The path to the Internet leads over a pink marble bridge. Dolphins jump over in the arch, at the end a faceless anime character in the gatehouse gives access to the digital paradise. Welcome to the Broken Reality.
In the game of the Brazilian studio Dynamic Media Triad, the Internet is literally a walk-in uncharted territory. Online shops have branches, the dating portal invites you on a cruise and malware becomes a roadblock.
Like thumbs instead of shotgun
Likes are a currency in Broken Reality. At the level-up, they do not increase the characters' character values but their popularity. If you are popular enough, you will gain access to more and more exclusive areas of this over-subscribed version of a social network. And so the thumb always sits ready to click in the corner of the screen like a first-person shooter.
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The satire of Broken Reality is as subtle as the name. "The game makes fun of our compulsive behavior, the appearance of the online world and our isolation in cliques and echo chambers," says Sebastian Covacevich, one of the developers.
To get ahead, players must watch ads until they drop their golden thumbs - just as "Super Mario" beats the coins out of boxes. And you feel caught, because you yourself fall for this parody of a reward system, the pointless consumption rewarded with colorful pictures and dopamine spurts.
The bizarre 3D world is reminiscent of "Second Life" - at least, if you still remember the long overdone hype. "Oh, yes, absolutely!" Admits Covacevich. "But it's an outside view, I was more inspired by my life in World of Warcraft."
Adventure in Netscape Navigator
The model for the game "Hypnospace Outlaw" by Jay Tholen goes back a decade, when animated GIFs were used unironically and web designers put on neon contrast instead of whitespace. Again, an over-hyped version of the Internet is the backdrop for a mix of parody and interactive storytelling.
The 2D text adventure "Hypnospace Outlaw" and the 3D walking simulator "Broken Reality" could hardly be more playful. Yet they share the same love for the strange niches of the net away from the big monopolists.
You can forget your actual mission goal and instead lose yourself in abbreviations and cross-references. On every corner there is a new curiosity to discover a shrill sound and the contextless fragment of a larger story.
Nostalgic on the outside, political on the inside
Both Internet simulators, despite their bright color palette, have little in common with videotaped escapism. Also in the forums of "Hypnospace Outlaw" there is sexual harassment, also the credit card debts in "Broken Reality" do not disappear by themselves.
In 2019, cyberspace is no longer the innocent scene of films like "Hackers" or "Tron". "The story is about the company behind Hypnospace - and the implications of changing their policies," explains Tholen, "so I would say it's very political."
As a poorly paid moderator you put this through with the Banhammer. If you are almost uncontrolled on the hunt for copyright infringement, you become the upload filter. Utopia and dystopia are close together in both games.
Playable utopias of yesterday
Covacevich still sees the impact of the internet as positive. "It's a hen-and-egg dilemma, I'm not sure if the giant corporations are creating a culture or if they are only reacting to statistics," he says. Even though "Broken Reality" makes fun of the Internet, the network has "created a worldwide empathy that I consider important in our hyper-globalized world."
"The Internet has really changed everything," says "Hypnospace Outlaw" developer Jay Tholen. "But over the past decade, it has also proven to be not the all-round marvel - the old web was not really great, but it certainly was not as homogenous and exploitative as today's social media."
Both games capture the degree migration between connectivity and overstimulation in a way that only video games can do. Under the collage of self-deprecating trash and nostalgic transfiguration is a complicated, albeit simple sounding truth: In the past, not everything was better, not everything is cool today - and no internet is no solution.