Welcome to the Universe

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

I do love me a multi-leveled work. A work that plays on multiple levels creates opportunity for all kind of cross-level linkages and inferences, and opportunity to examine things from multiple points of view and scope. I think I counted 4 different levels this piece operates at, which is just crazy ambitious. I’m going to need to number them for clarity.

There are two levels that are cued by graphical formatting. The first (L1) is kind of an academic summary of an… academic. It presents as a publication overview of a (presumably fictional) Dr. Balamer, a psychologist or philosopher who fascinates himself and his work with commonalities of human existence, up to the point of collective unconscious. Our game experience is periodically interrupted to present some more of this fictional background and context, building to a point where this thread (inevitably) twines with…

The OTHER graphically cued level. (L2) is a pixelated font videogame, cuing a 90’s(?) provenance that ALSO fascinates itself with life’s common experiences. The game is a series of scenarios the player is invited to briefly explore before rendering a verdict about themselves based on this exploration. The scenarios themselves are pretty quickly revealed to be (Spoiler - click to show)isolated snapshots of a life, leapfrogging in stages from birth to death.

There is a third level (L3), actually revealed even before the second level, of meta- playfulness. The opening sequence, where an erudite discussion of Moslow’s heirarchy of needs recasts LIFE CHANGING VIDEO GAMES as a core human need is hilarious in context and a breath-takingly hubristic way to introduce the game’s title screen. Thing is, this meta-playfulness stands outside both the other levels, not really of a piece with them, but slyly undercutting or tweaking them both. Honestly, this is kind of the best level of the game. It is this periodic cold dose of humor that keeps you on your toes, challenging whatever connection you are forging with the material as well as challenging the first two levels' hubristic ambitions.

The last level (L4) is the player themself. I mean to distinguish this from much of IF where this level is fully subsumed in L2. Here, you are playing a player of videogame (L4)… by playing a videogame (L2)! The game itself is kind of a character in this thing, and as player, your journey with it is very much part of the narrative. I don’t know if I’m saying this clearly. What I mean is the gameplay is a narrative distinct and separate from the game itself. The game exists both as ITSELF, an artifact in the fictional world, AND as the player’s main entry into that world. You are not a space hero, an angsty teen WITHASECRET, or a grizzled detective solving a mystery. You are a game player playing the real game in front of you that IS ALSO IN THE FICTION. I’ve thrown a lot of words at this, I hope it’s clear enough. If it’s not, just play it, I guess? The chutzpah of all this is just so delightfully joyous and sparkly.

So here you are making fiction by playing a fictional game that also happens to be real. You are choosing dimensions of human experience across a series of vignettes that aim to coalesce around the fictional Dr. Balamer’s observations of human commonality. And this is where I just couldn’t make that final jump from fireworks-display level sparking to true engagement. There is sometimes notable flair in the scenarios (a subversive favorite is opening with ‘you are behind bars’ to be revealed as (Spoiler - click to show)the crib of a baby. Just as often though, there is not. In a quest to describe common human weighpoints, the work falls a bit too much on generic scenarios that don’t feel specific enough to be real, but whose choices ALSO don’t feel justified due to that ephemerality. At one point you are meant to weigh in on having children after a single shopping incident. Not only was the incident itself a bit too pale to generate any real heat, the choice being asked was laughably grandiose! This was the most egregious example of this narrative/choice mismatch but it felt present in some capacity most of the time. This is the L4 experience, possibly the most unique aspect of this crazy Sunday stew.

So what I found as the game progressed was that I loved everything about it EXCEPT THE PLAYING OF IT, meaning navigating the scenarios themselves. There was a midpoint survey that hilariously broke things up. Periodic meta clashes like one leading text: “This is placeholder text for an unfinished story section that will be added in a future update. Please make a selection on the next screen, imagining the scenario that lead to these options:” This feels deliberate tweaking of the overall experience, not a coding oversight. The contrast between the extremely tight-laced academic analyses and background (L1), the much looser gameplay (L4), then the meta piss-taking (L3) always brought sparks of fun.

That core game though (L2), what was built up throughout the piece to be some sort of insightful distillation of human existence, was kind of revealed to be (Spoiler - click to show)a regurgitation of choices made throughout the length. Just that. And choices that had a lot more weight put on them than justified by the scenarios in the moment. There is a read on this mismatch that I like, that this is one final coup d’gras from L3 - that all the academic gushing and egghead philosophizing was ultimately so underwhelming and inadequate to its own goals. That is also a super sparky interpretation for me. It is not CLEAR that is intentional on the piece’s part, but the possibility that it might be is super, super fun to think about.

So yeah, a constant shower of sparks from its levels scraping against each other in thrilling ways, with a core gameplay conceit that deliberately or accidentally refused to become engaging. That’s where I finish. And a bonus point for smashing all these levels together so gleefully.

Played: 10/4/24
Playtime: 35m
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of joy/Seamless bonus point for multi-level madness
Would Play Again?: No, experience feels complete

Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless

(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.

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.