On Cyberside Picnic && The Growing Urge To Touch Grass

“Perhaps it is here that the space can be opened up to forge a collective resistance to this neo liberal expansion, to the endless proliferation of banalities and the homogenising effects of globalisation. Here in the burnt out shopping arcades, the boarded up precincts, the lost citadels of consumerism one might find the truth, new territories might be opened, there might be a rupturing of this collective amnesia.”

-Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life

Writing this at the beginning of the second half of the year 2023, during the height of the AI craze and after finishing my game Cyberside Picnic, I’m at the same time hit by both euphoria and dread, mostly dread. The dread stems from a double shadow: one cast by the eternally returning wiedergänger named Depression, especially prominent after a period of intense hustling & hassling; the other cast by poltergeists under the rule of our common cyberspace zeitgeist. The wiedergänger came first and started haunting me when it was time for me to describe the work, Cyberside Picnic, in the format of a gallery wall text: the words are all gone, but there’s more to be said. The deep and unceasing torment enveloped me at that moment when I faced the impossibility of contemplating and sharing what Cyberside Picnic was all about. I’d eventually settled on something like this:

Cyberside Picnic is a eulogy for the cyberian commonplace that just escaped us. A love letter to a lost future of alternative gamespaces, delete and overwrite.

You play as a worker tasked with maintaining and assessing the efficiency of 2ELLIOT, Arteon Corporation's flagship AI behind its best digital media algorithm. Splintering and reconfiguring a decaying library of video games, you explore the fragmented terrain of our collective cyberspace through conversations with your responsibility and your partner. Uncovering who or what is really behind this algorithm and the trauma you both share by navigating a multitude of "updated'' nostalgic games and shifting text adventures.

To be completely honest, at the conception of this video game, I’d never imagined it growing out to be haunted by many ghosts of the past; it was just going to be a series of minigames threaded together by a short story of the same name about a brain in a jar tasked as an AI running corporate algorithms. Instead, it evolved into me trying to find an alternative to the zeitgeist of today, a counter-game to the stagnant, boring, overly gamified cyberspace. I cannot overstate the importance of “trying” here because I’m not declaring that I have successfully found a clear practice to exorcize these ghosts, but rather just jotting down bits and pieces that seem important to even begin the journey.

Speaking of haunted spirits, I have to bring up William Gibson’s concept of Semiotic Ghosts. Conceived in his 1981 short story, The Gernsback Continuum, semiotic ghosts kept haunting the protagonist in his job to extrapolate possible futures from 1930s American architecture. These ghosts appear in the form of vivid hallucinations about a future that never was: boomerang planes, hovering cars, and fifth run movie theaters almost as houses of worship to hauntology. A future(1980s) of 1930s White American dreams that never happened. In the story, a vision for a golden future of technological utopia is quite literally a haunted insanity. To Gibson, this perfect future that SciFi writers before him had imagined is perhaps worse than a world with conflicts and contradictions, because to achieve a perfect future is to eliminate all other visions of what the world could be, and only death will prevail in the end.

Jumping back to 40 years later, Gibson’s fear of an Aryan Tech Utopia is only partially fulfilled: we have boomerang planes but only for the military, we also have regurgitated pulp SciFi in the form of Marvel and DC movies constantly hitting theaters. We have all the amazing infotech, but we do not have flying cars yet. The Aryan race still holds almost all of the capital, but they allow other races to exist under them. Bad things on TV are happening even more drastically, and outside of a few billionaires, no one has a vision of the future (outside of an apocalypse) anymore. Semiotic Ghosts, 40 years later, have switched roles. They used to spawn from aborted futures calling from a romanticized past, they swarm us from Gibson’s era forming prisons for thought, creativity, and action. Gibson’s genre of Cyberpunk has been distorted from a fundamentally punk genre railing against corporations, militaries, and technocrats into its own powerful ghost haunting modern culture with endless games, films, manga, and music about cyberness without punks. In video games particularly, there exists a deep sadness beneath the escapism, that neither the game designers or players could imagine and build virtual worlds outside the language of money and violence.

Coming back to Cyberside Picnic, the work itself consisted of 7(8) minigames with individual preludes in the form of different text adventures. The content and form of each minigame are all haunted by some famous video games from the past: Tetris, slot machines, and Flappy Bird to name a few. All products of digital hedonism, just for fun.  Even the text adventure portions call out to old school parser games like Colossal Cave Adventure, as well as more updated forms of text in modern games: documents and text messages. The story itself is also haunted by ghosts of 80s/90s cyberpunk about a brain in a jar acting as an A.I., except instead of plotting to destroy humanity, it is just doing a job as a digital media algorithm. In my mind, Cyberside Picnic is less about SciFi of a dystopian future than with the numbing agony of a stagnant present. The content and mechanics of the game are obviously haunted by ghosts of what came before, but it is also a question about what could have been. 

What could have been? I don’t think I have it in me to answer this question anymore. The potential of video games to influence reality is not the main concern of this work, but my melancholia about what could have been run throughout. I am almost certain that my amplified depression is caused by seeing images of wholesome, successful, pain-free lives showered to each of us by the cyberoverlords as a constant reminder of what a broken, good-for-nothing life I’d been living. Like many, many others who share this debilitating pain, of course we would be wondering about what could have been everyday and everywhere. In this sense, I see 2ELLIOT as a representation of my inability to fully articulate this pain, only chasing lost pleasures among aged video games, and unable to communicate without using elusive stories and euphemisms. Cyberside Picnic is my elegy for the gamespaces that made me and my generation, of memories of once euphoric experiences as now hollowed shells of rusty software, of those temporary, albeit hedonistic, moments of joy from play that saved our teenage lives amidst the violence from a world made for no one. Still, what comes next?

What could come next from these abandoned specters filled with frustration, desperation, anger, and self-hatred? In Cyberside Picnic, the story ends with the ultimate escape by the worker(player) and 2ELLIOT(in a jar). The worker betrayed the megacorp in search of a new world, but the world before their eyes only existed for a brief moment before 2ELLIOT’s predictable death away from all the technology that was keeping them functional and “alive.” Still reminiscent of the joyful past in the form of video games, this act of rebellion is a refusal to give up on a possible future that must exist no matter its brevity. The act to unplug from it all, both literally and metaphorically, in-game and in reality, should not be viewed as an act of pessimism and defeat, or even where the oppressive powers end. Instead, it must be viewed as a stern act of defiance. By holding on to what little is left of a romanticized past, and insisting on the existence of a genuinely kinder future, if this work is about anything, it is about where our powers begin. 

15//06//2023