A daisy creeps across a rocky
landscape. It becomes a blade of grass, which, in turn, becomes a caterpillar,
which then turns itself into a very miniature zebra. Nearby, a patch of clover
says to the zebra, “Repetition is the only form of permanence I am capable of.”
This is a kind of everything.
This is David OReilly’s Everything, a game nestled somewhere between art piece and walking simulator,
and perhaps best described by its title. It allows its player to be everything.
This is also, however, a kind of cop out. Surely in trying to be everything,
something is bound to be missed. It’s a loaded notion (indeed, when the game is
ready to play, it declares, “EVERYTHING IS LOADED”), but it certainly tries.
And it is better for it.
Take your pick from 3,000
playable characters in a collection of bespoke and procedurally generated
landscapes, between which you are permitted to ascend and descend as you see
fit. Perhaps you might like to be a flower. Perhaps you might like to be the
moon. Perhaps you might like to be a cluster of stars. Perhaps you might,
instead, like to know what a stone tower is thinking with the press of a
button. Everything will tell you, and then it will collect the thoughts of
things you encounter into a larger database of thoughts, which it will
eventually use to generate thoughts of your own.
The more you engage with, the
more you know and you can gather ladybirds and boxwood trees Katamari
Damacy-style across a meadow, soundtracked by lectures on the universe from
philosopher Alan Watts while you do it. A boulder might remark to you that it
hopes it remains springtime forever. It is certainly an experience.
In this way, Everything feels
like a massively upscaled version of OReilly’s 2014 release, Mountain, which
gave its players a procedurally generated mountain, contingent on little else.
Mountains might reflect on
starlight, or show up with a dining room set poking out from its crags and
hollows. Tech writer Leigh Alexander commented on Mountainback in 2014, saying,
“It’s annoyingly simple … One of those things where you assume someone either
‘thinks they are so deep’ or is making fun of you. But listen: I love my
mountain. I want to keep it.”
Everything takes this strange
comfort of the procedurally generated personal to a universal scale, and it is
good. It’s really good. Everything is a game that knows what its core strengths
are, and it does not shy away from them: everything persists, and everything is
connected.
Curiously, one of Everything’s
best features is that the game will autoplay when left idle for more than a few
seconds. One might let Everything play in the background while doing other
things, letting it be an ambient aquarium of universes.
Left to its own devices,
Everything will do absurd things. It will plop tubas into lakes, it will bring
pieces of pizza the size of suns into space. The game becomes larger and
larger, leaving flowers and moons behind to fold into earths, into ringed
planets, into irregular galaxies, into planck lengths of the one-dimensional
category, and then back into atoms. Or perhaps it will simply parade a group of
multicoloured tents around a fire pit, and let that be that.
To some, this pleasure of letting
a game play itself may come across as counterintuitive. But there is its own
sort of pleasure in watching a thing create itself again and again, to know
that the landscape either you or the game has created will never happen again.
This is your planck length of the
one-dimensional category. It is no one else’s.
This persistence in spite of
everything is Everything’s strength, but it is also to its detriment. It can
begin to feel fairly lonely to exist in a universe which isn’t affected by your
existence, or your changes.
You are an elephant in a
collection of flat blocks, but to what end? You are a pile of volcanic rock the
size of the Pyramids, and still the world carries on as if you were not. There
are no people, no dialogue, no consequences for being a sea of caterpillars in
an alien river. You are things and their thoughts, pieced together from their
own exposure to the universe you exist in, ever recycling and generating into a
potentially solipsistic infinity. Perhaps there is some comfort to find in this
relentless existence, or perhaps it is merely depressing. But to be affected in
this way – to contemplate one’s own relationship to the cyclical nature of
things – isn’t necessarily a negative.
As you explore hills and alien
climates as buttercups and trumpets, as aloe vera and as an Irregular 3D
Structure, Alan Watts’s voice rumbles low and emphatic: “Billions of years ago,
you were a big bang, but now you’re a complicated human being.” Perhaps this is
enough.
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