Fridgetopia

Time to completion: 10-15 minutes or shorter

Fridgetopia has been described by the author as "mechanically utopian", in that it doesn't necessarily sketch out a utopia per se: there is not much world-building here. But this is not a slight against the game. Rather than describe your interactions with a specific space or time, Fridgetopia instead gives you tools with which you can create your own world, to a certain extent.

Fridgetopia is very short, and perhaps not very polished. It reads as much as a coding exercise (albeit an interesting one) as a game, but it does hide at least one secret, which... let's just say it deserves the label of 'fridge horror'. Very clever.

You have the alphabet on a refrigerator. You can take letters and drop them in a new order to spell anything you want. You also have another refrigerator with more letters that allows for more diversity in word creation. Spelling words is the entire game.

This was a small coding exercise made for the Tiny Utopias Jam. By itself, it wouldn’t be much more than a small coding exercise, but positioned as a “utopia” it invites more interpretation. Inkblot tests come to mind here. Whatever meaning you take from Fridgetopia is likely to be meaning you also put into it, but then, that is the game: rearranging what it provides to create your own message.

As a utopia, however, it actually strikes me as more solid than other utopias in the jam. That’s not a criticism against those other games, just a statement about what Fridgetopia does differently. It’s not about a moment of escape, or a dream about how life might be better. Instead Fridgetopia creates a working system. Rearranging letters on its virtual fridge is more complicated than rearranging magnetic letters on a real fridge would be. In order to create this experience for the player, the game had to be mechanically implemented. There are rules at work behind the scenes. This control engenders freedom of expression, but not freedom to spell more than the letters on the fridge can support.

Fridgetopia doesn’t last long, but as an experimental art piece, it gives you a lot to consider... if you want to consider it. Much like the letters on its fridge. Fiddle with them or leave them alone. It’s all up to you.