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If we can say that the WarioWare, Inc. franchise reproduces the hectic and fragmented lifestyle of contemporary hyperconsumption, Arctic Eggs is particularly concerned with inducing the zen state you need to set aside your commitments and procrastinate peacefully until late afternoon — good.

First and foremost, it is important to note that Arctic Eggs continues that specific game design philosophy popularized in recent decades by Bennett Foddy's games such as QWOP (2010), GIRP(2011), and Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy (2017). In summary, the basic premise of this design philosophy lies in the playful intuition that any mundane everyday action — running (QWOP), handling a tool (Getting Over), or, in our case, frying eggs — can be translated into complex gameplay mechanics. In a world where we are all toxically conditioned by the accelerated rhythm of alienated consumption, and patience needs to be reclaimed as not just thinkable but practicable, this approach promotes self-denial over selfishness and measured precision over the brute force of the addict. Not surprisingly, the only explicit timer in the gameplay is the cigarette, which, along with the coffee break, stands among the universal symbols of procrastination in the workplace.

In many ways, Arctic Eggs seems to represent a successful synthesis of our typically postmodern spirit, symbolized precisely by the combination of the egg — that is, aborted life — and the cigarette — that is, premature death.

In diegetic terms, this is why the real origin of the dystopian social structure represented in the game is never fully revealed but only suggested. Even when the game seems to respond with something concrete to expose its "foundations," it does so always in a "post-ironic" manner, a symptom of our cynicism. Otherwise, the narrative could not admit any mistake from the cook and, for the sake of internal coherence, would need to place him back within the logic of late capitalism every time a slip occurred. In this sense, it seems to me that by never punishing him at any moment, the game validates the autonomy of the virtual game space, the "magic circle" (Eric Zimmerman and Katie Salen), as a space of abundance and experimentation.

Secondly, and more importantly, Arctic Eggs can be understood as a "strong" science fiction game, in a sense that I would like to elaborate on here. If the video game is — as has often been pointed out — a postmodern medium that absorbs and mixes, indiscriminately, the repertoire of its sibling media — literature, music, cinema — into a renewed and ever-changing form of reality representation, our initial task will always be to insist on the fundamental distinction that separates the game itself, in its own "gameness," from the audiovisual and literary aspects also present in the act of playing. In our predominantly logocentric philosophical tradition, the game has often been confused with the narrative aspects reproduced by the game, in the game; more rare has been the confusion between the game and the soundtrack. For the same reason, it has become acceptable to argue that a cultural product derived from science fiction literature is science fiction simply because it represents, to some extent, spaceships or zap guns — that is, even if it fails to consider more carefully any social implications of these inventions, something considered essential in true science fiction, or at least in good science fiction.

Not being a problem in itself, this situation suggests the high degree of diffusion of sci-fi imagery in the public consciousness. In Arctic Eggs, for example, many elements that make up the setting seem directly drawn from some of Philip K. Dick's most famous dystopian stories, such as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), as well as the technological imagery created by the cyberpunks in the 1980s (William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Lewis Shiner, etc.). In this sense, and according to common sense, Arctic Eggs is certainly a science fiction game — however, and here lies the main point of the second argument, Arctic Eggs is a "strong" sci-fi game, as opposed to "kitsch" sci-fi.

The greatest quality of Arctic Eggs, basically, results from the fact that this game deeply mobilizes the poetic power of science fiction as discourse, carrying out from start to finish that process of "cognitive estrangement" that the theorist Darko Suvin originally associated with the "ontolytic effect" of sci-fi. In Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (1979), Suvin characterized this act of "dissolution" precisely as the figurative deconstruction of consensually accepted reality, forcing the admission of other cognitively equivalent versions in its place. Thus, through its specific literary devices, science fiction, as a sui generis literary form, would be able to perform the aesthetic procedure of defamiliarization/familiarization of the known/unknown in the empirical world of the reader.

This "cognitive disruption" is possible because the creator of the fictional world, in an initial moment of validation, can typically situate his creation within a "realistic" paradigm — thus organizing its literary structure based on scientific observations and theorizations familiar to the reader's horizon as possible structures, as much as those of his current world. Only to later destabilize this perception with the insertion of a cognitively deviant referent, often a technological invention.

However, as the researcher Seo-Young Chu pointed out in her book Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? (2010), "every science fiction world is a metaphysical concept literalized as an ontological fact within a narrative universe." Expanding Suvin's perspective, Chu argued that science fiction reveals its cognitive value as it manages to represent certain "cognitively strange" referents that would otherwise be unrepresentable under a "realistic" representational model. In this sense, sci-fi discourse is understood as the most suitable representational mode for dealing with the impalpable aspects of essentially metaphysical questions of existence, alongside poetry and above other literary genres. Ultimately, it is in the transformation of these fictional experiences that we find, in one way or another, our own real experiences.

In Arctic Eggs, the following advertising slogan is read, which in multiple aspects seems to materialize that "happy consciousness" mocked by Herbert Marcuse in his book One-Dimensional Man (1964): "Cigarettes are the most agreeable way of ignoring life." Immediately, the joke serves to address the virtual social problem as an explicit correspondence of the real social problem, recognizable by the presumed player. However, when the nasal implant lady demands a half-cooked cigarette with her fried eggs, this correspondence quickly reappears as a distorted, though familiar, illusion — and the player recognizes himself in the virtual situation no longer under the key of an arrogant distancing that minimally understands the situation as a mere object of the cold "science" knowledge, observable and felt from a distance. Instead, the player recognizes himself in the virtual situation under the key of amazement, that is, wonder before the sublime that until then was implicit in the commodity spell.

In a well-known conference, Walter Benjamin declared: "An author who does not teach anything to writers teaches nothing to anyone" ("The Author as Producer," 1934). Placed in its original historical context, Benjamin's statement was directed especially against those intellectuals — and intellectuals can, of course, make games — whom he accused of being "hackers." In this case, Benjamin used the term "hacker" to denote the individual who, in possession of a certain "apparatus" of production — for example, a novelist; or, in our situation, a game creator — does not strive to transform this apparatus in the direction of socialism, only reproducing its social meaning within the scope of maintaining the current state of affairs. Taking Bertolt Brecht's epic theater as a paradigmatic model, Benjamin continues: "It is decisive that the production has a model character, capable, first, of leading other producers to production and, second, of making an improved apparatus available to them. And this apparatus is all the better, the more consumers it leads to production, in a word, the better it is able to transform readers or viewers into collaborators." What Brecht called "V-Effekt" (Verfremdungseffekft), or "alienation effect," was precisely what Benjamin considered the greatest quality of the communist playwright: as Benjamin explained, in Brecht's epic theater, unlike naturalistic theater, the viewer recognizes the true situations behind the performance "not with presumption," "but with amazement." "Epic theater does not reproduce situations, but discovers them."

Updating Benjamin's orientation, it must now be said: as a potentially revolutionary medium, the video game of the 21st century will be all the better, the more consumers it leads to production. In this sense, Arctic Eggs performs some of the main political functions of art, firstly, due to its indie nature, an example of resistance for a working class that is currently as commodified as the cultural products it mindlessly consumes; and secondly, through the exercise of "cognitively strange" displacement that its gameplay operates between the fictional world, the player's consciousness, and their concrete experience in the social world.

As the antithesis of the late capitalist way of life, the cook is a revolutionary agent. The dystopian world of Arctic Eggs, as a reproduction of a specific technological imagination, represents the defamiliarization of the mundane — that is, the handling of culinary instruments and, ultimately, the maintenance of the biological body itself. In a certain sense, Arctic Eggs is in direct opposition to games like Age of Empires, in which the player's avatar represents, if not the alienating force that turns "work" (the click) into an abstract relationship between "nature" and "resources" within a simulated economy, at least something close to that. Arctic Eggs, finally, rejects this philosophical option and offers the player the truly revolutionary alternative, that is: the one in which the player reconnects with the being-there of the cook; not only in narrative terms but also in terms of gameplay.

P.S.: The eggs resemble tapiocas.