think. Perhaps the most interesting game there is.”
Like LSD Dream Emulator, the imagined mechanics happening behind the scenes are arguably more important than the actual programming. The opening canvas that supposedly generates your mountain lends it a sense of individuality, even though I could not tell you if your inputs actually mean anything. Dream Emulator arbitrarily shuffles you towards Upper or Downer, Static or Dynamic, and Mountain tells you that your mountain is based on your interpretation of “forgiveness.” Mountain presents a number of “mechanics” that feel like they must be meaningful because that’s how we understand “games” to work. You can zoom all the way in or all the way out. If you click on the mountain, birds fly out of it. Occasionally, pieces of bizarre space junk fly into the mountain- a horn, a computer monitor- and if you click these, they’ll make noise. Even mashing the keyboard plays little synthy notes. None of it matters and all of it matters because there is nothing else, it’s effectively an idle program, you get out what you put in.
Alongside the glowing critical reception to Mountain was a parallel argument about what it…was, and what to do about it. Ben Kuchera wrote for Polygon that the whole experience seemed like a prank OReilly was playing on the audience, that attempting to find meaning in it was assuming a thoughtfulness onto Mountain that it probably doesn’t have. Partially in response, Michael McMaster wrote that Mountain is not a text to be read, it’s a form to be explored, to which writer Austin C Howe responded with a blog called “On Text vs Form” which reads: “Everything is a f**king text.” But ultimately I think the question of how to think of Mountain, and maybe more importantly why it is important that it’s labeled a “game,” was tackled best by Cameron Kunzleman in a piece for Paste. Cameron writes: I think there’s a desire to see Mountain as profound. It wants to cultivate that, with its poetry, with its random objects, with its sometimes-soaring spouts of music. I’ll come out and say it: There’s nothing special about this mountain. It is like every other mountain, and if we wanted, we could try to mine that normality for profundity… That flips the relationship onto the player. The mountain becomes about how I relate to that mountain and what it does to me, and most importantly, how long I can stand to witness it. It becomes a game of endurance. How much Mountain can you take before you close it in boredom?
This idea of the flipped relationship, of the mountain being a sort of cypher for how the audience relates to it, is generally my perspective on non-explanatory art, whether that’s a Mountain or a play or a big red canvas. The advantage I think Mountain has is that its strange level of interactivity, present but mechanically meaningless, pushes that question of reflection more accessibly than a painting or some other medium. The biggest impediment to appreciating a piece of art in a museum might just be how easy it is to keep walking, to glance over, see an unorthodox sculpture or video, and make the split-second decision to not slow down and enter a…conversation with the piece. Because Mountain has been given the title of a video game, because we inherently understand that video games are something to be interacted with, that conversation flows a little more comfortably. The most easily identifiable “game” Mountain is playing is, as Cameron wrote, “a game of endurance.” But endurance is a genuinely valuable skill to practice when confronted with art you can’t immediately understand! I know that for some, calling a piece of art a “game” feels diminishing. But I am tickled that being saddled with the label of game almost forces a deeper level of conversation with a piece than a more traditional, more museum-y art. I don’t have the answer to what the “theme” of Mountain is, but I do have an answer to what the “game” is, and that game, forcing conversation with a creation you don’t fully understand, is one of my favorite things in the world.
Mountain has gone through a couple overhauls since release. A newer version with better graphics is now available on Steam and the App Store. Unfortunately, this version also adds achievements like “use all the keyboard musical notes!” which I really think takes away from its introspective nature. But there have been more fascinating updates as well: a buttonless arcade cabinet, for example. Or, bringing my thoughts on its status as art full circle, Mountain got its own museum exhibit, kinda. At the Fukuoka Airport in Japan, a sort of steel topography housed a couple monitors playing Mountain for all visitors, its sheer scale positioning Mountain as a thing worth being considered. However, housed in an intimidating metal structure and without obvious input methods, I worry the Mountain “exhibit” may have removed some of the ease of its conversation.
Over the past several years, we’ve seen games and museums wade into friendly waters– video games have received big exhibits at the Smithsonian, MOMA and other institutions. Many other museums have uploaded fully explorable online versions of themselves; you can walk around the Guggenheim in Google Street View, you can jankily teleport around the Louvre. In 2016, the Museum of London commissioned an enormous and detailed model of London before the fire of 1666 that visitors can freely wander– in Minecraft. And while I think these are great (I actually used to teach a museum science camp using Minecraft), what I find more fascinating are exhibits created entirely as games, with no real-world analogue to hold them back.
Released just a couple months ago by a creator named Louis, Monuments to Guilt is a fairly straightforward exploration of the digital museum format. Monuments to Guilt introduces us to the “museum of exclusionary design,” a few brightly lit rooms that feature dozens of bench designs. Each bench demonstrates some new way to prevent people from drawing too much comfort from them. Some make it impossible to lay down, others are uncomfortable to sit for long, and some are designed so it’s impossible to use the quote-unquote bench at all. Louis’ game– and he does refer to it as a game– could quite easily be a real museum exhibit. All the spaces are realistically sized, hanging benches are supported by wires, nothing is too extravagant. Perhaps the most infeasible part is the benches themselves. Each is sourced from a real design, often paired with the exact coordinates where you can find said bench. But these are largely guerilla captures, remade from third-party photographs and collections, certainly not included with the express consent of the designers themselves. It allows Monuments to Guilt to carry the prestige of a nice, high-quality museum exhibit without, you know, the actual funding and permissions it’d take to pull it off.
On some level, Monuments to Guilt is completely non-interactive. Like Mountain, there’s nothing you can do to directly impact the environment. But like Mountain, this non-interactivity highlights the point. Plastered on the museum walls are constant reminders– please do not touch, no photography, no eating, no drinking, no sitting, no sleeping. At first, these warnings may seem redundant, or only present for verisimilitude. Of course I won’t eat, there’s no button for that. Of course I won’t sleep, it’s a non-interactive exhibit. Of course I won’t sit, it’s just a bunch of…benches... The Museum of Exclusionary Design is not simply the space that this exhibit occupies, it’s the way the player is forced to interact– or, not interact– with it. A room full of benches where sitting is prohibited, not just against the rules but against the laws of the game’s design.
Most omnipresent and maybe most clever of all is the perspective. You may have wondered about the white letterboxing on this footage– that’s not an editorial choice by me. When the game opens, the screen does too, like an eyelid except it stops not even halfway. Almost two thirds of the screen remain unusable throughout the whole experience, a theoretically aesthetic decision that’s frustrating in how much usable space it denies the player. And then you look at these benches, designed for discomfort, designed to remove their own purpose, and you get it. The Museum of Exclusionary Design. The Museum is gamic, not in what it allows but what it denies, and it uses that denial to further its point. Louis’ project was never, as far as I know, considered for real physical space. It’s impressive how closely it sticks to real museum design while being an entirely virtual experience.
But there’s one more thing I want to talk about, something that was at one point going to exist in real life, and yet is one of the single most impressive games-that-aren’t-games I’ve ever played. Everything just managed to land in the right pla- “It was going to be a huge red construction made by welding shipping containers together, constructed so that it looked as if a brutalist spacecraft had crash-landed into the classical architecture of the Victoria & Albert Museum in Kensington…inserted into the urban fabric of London like an ice pick into Trotsky. Jutting up into the grey English sky.” 21 years after the release of Kid A and Amnesiac, Radiohead planned to destroy a London museum. Not intentionally. They just couldn’t do the thing they wanted without completely compromising its structural integrity, couldn’t make the “brutalist spacecraft” big enough, heavy enough, alien enough. And then in 2020 everyone in the world went inside for a while, and the idea for whatever Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood wanted to make did as well, and then in 2021, they, along with developers namethemachine and Arbitrarily Good Productions, released one of the wildest museums to ever virtually exist.
The Kid A Mnesia Exhibition (still not really sure how I should pronounce that) is, by far, the biggest production I’ve talked about today. Published by Epic Games and spearheaded by, you know, Radiohead, the exhibition almost certainly cost millions more dollars and was seen by millions more eyes than Dream Emulator, Slave of God, Mountain, and Monuments to Guilt combined. But Kid A Mnesia is no less challenging because of this– given its relative mainstream-ness, I can’t help but admire how weird and evocative an object it is. Like that original trailer for LSD Dream Emulator, the opening moments for Kid A Mnesia lay down a claim. This is not a game. It’s instead a museum, I suppose, every dream they originally wanted to cram into a welded shipping-container structure instead blown out in an impossible way. It is bottomless pits and infinite stairways and voids and stars and, it is, genuinely, moving.
I like Radiohead quite a bit. I’ve listened to Kid A and Amnesiac a number of times, but what’s kind of incredible about the exhibition is how few straightforward implementations of the songs there are. The National Anthem is an iconic piece of Kid A, that bass and drums and anger in concert with each other, and in the exhibition those pieces are all there but broken apart, separated by the virtual space this not-game allows. You walk into the exhibit room labeled “The National Anthem” only to be greeted by the thinnest synths and 100 haphazardly stacked televisions. You goop yourself into this square of gel in the center and yes, there are the drums and the bass, but the vocals are isolated again, a pay phone in the corner with Yorke’s digitized yelping, awkward and lonely. A live recording of Everything In Its Right Place plays only in a little cubby, with a strange demon repeating looking at you like you should be embarrassed to be watching. In a room that feels as dreamlike as anything in Dream Emulator, the skeleton of In Limbo plays while hundreds upon hundreds of notes detach themselves from the walls and soar into nowhere. A hall lit with a dim floating cube suddenly swerves directly into Slave of God territory when you step on a certain floor tile. By setting the “album” in 3D space, the exhibition is able to deconstruct the songs of Kid A Mnesia almost physically, demonstrate how each piece exists within and without the whole. It’s doing something with the tracks that genuinely could not be done with pure audio– spending just a couple minutes in here makes it obvious why Radiohead wanted to do a museum exhibit to begin with. And yet just a few minutes also makes it obvious why, whether they knew it or not, this had to exist in this gamic medium. Any room's individual special effects pale in comparison to the overwhelming feeling of the space as a whole, a space that doesn’t make sense, a space that spirals in on itself, labyrinthian, bigger on the inside than the outside. There’s a pyramid floating in the overgrown concrete atrium.
Look if there is one thing you take away from this video, one actionable request I have of you, it is to download the free Kid A Mnesia Exhibition and go inside the pyramid in the atrium. I’ll be here when you get back. For most of my music listening life, I haven’t liked music videos. There are plenty of interesting, beautiful music videos. But listening to music, for me, is such an abstract, nebulous experience that I kind of end up resenting any video that makes the abstract concrete, for attaching literal imagery to what was previously a kinda indescribable emotional blob of a song. What’s in the pyramid does not feel like a music video. It doesn’t feel like a…conversation either, not like I talked about with Mountain. Instead, it is that emotional blob, precisely, somehow pulled out of my brain and made manifest in ways I’ve never seen. And because the rest of the museum has refused to play a complete, unadjusted song, the fact that they do in the pyramid makes the obvious interpretation feel revolutionary. How to Disappear Completely emanates out of the void as pictures fragment and fly towards you in countless pieces, You and Whose Army creates a zoetrope of a single dancing creature before blowing it out to be completely overwhelming.
This Is Not a Game, in that it’s so different from everything else that the categorization is meaningless. I am being hyperbolic, of course. Despite their own claims to the contrary, I think it’s fairly easy to call all of these pieces “games,” from the aimless trance of Slave of God to the indifference of Mountain to the transcendence of Kid A Mnesia. Not because they resemble our more mainstream understanding of games– they certainly don’t– but because framing each of these titles as games bestows a sense of mechanical investment that can’t help but grow into emotional engagement. The label of “game” can say as much about your method of understanding as whatever the project is doing on its own. And you might hear that and think, “okay, but where does it stop? Doesn’t that make any museum a game? Is photography a game? Is a book a game?” But here’s the thing…I’m just a youtuber! My thoughts don’t have to have perfect academic consistency! Everything’s a game! Everything’s a game! Everything’s a game!
Hmm…how do I do this transition…I’ve made another video essay that’s perhaps the polar opposite of this one. Recently I played through the forgotten gem The Darkness 2, and rediscovered one of my favorite mechanics in games, and I just had to talk about it, and so I did in a completely separate video you can watch right now on Nebula. This is a whole other distinct thing for me, both a little too light and simultaneously, maybe a lot too gory to put on YouTube. ["Even in 2023, playing The Darkness 2 is a revelatory experience. The speed and chaos with which simple arena fights unfold, the number of ways your powers can be combined."]
Have you heard of Nebula? It’s this streaming service, created by video essayists like me, owned by the creators that make content for it, and it’s a thing I believe in wholeheartedly. Nebula, for instance, lets me host a version of this essay where I can actually play the Radiohead songs I was talking about. It lets other creators release whole, well-produced classes, or essay series on topics that would instantly be wiped from YouTube. And it lets me pursue all sorts of alternate video projects, which now total nearly seven hours of fully original, non-YouTube-able content. Unlike the video you just watched, there’s little discussion of– you know what, I was about to say “unlike the video you just watched, there’s little discussion of the nature of art,” but that’s not true. Somehow, The Darkness 2 leads right back to the nature of art as well. Anyway. Nebula is cheap, you directly support me by signing up, and you get an incredible amount of bang for your buck. Now you’ve got a whole backlog of my videos to get through! Clocks ticking! Let’s go!