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Professor Furr
ART 311
6 June 2023
Hypnospace Outlaw: Player Agency, Interactivity, and the Culture of the Capitalist Web
Interactivity is at the heart of video games, and indeed, games in general, beyond the realm of the digital. Without some element of interactivity, whether that be the player’s choosing to put their faith in random chance like in a game of bagatelle, or whether that be making choices in a text-based adventure, games as we know them wouldn’t exist, and the breadth of our engagement with media as we know it would be limited to the observer space. Not all games utilize their nature as an interactive medium to their fullest extent, and not all need to – but the ones that do, and do so well, can become some of the most effective at delivering their intended experiences and all that come with them. Take, for example, Hypnospace Outlaw; an incredibly interactive game that utilizes its element of interactivity as an incredibly effective tool and that plays with notions of player agency to their full extent to deliver a strong cultural critique. The game challenges player agency and interactivity, and rewards exploration and involvement. On a more metatextual and cultural level, though, the depth of the game’s interactive elements combine to form a profound love letter to the technological ‘jankiness’ and more importantly the mish-mash internet culture of the late 90s and how the web has changed – a time capsule of an era that can only be re-captured so effectively in the form of a video game, and an incredible vessel for a critique of the ways our culture has shifted to a money-focused mindset and, to some extents, cut out crucial aspects of humanity that were once present.
The internet of the 90s, Web 1.0, was a wholly different beast to the internet of our modern era. Long before the days of influencer lifestyles and Twitter’s monopoly on world politics, it was a time dominated by personal user sites, of GeoCities home pages, terrible design choices, and overuse of flashy gifs. Information was harder to come by then, but individuality was the ruling principle, with people free to express themselves as they pleased no matter how bad it looked. Hypnospace Outlaw is a point-and-click adventure-puzzle game that aims to immerse the player in a fictionalized version of this era. In it, the player is tasked with moderating the internet – Hypnospace – of the ‘sleeptime’ computer operating system HypnOS; they are given the tools to ‘report’ content that violates the in-universe ‘net laws and, guided by the ‘cases’ they are assigned, directed towards what to focus on. Among other point-and-click adventure games, one especially notable thing is that there is no danger to the player character throughout the duration of their time in Hypnospace, or HypnOS, the titular ‘sleeptime computing’ operating system. No enemies are present to jump out and scare or pursue the player, and the player never really strays away from their fictional desktop computer. The player is functionally immortal; however, as it comes to be known over the course of the story, the people who reside in Hypnospace are not, though the player can affect them in certain ways. In fact, in the climax of the game, depending on the player’s actions up to that point, up to six people can end up dead due to the “Y2000 Mindcrash”. This event is a fairly obvious reference to the Y2K hysteria, which denotes potential computer errors with the potential to crash the infrastructure of the world that had been growing reliant on computer technology - and which may have occurred on January 1, 2000, due to the ways computers stored their dates in memory, using two digits instead of four. While not fatal in real life, the game universe’s equivalent very much is – and directly because of the sleeptime technology the Hypnospace peripheral uses, interfacing with the user’s brain using laser stimulation.
This “Mindcrash” is originally scapegoated on an ultimately innocent teenager; the real Mindcrash, as the player discovers, arises directly as a result of corporate negligence – the rushing of an unfinished update, and of a broken version of a game created by Hypnospace’s main developer (who eventually fesses up to the deed) – and by extension of the attempt to rush the cultural progress of Hypnospace. This mirrors the shift from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 in our real world, the shift that led to information being readily available at our fingertips and to an internet “where data was shared readily, and experiences previously limited to software were now housed on ‘apps’ connected via the internet” (Richtsmeier) – which in turn swiftly bore a shift to profit- minded focus at the expense of individuality. The internet was no longer largely dominated by geeks and nerds interlaced with curious newcomers to this interconnected wonder, but rather, it was quickly becoming a place to make money. Even Adrian Merchant, the other Merchantsoft brother, says as much; he states his focus on making Hypnospace casual-friendly and demeaning the ‘nerds’ and losers he believes currently populate its Zones.
Ultimately, then, Hypnospace presents criticism of the capitalist ‘taming’ of the internet and the kind of cultural shift that grew out of it: the shift that took the power of technology (all technology, from social media to peripherals to gaming) and from it formed a homogenized mess where everyone’s expression is limited, where all of it tries endlessly to all look the same, to have the same ‘new’ features. At the same time, Hypnospace shows, this capitalist taming brings ruin; its negligence allows the wrong people to get hurt. This could be on the small scale, like when a user of Hypnospace posts screenshots of harassment she has received, begging for help, and she is the one to receive the violations. Or, it could be on the large scale, when the corporate rush to be ‘innovative’ and get a product out before it is ready causes the tragic and sudden deaths of multiple Hypnospace users. Interestingly enough, the fact that capitalism is hypocritically allowed to be ‘innovative’ in some ways while end users are left a homogenized mass is criticized within the game, too; Dylan Merchant, the inventor of Hypnospace and the player’s game-world boss at Merchantsoft, is an incredible hypocrite, uploading copyrighted material and then revenge-banning the player when they use his own reporting system to strike his material. This, then, speaks to the unfairness of the dog-eat-dog nature of a money-focused culture; those with power can do whatever they want, while those who lack it are punished – sometimes even met with death – as a result of capitalist cruelty and downright incompetence.
As an Enforcer, the player is by the very nature of their role not permitted to contact or connect with any of the people they are responsible for in any manner, ostensibly for the purpose of withholding biases; they are an outside observer, watching the people whose Zones they moderate as they navigate their lives and build up their own Pages, which change throughout the game. The Enforcer is anonymous; they cannot communicate directly to facilitate their tenure, and so must find ways to sleuth out information. This is a restriction made for a couple reasons; as games reviewer Jim Sterling states in her review of the game, this “mechanically works so that the game doesn’t have to come up with a whole AI that can have fake chats with you, […] saving time and effort and resources”, but there is also a “great story element to it, where you can see certain violations […] but you […] have no real power.” (Sterling 6:42-7:04) – you are unable to substantially help solve problems. Lacking communication, it is clear that Enforcers are not all powerful and perhaps are less so than ordinary users, barring their reporting power; their headset can be disabled at a moment’s notice by their higher ups for ‘violations’ as minor as… doing their jobs. Enforcers draw similarities to the content moderators of modern-day social media; “the sin-eaters, the scapegoats in the wild”, faceless entities behind the screen that “suffer so that we […] may go about our days […] shielded from the vast magnitude of human depravity in this world” (McNeil) – like the Enforcers, they are exposed to anything from trite harassment to incredibly graphic shock content, and are often blamed by users for censorship or otherwise ignored in the wider scope. This feeds back into Hypnospace’s ultimate critique of the competitive technological sphere, and particularly capitalism; the system is not broken, merely working as intended – some must suffer for the machine to keep working.
For all the player’s limits, however, they are permitted a lot of freedom to customize their virtual computer and play with programs inside Hypnospace – lending credence to the construction of its built-in world and providing the player one true outlet for self-expression that they are otherwise not afforded inside the game world. Player curiosity is never particularly ‘punished’, aside from the occasional easily solvable virus problem or, heaven forbid, the Bonzi Buddy-esque desktop helper and adware “Professor Helper”. As developer Jay Tholen stated in an interview, “Shifty freeware [...], useless toolbars, and adware were integral to my Web 1.0 experience, and I wouldn’t deny my players the pleasure.” (Haske) – for all the trouble random downloading might bring, it’s never harmful, and typically funny (take, for example, the Buttsdisease virus; the name is rather self-explanatory). The strictest punishment of player curiosity is a narrative one that itself is only activated through use of the player’s given reporting tool. Otherwise, one is free to download as much pirated music and malware as they please without much recourse, and to plaster as many stickers on their desktop as they can stomach; perhaps, in the wider scope of things, a parallel to how even in a world of dwindling individuality under an increasingly bleak culture, it is in the small spaces that one can find an outlet for self-expression. As a love letter to the old internet and the dawn of the new millennium, Hypnospace Outlaw’s criticisms of the capitalistic sway of the internet’s culture dare to ask – what, exactly, did we leave behind – and what can we learn about moving on?
Works Cited
Haske, Steve. “‘Hypnospace Outlaw’ Is a Game about the Terrible Internet.” Inverse, 21 Oct. 2016, www.inverse.com/article/22494-hynospace-outlaw-jay-tholen-interview.
McNeil, Joanne. “What’s Life Like for the Content Moderator?” The Nation, 23 Aug. 2022, www.thenation.com/article/culture/hanna-bervoets-remove-this-post/.
Richtsmeier, Nick. “How Web 2.0 Destroyed the World.” LinkedIn, www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-web-20-destroyed-world-nick-richtsmeier. Accessed 6 June 2023.
Sterling, Jim. "Hypnospace Outlaw - Wild Wild Web (Jimpressions)." YouTube, uploaded by Jim Sterling, 26 Mar. 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dzdGo4XGxc.