Hypnospace Outlaw
In my conversation about Papers Please, I mentioned how replicative realism (inserting people into a meticulous reproduction of a time/place) is often less valuable to historical video games than building an artwork that lets the players understand some of the deep systems that made that period unique and continue to affect our thinking. Hypnospace Outlaw does this for the late ‘90s and early ‘00s internet in the most rambunctious, aesthetically obnoxious, and wonderful way. Yes, you could send younguns out to the Space Jam website, but that only captures some of the more egregious design choices, not an understanding of how the tight-knit communities and crude tools crafted the foundation of internet culture. Booting you into a fake version of Windows 97/2K, Hyponospace Outlaw immerses you as an unpaid moderator for an alternate version of a service provider who hosts a community-made vaporware wonderland of hot-rodded and remixed Angelfire and Geocities sites, bands and their stalkers on Myspace, and role-playing game community chats on AIM. Back to the unpaid moderator aspect: in Hyponospace Outlaw, you work for the dubious tech mega-company, getting digital scrip for enforcing rules. You quash alternate scrip currencies, track down people for violating copyright, and even get viruses for your fake computer that require you to spend your Hypnobucks (tm) to buy virus removal software from the company you so kindly volunteer for. In playing the game, not only do you get a sense of how the aesthetics and culture of Web 1.0 functioned; but the game also forces you to grapple with the ways that our current tech industry came to fetishize greed, self-exploitation, and monopolization; and how radical it is to retain a sense of meaning in the fragmentary record of fleeting proprietary platforms.
Creator: Jay Tholen & Tendershoot
Link: https://www.hypnospace.net
Connections:
Macintosh Plus - Floral Shoppe
JODI (Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans)
Scott Beauchamp - How Vaporwave Was Created Then Destroyed by the Internet