this game is a fish tank of the teenage experience.
you watch as the little people mill about, sequestered in this simple environment, left to pace and spin and pace and spin. as the player, you mold and mend that environment, encouraging spins, discouraging paces, attempting to direct movement toward one direction and ultimately failing.
my high school experience felt claustrophobic--there was not much to do, i didn't have much control, and every little change to my environment very much had an effect on my internal world. playing with this game felt like deconstructing how all of the shifts in perspectives, spaces, and movements deeply affect the agents within that paradigm who are trapped, simply reacting to their environment with so little power over it.
yet, you as the player are the god that shapes the world for its inhabitants and thus the one connecting your actions to consequence. although its clear that the systems in place account for the behavior of the people to change based on what the player does, there is no certainty from this faux-omniscient perspective of what your actions are actually doing. you can call a manipulation of the wall an unsuccessful or successful means of achieving a certain reaction from the meanderers or simply an exploration into this digital toy, but that is a characterization you have made and not something inherent to the systems at play. this parallels the way we look back at our adolescence: we wonder what then caused the affairs of now, what were the conditions that affected our skills, our thought processes, our trauma that we experience in the present.
it is clear that the design of things all around us shapes who we are, but the meaning that is made from that process is ours to shape. or, in other words, to decide "if it's fun."