Welcome to the Universe

This is a Twine game that alternates between academic treatises in one set of styling and a life-simulator in binary choices in another set of styling. You progress through an entire life while simultaneously reading about the (fictional) author's thought processes and research.

I thought the life simulator part was pretty fun. It has a certain unusual perspective on the world that to me captures a lot of the weirdness one feels when transitioning from one age group to another.

The scientific part seems intentionally obfuscated. Some of it seems like a reference to way the 'inner' game is structured (for instance the scientific part talks a lot about duality and the importance of a fixed binary, while the game consists of yes/no choices). I think that one phrase from it describes itself well: a “verisimilar facade of truth, a frightening pastiche that serves only to bolster the supposed intelligence of the person writing it.”

The game has some meta (or is the word extra-diegetic or something fancy like that?) parts like completing a survey about the game, downloading an update, etc., a part that looks unfinished.

Overall, I liked the opportunity to think about my life, and I liked the way that the game poked fun at personality tests and the kind of vapid summaries they give.

So I think I'll rate the game on that impression. Witty, nice-looking, poking fun at obtuse academic language, introspective.

Outside of that, someone mentioned that this is a parody of Alter Ego, a very old choice-based game. I had heard it mentioned once or twice and had looked at it in the past, but I revisited it as part of this review. I think that this game definitely suffers from the comparison. This game lambasts the over-emphasis on binaries; Alter Ego has more than just binary options and gives quite a bit of freedom in exploring the game; this game is self-conscious and tries to show the absurdity of life, but Alter Ego does so as well. I've heard it said that the best parodies are by those who have a deep love of the subject material, but I didn't get that feeling here. Now, I don't even really like Alter Ego and this whole reference idea isn't stated by the author, so I'm not including it in my rating, but it would be like parodying a hamburger by putting roast beef in a hot dog bun: just revisiting the same basic concept, making it a little more absurd, but not essentially adding anything or doing anything significantly better. (whereas a burger-lover's parody of a burger could make a really tall burger to make fun of how hard it is to bite into a restaurant burger, or include 20 patties and 25 slices of cheese and sparklers on the top to make fun of supersizing, etc.)

As a final side note I liked how smooth the animations were, (the two I remember are the picture of Conway's game life and the loading bar).

Middle school bodies are like crappy NYC apartments: nothing seems to fit right, the smells never go away, and the general experience makes you wonder how growing up was ever considered a good idea.

Regardless, the young adult body is a universal conundrum that everyone must confront at some point. (Don't get discouraged. Studies from The New York Times tell you these feelings are permanent and leave ever-lasting damage to your psyche.)

You’ve been instructed to write a short essay on the topic “Should kids have homework?” for English class. While you are glad your teacher is interested in hearing about topics actually relevant to your life (unlike last week’s discussion climate change), you’re not quite sure where to start.

You reach down in the deep well of ideas swirling inside your brain. Homework good… but also bad?

You look where the sky should be only to see a river. You reach for the current. It's warm.

I’m going to sink. I always knew that, but I thought my boat would hold water. None of you know what it’s like to plant a seed by hand. You fix weights to ships, and you tell them the water's fine.

I’m an arduous process, arboreous labor. My bones are the dirt the ground came from, my trees the gift of broken hands. I want you to find the coastline. But none of you see it, none of you do.

It is empty. The world around you is creaks and bones, the hardwood floor a muted fretboard. No one else is around. The universe is quiet, a silent denouement for an inevitable ending. You see it on the skin, the distance. Your time is drawing to a close.

What’s terrifying about babies is how terrified they scream. Beyond the voice’s breakingpoint and still the shrillhoarse shreaking. Listening to them, you just kind of wonder, is it this bad, this whole, you know? Not just that I’ve learned subtler ways to cope with being cold or hungry or alone in a darkness that I don’t know will ever be broken, but worried that it’s worse, that I’ve lost the intensity of these feelings through ineluctable repetition, the fullest misery of our damnation has been worn away, left with whatever ashes we adapt to adulthood: “You cry at the top of your lungs, the realization that you are alive and singular dawning on you for the very first time. It's okay, though. This thought will only haunt you for the rest of your life.” Belying the child crying for their mother is the reality she could not return, our coherence of any desire to live depends on flickering contingencies which do not take them with us, when they go, we are here to be alone inside ourselves, inflictable.

Tension between universality, the empathetic recognition of the baby’s suffering that accords with our own having traveled that road, and individuation, whatever eternal return condemns you it is you who must undergo everything incurred, deathmarches us through the pervasive we permutate: “the normal processions must be carried out. If this is somehow new information, congratulations: a lifetime of disappointment and pointless information awaits. How is it, being born? Do you feel ecstatic? Elastic? Life is something we must all come to terms with at some point in time.” In a rapidfire game of life, Conway’s or Milton Bradley’s, we are whisked through each progressive phase of the ineluctable, accumulating idiosyncrasies primarily in the flinches from them. From “Childhood is a process of aches, pains, and frequent misunderstanding” to “Now, time is slower and bare walls are more noticeable. Like that chip in the wall you forgot to note on your security deposit” we are swept along a sweatprocess that leathers us unrecognizably stretched over the brainbloat accumulated by decades of reasons and wouldbe answers, none of which trigger a transcendence to wrest us from the ungravitas gravity: “Life is a cascading, measureless list of somehows.”

Whoa, you say, that’s pretty deep dude, and the game makes the same snarky snidestep from its subject, with wacky asides like how many McDonalds does it take to make the best of all possible worlds or skateboard tricks you land in a fireball to obsequious applause or “The clown is an affront to God, a pitiful mortal unaware of what is good and just in the world. Clowns represent full depravity and unchecked hubris.” This flippancy deadpans the drama to dry out the soppy philosophizing, which works to the extent it keeps the tone amicable, but somewhere between the game installing updates midstream and interrupting you with zany lists and buckshots of cheap jokes and nonsequitor noneliners, the veering starts to feel Wink Wink Clever again, only in the other direction, and you’re like, okay, you clearly have something interesting to say, could you please just say it.

Which is a shame, because, when it does just say it, the writing radiates clarion certainty not worth shying from. The delicate balancing act between encapsulating universals like “Cinema is verite. Our needs are our mechanisms. Truth must be discovered in order to be truth. Discover the want and want the discovery. / We are gelatin like the Earth is clay. The fact that a question exists at all is beautiful.” and the heartbreaking simplicities that sufficiently fuel any given soul like “There is gestalt in survival” create generative confliction perfectly capable of carrying the game’s moue molting to a grin. Unexpected little ruby pops like “gentle fortress of claret and peel” or “Heat emanated like a broiler skillet spider” italicize a lived particularity that niches connections within the textbook infodumps and vague gestures at “capital-S Somethings”.

Zaniness undercutting the narrative also proves redundant, because this undercut is precisely the climactic fulcrum that poignancies the narrative’s switching tracks from the connaturalist aggrandizing of the psychological into the anthropological to the emotive underscore of the narrative’s soft pulse: “You stare at the conveyor belt. People need to do what they can to survive. Life has beaten us down so much. I want us to be okay.” Choosing not to resolve the tension between the universal condition and its lived particulars into a nihilistic hauteur but rather a gentle awareness of the fragile interstitially stitched together psyche, the one of one that is “here in spite of all my challenges, my choices, and my mistakes. I am human. I am real. I am necessary. / And yet, even by telling you all of this, even by including that preamble and this vast, quite-encompassing magnitude of a description, I am more than any of these binary truths or lies alone could ever hope to describe or contain: / I am multitudes. / I am complex, the in-between. / I am synthesis.” Compiling all your choices throughout your playthrough into a description of you, the specific player, that creates a surprisingly deep portrait of how you dwelled within overhaunted confines, the liberative immelman out of the inexorable to its inness and ability justifies the central conceit into a call to, if not action, then at least reaction, reagency at last: “Let’s hold on a little bit longer. Let’s change things. Let’s scar.”

(Some spoilers)

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be very careful about what we pretend to be,” muses a WWII-era American spy, who worked under such deep cover he might have just been a Nazi, in Vonnegut’s Mother Night. Welcome to the Universe isn’t masquerading as anything nearly so horrible – it presents itself as a slightly tarted-up version of ahead-of-its-time 1980s life sim Alter Ego, intercut with excerpts from a fictional sociology textbook – but it might have profited from this hard-won wisdom all the same, since for all that I’m pretty sure the author wanted me to find the meat of the game irritatingly superficial, spending half an hour gritting my teeth at the irritating superficiality on display didn’t prove the best on-ramp to the actual point the game’s trying to make.

The flip side of all this is that Welcome to the Universe gets points for verisimilitude. The conceit here is that the game is the brain-child of a Professor Balamer, a one-time sociological wunderkind whose groundbreaking theories have come under increasing criticism, and who has thus decided to take his arguments to the masses via the medium of electronic entertainment. The game-within-a-game steps you through an archetypal life vignette by vignette, starting from experiencing the loneliness of a baby being sleep-trained through playground philosophizing, from education to puberty to young adulthood, and then eventually on to maturity, potential parenthood, and senescence and death. Occasionally you’re given a binary choice that can help define your personality, like are you a homebody or traveler, someone who’s cool or lame, who’s content in your small town or anxious to enter a bigger world.

I’d characterize the prose here as ambitious – it’s trying to create a lot of context, philosophical resonance, and importance around what are ultimately just a handful of short scenes, the better to make them constitute a life in full, as well as work in some jokes. It’s occasionally successful, and always readable – here’s an early bit I liked, laying out the downsides of life in the crib:

"for some undeterminable reason, you have been left in this cold, damp room alone. Your face begins to sour. Loneliness is not fun. Loneliness is not what you signed up for."

Things get away from the author occasionally, though. Soon after the above, we get this:

"You lean into your mother’s embrace, her body a gentle fortress of claret and peel."

And beyond specific missteps like this, the overall effect can be alienating – seeing six-year-olds debating whether their small town is better than another based on the availability of fast food restaurants through an authorial voice that’s constantly cracking wise with e.g. Thornton Wilder references can’t help place the action at a remove. And sometimes that voice is much less clever than it thinks it is. Here’s a bit about puberty:

"Regardless, the young adult body is a universal conundrum that everyone must confront at some point. (Don’t get discouraged. Studies from The New York Times tell you these feelings are permanent and leave ever-lasting damage to your psyche.)"

The swerve in what “don’t get discouraged” means is a good joke, but come on, the New York Times doesn’t itself do studies.

I can’t rule out that these infelicities are diegetic, however. As mentioned above, after every couple of life-sim segments you get a page or so telling you more about the game’s author and his theories. The prose style here is very different, a note-perfect imitation of academic jargon complete with dated citations – it’s an enjoyable parody, but parody it is because the actual ideas being conveyed in this dressed-up language are very stupid. Balamer was obsessed with quantifying existence via standardized, binary properties that he alleges are universal across the human experience and can therefore lead to common understanding and mutual respect across difference, which depending on how you understand it is either banal or false – there are also some supernumerary elements to his thinking that appear to be warmed-over Durkheim or Mead, who were writing at the dawn of sociology’s creation as a field of study. Balamer, meanwhile, is meant to have been heralded as a great genius after his first major publication in 1999 – apparently it “shaped early postmodern research by merging New Journalism techniques with traditional quantitative methodology” so I guess add time travel to his list of talents – so yeah, it’s hard to take this stuff seriously.

Welcome to the Universe appears to be in on the joke that Balamer’s a blowhard; there are some late-game metafictional twists that suggest that he’s having second thoughts about his idea that everybody is reducible to a small number of data points, and the fact the life-sim that purports to reflect universal human experiences, and therefore point to the futility of conflict and the need for brotherhood, is very clearly recounting the life of a straight middle-class suburban white guy, seems like an intentional choice.

So yeah, this is a satire that spends most of its running time playing things straight, meaning that my notes are primarily ejaculations of frustration at how obviously incorrect its purported thesis is (admittedly, intercut with admiring comments about some of the nicer turns of phrase). I can see how some players might find it to be redeemed by its twist, and to the game’s credit it’s open-minded enough to give Balamer a bit of grace, allowing that his intuitions about the need for human connection and the inherent worth of life are correct even while making clear that he was going about all of this the wrong way. But, well, my experience of the game was primarily of it going that wrong way, and I can’t say that I felt the satirical project was sufficiently well-aimed to justify the annoyance: of the major bad ideologies currently out there in the world, “maybe the personality is reducible to a relatively small number of knowable variables” is probably not in the top 50 or 100. Even though Welcome to the Universe isn’t a bad game, it often does a very good job pretending to be one, and that’s a dangerous business.

Welcome to the Universe is an homage to/parody of Alter Ego, a 1986 choice-based game. Alter Ego was created by, I believe, a psychologist, and purported to be able to accurately model the player’s personality and life up to that point and show them what the outcome of their life choices might be, as well as allowing them to experiment with other life paths and identities. Alter Ego’s claim that it would “change your life” was a little tongue-in-cheek (because you can model the outcomes of making different choices, get it?), but it was earnestly meant to be thought-provoking and somewhat educational, claimed to be rooted in a deep understanding of human psychology, and was perhaps even intended to provoke empathy for others in bad situations, in a “there but for fortune” kind of way. A contemporary review called it “consciousness-raising.” Of course, it also made a number of normative assumptions about the player, and in a game that’s supposed to be so all-encompassing of the human experience, there’s a particular kind of discomfort that that causes for a player who finds that the array of choices on offer hasn’t taken into account the possible existence of a person like them.

You may wonder why I’ve spent a whole paragraph of this review talking about an entirely different game, but I think if I had not already been familiar with Alter Ego—not only the game itself, but the way it was marketed and received—I would have been pretty baffled by Welcome to the Universe. The latter game is framed as the creation of a fictional academic, Dr. Balamer, who believes in the importance of “life-changing video games” and their ability to provoke empathy by drawing on universal human experiences. His earnest ambition to connect humans by creating a universally relatable game produces something that is both obviously filtered through the perspective of a middle-class, suburban, white American man (witness, for example, the schoolchildren arguing about the merits of their hometown based on the presence or absence of particular chain restaurants—can a town really be said to be good if it doesn’t have an Applebee’s???) and frequently absurd (featuring heated arguments about Parisian dentistry and a placeholder for an incident involving “goop” that somehow leads to you declaring yourself the “goop master” or “goop servant”). I won’t spoil where exactly this goes, but my read is that Welcome to the Universe affectionately mocks some of Alter Ego’s grand ambitions and gestures towards universality while ultimately affirming the impulse towards human connection that underlies it.

I found this pretty entertaining (the high point for me was probably (Spoiler - click to show)the mid-game survey that asked you if you thought the game should add an incident involving a stranger in an unmarked van and then asked you if you thought it would be fair if your character died if they interacted with the stranger in any way, a reference to an infamously jarring episode in the childhood section of Alter Ego where your character can be kidnapped and murdered). But at the same time, I’m not quite sure if there’s much of a point to this mockery of a specific aspect of a specific game that didn’t exactly spawn a host of imitators. On the other hand, maybe it’s just a monument to someone’s complicated feelings about an ambitious but flawed game, and maybe that’s all it needs to be.

There is one aspect that I felt might rise to the level of a commentary on choice games in general rather than Alter Ego in particular. Alter Ego was a game that gave you choices of actions and determined your (or rather, the PC’s) qualities based on what you did, and that has remained a popular model for choice IF (see the whole Choice of Games oeuvre—in fact, Alter Ego’s latest incarnation seems to be in Choicescript). Welcome to the Universe, on the other hand, allows you to choose what you are (a traveller or a homebody? Cool or uncool?), and determines your actions based on those qualities. It inverts the usual framework, perhaps calling into question how much choice we really have in what we do versus how much our actions are the inevitable result of who we are as people. (Of course, this has particular relevance to Alter Ego’s claim that you can create a perfect replica of yourself but then see what happens if you make different life choices, and a little less relevance to the majority of choice games, in which you’re not supposed to be playing a character who’s Literally You. But on the other hand, I’ve often heard people lament that they replayed a game planning to make different choices this time, but couldn’t bring themselves to do it….)

There’s also something there about the inadequacy of binary choices to really capture the range of human experience, but this falls a little flat when you consider that most games don’t have purely binary choices, including Alter Ego itself.

All Alter Ego considerations aside, I didn’t consistently love the experience of Welcome to the Universe; the humor was a little hit or miss for me, and also I don’t really like playing as Literally Me in any game and so I didn’t and then I felt like I’d undermined the intended experience of the ending. (This is a me problem, I know.) But it’s definitely unique, and it gave me some ideas to chew on, and I appreciate that.