Saturday, August 3, 2019
Junkworld
As the player of Getting Over It continues through the game, the nature of the mountain becomes apparent as not being the natural mountain seen in the beginning. As the player ascends into the sky, the mountain slowly turns into a pile of assets haphazardly stuck together. This resolidifies into the icy shapes of the final third of the game after Orange Hell. The tone of the narration changes as well, extrapolating and expanding upon the junk pile that makes up the middle third. The game ends with an ode to junk and persistence, the beauty of small projects and efforts of futile love, as the original Sexy Hiking was.
One of the earlier terms for the internet was the “information superhighway”, referring to the concepts marketed at the dawn of the HTTP protocol, the ability of the internet to perform the function once performed by encyclopedias and libraries. Just as with libraries, the systems of organization of information emerged as the primary concern of the internet, with the first internet companies being focused on the organization of communication and information. The surviving websites after the dotcom bubble were those which did this most effectively, Amazon and Google being noticeable examples.
A second trend emerged alongside this, new organizations of content with defined space for user creation of content. Here, Getting Over It is relevant. With the focus on premade assets, Getting Over It references others which use a similar structure. Myspace profiles and Worlds.com were early examples of this, where the overall structure created individual spaces for each user, who was fit to mix and match content within a set of rules they created. The uncanny and creepy feeling of Worlds is based on this, the modern effect being agglomerated rules and ideas, creating a system of surreal connections between disjointed sets of assets, strung together by long offline intelligences. Above all else, this brings into sharp focus the structure of online content-generation.
The nesting of structures shows an interesting problem of online narratology. The structure of a content-generating structure, like Worlds, is a greater structure which the internal structures and logics are always beholden to. The greater structure escapes however, as to transcribe it requires it to be made into the lesser structure and be beholden to a greater structure of its own, the technical system of the computer, for instance. The resulting overall structure is pyramidal, a hierarchal relationship from the most base ruleset of technical possibility to increasingly specific rulesets as virtualization occurs in finer and finer amounts, until the end product, the game or website the user interacts with.
What technology offers is rulesets into which to channel creative energies, languages to input into. In doing so, technology fulfills the function of formal artistic education, where the ruleset is constructed to give productive channels by which creative energies can create more developed and interesting works than if the hand were untrained. This is symbolized in the aesthetic of the Junkworlds of Getting Over It, Garry’s Mod, the Filthy Frank lore, and others similar, where the preoccupation is with abstraction and manipulation, in recognition of technology’s key role in increasing types of abstraction available and thereby increasing the amount of rulesets with which to speak into.
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