31 Days to HYPSMC

This game is reminescent of two other games I've played recently, Pageant and PhD Simulator. All three are simulation games with a central focus on grinding through, yep, school. Grad school in the case of PhD Simulator, high school in the case of Pageant and this game. PhD Simulator and this game are both made in custom engines and both light on writing and story, letting narratives develop naturally through the player's gameplay. Pageant, on the other hand, has an actual storyline about a Chinese-American high schooler named Karen Zhao who applies to a beauty pageant for the sake of college apps. But there are still stats for the beauty pageant and specific requirements that must be met to win, and like in this game, Karen needs to get into a good college. For the sake of your future, they say. It will be worth it, they say.

What's the commonality between these games? They all use resource management mechanics to capture the soulless grind of the American university system and how far people need to go to "make it". PhD Simulator and this game both have a sanity-type mechanic, where your hope lessens day after day as you do nothing but work and study and work, no time for hobbies when you need to meet the metrics or you'll fall behind. Pageant has no sanity stat, only a time stat, but Karen does pass out in the middle of school due to lack of sleep. One of the things you can do when waking up in the nurse's office is say you're fine and go back to class. Can't miss the important content, after all. Look, all these other people have gotten their PhDs already. All these other people will manage to get into Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, so you better join them.

In Pageant, the main goal is winning the beauty pageant and not getting into Yale, but that beauty pageant is indirectly about getting into Yale. You're not allowed to do something for its own sake, just to have fun. If you do, it's time you're wasting and should be channeling towards a greater end.

"But colleges want interesting and genuinely passionate people, not just soulless automatons who do what they're supposed to do because they can't imagine anything else!" College apps do a great job of encouraging the second and turning the first into the second. Colleges can't tell genuine passion from a person who's faking it, and the highly regimented specific hoops a person needs to jump through to "demonstrate passion" are easy to fake, so now everyone needs to fake them. You know that saying about how a measure stops being a good measure once people start using it as a target? For every happy passionate person who makes it into the good college as intended, there are at least ten terrified kids trained into anxious self-hating hyperperfectionists because the surrounding culture has convinced them that HYPSMC hyperperfectionism is the only way to win. Success in the "good colleges" guarantees money and a stable job for the rest of your life and a chance at huge power, wealth or fame. Who wouldn't want that? Of course, those kids might not even get in.

From The Stanford Marshmallow Prison Experiment:

Recently, I’ve been tutoring 30 or so pre-med students. These students—mostly Asian, some white—are smart and motivated. They have done cross-country, rowing, and tennis. They play piano, violin, and cello. They have Clinical, Research, and Community Service experience. And, in certain consistent ways, they are unhappy. They are anxious and self-doubting. They crave reassurance. They downplay successes. They feel that all my compliments are “just being nice.” They radiate fatigue:

“So, what do you do when you’re not doing medical stuff?” I asked one of them.
“I don’t know. I play videogames sometimes. Except I should probably quit.”
“What are you going to do instead?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Study more, I guess.”
“Your grades are pretty good, though.”
“For medical school? They’re, at best, a little below average.”

And he wasn’t wrong.

From a post on r/ApplyingToCollege, where this game was posted, with 2000+ upvotes:

As I write down the activities and awards that describe me, I feel no passion nor excitement over them. Orchestra? Forced to pick an instrument in middle school. Model United Nations? ao's love that, right? Community Service? I couldn't give a single shit about this toxic ass community of selfish humans that doesn't bat an eye what happens to me. I'm not a bright, optimistic person that my activities show. I'm not even the person I say I am in my personal essay that I spent countless hours toiling with my blood, sweat and tears over, which is a cycle im sure will repeat multiple times. Are you kidding me? I'm 18 years old. You want me to write about who I am? I don't even know who I am...

There is this feeling I never felt before. Whenever I feel happy, whenever I ace a test or do something that brings my mood up, I feel a certain dread approach me. It's telling me that I shouldn't be relaxing, or playing games, or reading light novels, or watching anime, and it's telling me that I'm not allowed to feel happy. Don't forget to edit your personal statement! Did you finish your college list yet? Which topics are you writing for the UC essays again? Which college in this university are you applying for? Are you sure you want to apply to this school? What makes this school different than this? Are you going to retake that good sat score because you screwed up the essay? Are you going to miss registration deadlines like last time?

I could go on, but this is too long already and other people have said it better. Like that guy above.

The game itself is very light on story, compared to something like Pageant. Unlike Karen, the player here is essentially a featureless protagonist. And there's no snippet of narrative with every choice you make to tell you what happens or how close you are to success. Time just silently advances.

The lack of feedback is one of the biggest differences from Pageant and PhD Simulator. In those games, you at least know what you're getting into, and how much work you need to put in to succeed. Here? College admissions processes are notoriously opaque. A person might get accepted at one college for what gets them rejected at another. You have no idea what you're supposed to do, what kind of person you're supposed to be, what kind of thing to focus on. Just grope around blindly and stress yourself out to the point of collapsing from exhaustion and sleeping three days straight because you overwork yourself to the bone, not knowing how much to do and so trying to do everything at once, even if it's impossible.

The game mechanics that allow this kind of narrative to develop naturally are good ones, and adept at showing the point--that elite college applications are a special circle of hell.

What I would criticize is the lack of narrative snippets, which I think would add a lot more character to the piece, and the mechanical approach the game takes towards "have a mental breakdown and be escorted to the mental asylum for a week" and "sleep for three days straight out of exhaustion". They're just mechanic punishments for letting your sanity/exhaustion drop to 0 and can happen over and over without any change in the text. I would make multiple occurences have more severe consequences, or even have one be instant gameloss like how PhD Simulator does it. I also feel, personally, that the game would benefit from having a more defined protagonist who isn't just a featureless self-insert, so we can interact with this person's family and friends more, and really get to know them. But that may not be the point of this game, and it seems like it hasn't been updated in years, so further change looks unlikely.

I should probably go to sleep now. May write more later, excuse any mistakes, etc.