Broken Reality, Vaporwave, and Irony

I don't normally think of myself as being an easy mark for things but looking back on my history with certain games I start to see patterns I like cyberpunk stories that have that distinctly 80s neon chrome look I like stories that take place inside of computers I like that geometric pastel Lisa Frank 90s thing I like nonviolent exploratory gameplay I like janky weird glitchy indie games that maybe don't quite work right but there's value in them anyways and today's game kind of has all of that so I have to confess that I am a soft mark for this sort of thing and you may have to take most of what I say today with a large grain of salt anyways today's game is broken reality a first-person exploration game about living inside of a 3d version of the internet called nate 'm native is part metaphor for the relationship of its creators part all-encompassing virtual space but more than anything it's a 90 style VRML chatroom however you won't find its denizens particularly interested in chatting whether it's premier users relaxing on an imaginary luxury cruise or newly created accounts mulling around the opening islands tropical gazebos you'll find people in NATO Marge Lee ignore you and are concerned exclusively with their own problems that's because in a time the only true currency is the number of likes you have the more popular one is the more powerful one is and you play as an unnamed protagonist looking to conquer this particular social space by becoming the most popular user possible to do so you have to collect likes a numeric manifestation of your popularity and worth on the internet sometimes they're just scattered around the environment like coins and Mario this has the added benefits of tracking which areas you have and haven't visited providing rewards for exploration and occasionally allowing for breadcrumb trails to Secrets sometimes you get likes as rewards for completing quests like experience in an RPG you can grind for likes by exploration but really the easiest way to make sure you're ready to move on to the next area is to complete the central quests and sometimes you get them - optional side activities like a photography minigame or by shopping effectively the various stores in native all of these like slowly unlock more and more of the system to you as you complete your goal to find the most exclusive chat rooms along the way you find out a little bit more about the history of native and its creators and maybe maybe a little bit about what your role in all of this is from a gameplay perspective broken reality is kind of an exploration based Metroidvania title well the first Island of the game absolutely is a Metroidvania it's where you collect all the tools you'll be using for the rest of the game and to get them you're guided to unlock areas by getting a new tool that grants you access to other areas to get another tool that unlocks access to additional areas and so on these tools include a licker that lets you like ads and interact with things a bookmark tool that lets you teleport to a previous location instantaneously a hyperlink tool that functions like a hook shot on specific panels a magical katana that lets you cut through malware a credit card that allows you to make purchases and pull money out of ATMs and a digital camera once you've collected these items and finished the first world though the unlocks and upgrades slow down a little bit and the game really becomes more about using those set tools to solve puzzles while exploring a variety of weird wacky scenarios and all the characters that inhabit them while trying to farm enough likes to become the most popular user as you can tell from the footage the game leans hard into a sort of retro 90s look but it's not tied to any specific 90s technology per se there are bits designed to look like any given frame was generated on a c64 machine and there are low fire areas that look closer to an n64 title the result is sort of a hodgepodge Tecna look that underscores the game's goofy sensibilities everything is in service to a game that constantly tries to crack jokes and make irreverent references or present absurd situations like getting tea for a samurai master who wants to forge you the sword what can kill viruses or literally committing the crime of downloading a car in the game's big city area it's all very much tongue-in-cheek but all the humor belies a sense that there's something darker going on just outside of you and that's kind of the back of the box summary for broken reality a non violent comedy exploration game that's pretty long as far as exploration based games go and has some enjoyable puzzles to solve with the limited abilities it gives you so let's talk theme you may have noticed that the game has a familiar ish aesthetic and to understand broken reality you kind of have to understand the whole scene surrounding it so talking about this poses a bit of a challenge for me because I am NOT a music critic or even much of a music guy in general and I definitely wasn't involved in any of the internet subcultures that birthed vaporwave so I'm a little out of my wheelhouse here that said I'm gonna try to cite some sources below that I've done my reading on and acknowledged to any scene aficionados or hardcore genre buffs that I am speaking in way overly broad strokes and that I mean no offense this is an overview from 10,000 feet that I need to be able to talk about a video game that walks in the same aesthetic circles not a comprehensive history of an internet music genre with that out of the way vaporwave originated as a musical sub-genre on the Internet in the early 2010's with two works generally being cited as progenitors chuck person's echo jams Volume one was an album that took eighties pop hits and slowed them down added reverb and chopped them up to create new songs that had sort of a haunting sombre quality about them [Music] meanwhile James Ferraro's Farsight virtual took archaic operating system alerts sounds from popular computer applications at early text-to-speech samples and applied them to chipper jazzy Tunes farside virtual seemed to call back to though where do you want to go today and think different eras of blue-sky computational optimism [Music] these two proto vaporwave albums led to the creation of Macintosh pluses floral shop an album that merged farside virtuals use of kitschy corporate ephemera and veneer of optimism with echo jams disquieting tone and tendency towards pitch down reverb heavy samples from other sources resulting in something that felt decidedly more critical of its source material and of its own superficial hopefulness [Music] from floral shop the genre exploded out into a bunch of different directions but two overriding themes started here that seemed to hang over most vaporwave albums one there's an impish irony at play within the genre which I guess you'd expect from a concept that originated on the internet echo jams volume one's author Daniel Lou Payton has stated he did the album is a bit of a joke but joke or not it helps spark an entire artistic movement and the genre as a whole at least in broad strokes and as a gross generalization tends to have a playful attitude with the way it treats its relationship with its samples and aesthetic trappings and whether vaporwave has an artistic movement or just a pile of memes and even whether it's alive or dead at this point it is at once serious and worthy of academic study and a big ol pile of in jokes and piss taking and it never wants you to know which it is at any given time does vaporwave evoke Japanese exoticism because it's interested in referencing cyberpunk dystopias as an intentional commentary on its corporate samples or as the genres use of Japanese language and iconography more of an indulgent weeaboo move that invokes the 80s fear of corporate takeovers from the far east because it's late 80s tech and this is more late 80s early 90s he is the retro tech aesthetic embraced because it emphasizes the inevitability of technological obsolescence or because it genuinely finds old school computer samples really cool sounding and worth exploring is it's hazy dreamlike sensibility and attempt to tap into some underlying anxiety or disillusionment with reality or is it just an unintended side effect of the audio distortions that became a hallmark of the genre music critic Adam Harper pointed out this duality between joke and statement between criticism and embrace in his 2012 piece vaporwave and the pop art of the virtual plaza quoting Harper is it a critique of capitalism or a capitulation to it both and neither these musicians can be read as sarcastic anti capitalists revealing the lies and slippage 'as of modern technical Chur and its representations or as its willing facilitators shivering with the light upon each new wave and delicious sound we could apply to their music a term used to describe a certain sentiment and praxis that has recently gained currency among philosophers of capitalism acceleration ISM acceleration ISM is the notion that the dissolution of civilization wrought by capitalism should not and cannot be resisted but rather must be pushed faster and farther towards the insanity and quickly fluid violence that is its ultimate conclusion either because this is liberating because it causes a revolution or because destruction is the only logical answer which brings up the second theme that most though by no means all a vaporwave ends up engaging with intentionally or not vaporwave is inexorably tied to a discussion of if not capitalism as an economic system then the detritus and forgotten artifacts the capitalism leaves in its wake it is after all founded on remix in the-- corporate advertising samples soothing elevator music the sort of harmless easy listening jazz you'd hear in a mall and super consumable pop tunes and turning them all into a low tempo dreamlike soundscape that is at once optimistic but dreamy and depressing and full of dread combined with its inescapable joking irony the result is music that can at once be read as a celebration and lament of the waste generated as a byproduct of corporate machinations art created and then discarded given new life even if that new life singularly reflects on its own abandonment an ode to planned obsolescence as sung by the obsolete it's the whole reason that youtuber dan bell is teamed up with a variety of vaporwave artists for his dead mall series on youtube [Music] Bell has been documenting dying and dead malls for a few years now and each 20 visits gets a video documentary augmented by a soundtrack by various vaporwave artists to put it in his own words they believe is more than an art form it's like a movement it's nihilistic it's angsty but it's somehow comforting the whole aesthetic is a way of dealing with things you can't do anything about like no jobs or sitting in your parents basement eating ramen noodles weber wave came out of this generations desire to express their hopelessness the same way that the pre-internet generation did sitting around in the food court which brings us back to broken reality broken reality is clearly influenced by the vaporwave movement it's got the music that ranges from chill wave to outright vapor wave [Music] it's got the pastel colors the simple geometric shapes and obsession with fetishizing / exoticized in Japanese culture that are the hallmarks of vaporwave album covers heck floral shop gets a call-out as the highest level of performance you can get in the shopping minigame along with some other more secret references to it that I don't wanna spoil here but all of this is surface level stuff why does broken reality take the vaporwave aesthetic and run with it and what does it do with it well it takes the genres love of corporate and technological ephemera and turns it into the game world itself native is built on archaic cyber Kitsch from chunky processors and fans to pop-up ads to pixel II cursors and despite still having a sizable issue user base for what it is natan has largely decayed from whatever heyday it may have had its ruins may allow for some light exploration based puzzle-solving from a gameplay perspective but they also are ruins because the system has been abandoned by its creators graphical glitches riddle native viruses are everywhere the entirety of the remaining community is in a beautiful visual metaphor more interested in spending time on their phones than existing in this virtual place if vaporwave at once laments and celebrates advertising jingles and music broken reality laments and celebrates the broken and dying corners of the internet the half functional web rings from 1995 corrupted VRML chat rooms and zombie computers joining botnets out of a long-neglected closet in a derelict office heck the major metropolitan area and broken reality is called geo city what dan bell tries to do for decaying malls broken reality tries to do for crumbling software by using the same aesthetic language it is a walking tour of a dying space that space just happens to be digital but it also feels like broken reality tries to marry its commentary on social networks to the economic anxieties inherent to vaporwave one of the key tools the game gives you is a credit card but money itself doesn't mean anything in the game it's really not much of a resource it's all about image the more money you spend and native the more popular you are you get likes for using ATM machines or by being an effective trendy shopper this is where likes being treated like coins and Mario becomes a semi relevant metaphor money can lead to popularity but popularity itself is the currency but what does that currency buy in a dying broken system if Adam Harper is right and vaporwave does hold an acceleration esteem of capitalism broken reality seems to suggest an acceleration ax stuff so shil media and technology in general but unlike acceleration ism in response to capitalism which hypothesizes some end point for capitalism itself that we need to rush to broken reality seems to think that technological breakdowns are cyclical numerous characters reference rebirth orbs seem to have an iterative existence like zero John and onii-chan but this is perhaps highlighted best by the mural before heading into the Aquanet there is a series of pictures that tell the tale of a community torn apart by two different media standards leading to its ruin then putting aside their differences they come together to rebuild only to find a new format to fight over broken reality seems too long for a post Facebook post Twitter world but knows that whatever is on the other side will just restart the same process that produced landfills full of zip disks and hard drives full of forgotten geo city sites the platform wars never end it's a fitting stance for a game whose Kickstarter demo is still a niche do but whose full game is as of this recording still only on Steam if broken reality trips up it's in the games jokes they are totally all over the place sometimes they're wacky and adorable like when the cruise ship captain wants to talk privately with you other times they're a bit more stock stoner humor for example a character named chronic the Hedgehog makes repeated appearances and that's the joke it's a sonic that does pop and is green and has a Rasta hat then every once in a while it goes full-on adult joke like one secret area reveals a peephole into another room with two robot people having oral sex in Geo city one of the advertisements is for lollipop which yeah there's also a restaurant filled with a mariachi skeleton band and operated by alien greys called trace aliens which it first feels like it could kind of be obliquely racist until you remember that the game's developer dynamic media triad is a Mexican development studio so it's an ironically race tinted joke in fairness very few of these gags are like in-your-face or detract from the experience overwhelmingly but they give the game a background radiation of schrödinger's edge lord humour is it being mean-spirited or is it ironic and referential is it invoking memes because it's aesthetic or because it wants to say something with them it's a form of irony poisoning that makes one sense that there's nothing truly earnest in the game from the tragic falling out of natives creators which is the secret background lore of most of what happens in the game - its love of vaporwave and honestly that ambiguity between is this a joke or is this a meaningful statement might be one of the most vaporwave things about broken reality while there's a ton of things that could be said about what it's trying to do artistically meaningful critique becomes difficult when everything about the game can either be responded to with it's just a joke or it's just joking about being just a joke and is actually really deep and all of that makes processing my feelings unbroken reality difficult because every time I feel like I'm picking away at natives mysterious backstory and its creators big dispute or drawing meaningful parallels to an artistic movement we're trying to parse the game's trippy final moments and finding something potentially meaningful or resonant I remember the flamboyant administrator that calls me baby or the inner-city gangster types that litter geo city and realize it's kind of intentionally a joke or at least as much of a joke as you want it to be because there's no earnestness because it's so dedicated to its own aesthetic trappings above everything else one doesn't get a sense of what broke in reality actually values compare this to say secret little haven which is also a vaporwave influence title it's earnest almost to a fault but it's never ambiguous about what it really feels or what it takes seriously even broken realities game design has a sort of duality to it it's a non-violent exploration game which traditionally means a design that's friendly to new players that involves a lot of walking around as you consume environmental narratives but here there are some seriously non-trivial puzzles that ask you to do tightly timed hookshot chains or navigate an abstract 3d environment like a pro like I said at the outset I have a soft spot for almost everything this game is trying to do so I can't say I didn't enjoy my time with it even if I ran into a few game breaking bugs during my playthroughs but putting aside how much the game resonated with me personally it's clear that broken reality is above all an aesthetic experience not about narrative or theme or even so much about tone as it is about capturing this particular look and sound about capturing the artistic sensibilities of the moment even if the moment it's capturing peaked in 2012 in a very real sense broken reality is vaporwave the video game for good and for ill and that probably sounds like you could be really cool or really exhausting depending on your views of the subject if you dig the overall visual design you can look past the problematic memory there's some interesting ideas at play here about the intersection of Technology culture and capitalism but if peeling back layer after layer of irony only to realize there's nothing really concrete at the core doesn't sound appealing or if an edgy nihilist streak that embraces aesthetics over values turns you off maybe avoid this one like the vaporwave albums that inspired it broken reality is both a self referential joke no one is meant to take seriously and an attempt to wrestle with some very real modern anxieties [Music] [Music]

Channel: Errant Signal

Views: 150,685

Rating: 4.9149051 out of 5

Keywords: errant signal, broken reality, vaporwave, irony, floral shoppe, far side virtual

Id: EtaHmaEAbi4

Length: 20min 17sec (1217 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 01 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/08_HOTLINE]

Vinny from vinesauce already played the demo a pretty good look into the game from a outside perspective imo

[u/centersolace]

Yeah I definitely need to play this.

[u/Helix935]

Played the game already, it honestly got me to appreciate the Vaporwave aesthetic enough to come here just due to how serene it all was.

[u/d1g1t4l_w4nd3r3r]

Interesting looking game. Will definitely keep my eye on it to see if it ever goes on sale.

[u/[deleted]]

It's intriguing but I can't see myself actually playing it lol. I don't like how they mix current things like facebook likes and modern memes to the vaporwave aesthetic which is all 90s/2000s. It's inconsistent.