Outside my window the streets are quiet, the world is weird, the future uncertain. Conspiracy theorists are bombarding my social media feed, and everyone is an armchair expert on the pandemic. But for now I am okay, because I am a moose. The game called Everything has been out for a while now. Occasionally I click on a thought bubble and the counterculture philosopher Alan Watts tells me something; sometimes I cease to be a moose and choose to be a solar system or a single-cell organism instead. I move around this game of infinite possibility, not doing much, occasionally communicating with other things with barks or tinkles. I’ve never been much of a gamer, but in recent weeks Everything – and its sister game, Mountain (equally pointless, if not more so) – have been, well, everything to me. Absorbing, still, deep, silly, beautiful, with a chorus of odd but satisfying sounds – both have calmed me and made me forget the lunacy and drama of life online and in lockdown.
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Everything was a game that divided the gamer community when it came out: ‘Joyfully expansive’ or ‘garbage’. For someone like me, though, it was an escape from the turbulence of work pressure and paranoia into an exquisite form of boredom. I gave it to my nephew and niece. They told me, sagely, more experienced in these things: “It’s for relaxing before bedtime because it doesn’t make you excited.”
When the programmer Brie Code wrote a manifesto for her new games company, Tru Luv, she could not have known quite how presciently one line would describe our lives today. “We gaze with horrified fascination into our phones, we are all overwhelmed with shock…”
Her goal for the Toronto-based business was to create games that are an antidote to the adrenalised, goal-driven, fight-or-flight content that has dominated the gaming industry since its genesis 50 years ago. Provocatively, she says: “The multitudes of white masculine gamers who dominate the games industry have made experiences that are relevant to them but not to most people.”
In 2018, Tru Luv’s first game hit the market, a phone app called #selfcare. In it the ‘player’ is stuck in bed interacting with various rituals designed to de-stress. #selfcare looked and felt like a game but it went, really, nowhere. There are no monsters to kill, only cats to stroke, and simple but satisfying tasks to complete.