Full Monologue – Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy

There’s no feeling more intense than starting over.

If you’ve deleted your homework the day before it was due, as I have. Or if you left your wallet at home and you have to go back after spending an hour in the commute. If you won some money at the casino and then put all your winnings on red and it came up black. If you got your best shirt drycleaned before a wedding and then immediately dropped food on it. If you won an argument with a friend and then later discovered that they just returned to the original view.

Starting over is harder than starting up. If you’re not ready for that, like if you’ve already had a bad day, then what you’re about to go through might be too much. Feel free to go away and come back. I’ll be here.

Alright, thanks for coming with me on this trip. I’ll understand if you have to take a break at any point… just find a safe place to stop and quit the game. Don’t worry, I’ll save your progress, always. Even your mistakes.

This game is a homage to a free game that came out in 2002, titled ‘Sexy Hiking’. The author of the game was Jazzuo, a mysterious Czech designer who was known at the time as the father of B-games. B-games are rough assemblages of found objects. Designers slap them together very quickly and freely, and they’re often too rough and unfriendly to gain much of a following. They’re built more for the joy of building them than as polished products.

In a certain way, Sexy Hiking is the perfect embodiment of a B-game. It’s built with almost entirely out of found and recycled parts, and it’s one of the most unusual and unfriendly games of its time. In it your task is simply to drag yourself up a mountain with a hammer. That act of climbing in the digital world or in real life has certain essential properties that gives the game its flavor. No amount of forward progress is guaranteed; some cliffs are too sheer or too slippery. And the player’s constantly unremittingly in danger of falling and losing everything.

Anyway, when you start Sexy Hiking you’re standing next to this dead tree that blocks the way to the entire rest of the game. It’s might take you an hour to get over that tree. A lot of people never got past it. You prod and poke at it, exploring the limits of your reach and strength, trying to find a way upon over. There’s a sense of truth in that lack of compromise. Most obstacles in videogame worlds are fake. You can be completely confident in your ability to get through them once you have the correct method or the correct equipment or just by spending enough time. In that sense, every pixelated obstacle in Sexy Hiking is real.

The obstacles in Sexy Hiking are unyielding, and that makes the game uniquely frustrating. But I’m not sure Jazzuo were intended to make a frustrating game. The frustration is just essential to the act of climbing, and it’s authentic to the process of building a game about climbing. A funny thing happened to me as I was building this mountain: I’d have an idea for a new obstacle, and I’d build it, test it, and they would usually turn out to be unreasonably hard. But I couldn’t bring myself to make it easier. It already felt like my inability to get past the new obstacle was my fault as a player rather than as the builder. Imaginary mountains build themselves from our efforts to climb them, and it’s our repeated attempts to reach the summit that turns those mountains into something real.

When you’re building the videogame world you’re building with ideas. And that can be like working with quick-set cement. You mold your ideas into a certain shape that can be played with, and in the process of playing with them they begin to harden and set, until they’re immutable like rock. At that point, you can’t change the world, not without breaking it into pieces and starting fresh with new ideas.

For years now, people have been predicting that games would soon be made of prefabricated objects, bought in a store and assembled into a world. For the most part, that hasn’t happened, because the objects in the stores are trash. I don’t mean they look bad or they’re badly made, although a lot of them are. I mean they’re trash in the way that food becomes trash as soon as you put it in the sink. Things are made to be consumed in a certain context, and once the moment is gone, they transform into garbage. In the context of technology, those moments pass by in seconds.

Over time, we’ve put more and more refuse into this vast digital landfill that we call the Internet. It now vastly outnumbers and outweighs the things that are fresh and untainted and unused. When everything around us is cultural trash, trash becomes the new medium, the lingua franca of the digital age. You can build cultures out of trash, but only trash cultures: B-games, B-movies, B-music, B-philosophy.

Maybe this is what digital culture is — a monstrous mountain of trash, the ash-heap of creativity’s fountain, a landfill with everything we ever thought of in it. Grand, infinite, and unsorted.

There’s 3D models of breakfast, gen-X’s fanfic novels, scanned magazines, green-screen Shia LeBoeuf, banned snuff scenes on liveleak, facebook’s got lifelike bots with unbranded adverts, candid shots of kanye, Taylor Swift mashups, car crash Epic Fail gifs, Russian dash cam vids, discussions of McRibs. Discarded, forgotten, unrecycled. Muddled, rotten, and untitled. Everything’s fresh for about six seconds until some newer thing beckons and we hit refresh. And there’s years of persevering disappearing into the pile, out of style, out of sight.

In this context it’s tempting to make friendly content. That’s gentle, that lets you churn through it, but not earn it. Why make something demanding, if it just gets piled up in the landfill, filed in with the bland things?

When games were new, they wanted a lot from you. Daunting you, taunting you, resetting and delaying you. Players play stoically. Now everyone’s turned off by that, they want to burn through it quickly, like a quick fix for the fickle, some tricks for the clicks of the feckless. But that’s not you, you’re an acrobat. You could swallow a baseball bat.

Now I know most likely you’re watching this on Youtube or Twitch, while some dude with 10 million views does it for you. Like a baby bird being fed chewed-up food. That’s culture too. But on the off-chance you’re playing this, what I’m saying is, trash is disposable, but maybe it doesn’t have to be approachable. What’s the feeling like? Are you stressed? I guess you don’t hate it, if you’ve got this far feeling frustrated, then it’s underrated.

An orange is a sweet, juicy fruit locked inside a bitter peel. That’s not how I feel about a challenge. I only want the bitterness – it’s coffee, it’s grapefruit, it’s licorice.

It feels like we’re closer now. Composer and climber, designer and user. You could have refused, but you didn’t. There was something in you that was hidden, that chose to continue.

It means a lot to me that you’ve come this far, endured this much. Every wisecrack, every insensitivity, every setback you’ve forgiven me is a kingly gift that you’ve given me.

We have the same taste, you and I. It’s not ambition. It’s ambition’s opposite – an obdurate mission to taste defeat. You’ll feel bad if you win, so I put this snake in for you.

Have you thought about who you are in this? Are you the man in the pot, Diogenes? Are you his hand? Are you the top of his hammer? I think not — when your hand moves, the hammer may not follow. Nor the man, nor the man’s hand. In this you are his WILL, his intent, the embodied resolve in his uphill ascent.

Now you’ve conquered the ice cliff, the platforms, the church and the rectory, the living room and the factory, the playground and the construction site, the granite rocks and the lakeside. You’ve learnt to hike. There’s no way left to go but up. And in a moment I’ll shut up, but let me say I’m glad you came.

I dedicate this game to you, the one who came this far. I give to you with all my love.