There’s a moment in the game ‘Viewfinder’
that kind of… broke my brain. Actually, there are lots of moments that broke
my brain — the game is… ludicrous. But the most mind-shattering instance came
right at the start, when I held up my first photo… and walked right into it. And even though I knew this was a main component
of the game’s world, I still said to myself: “There’s no way. This game won’t actually let me place a
photo anywhere, it would completely break… well, everything.” But the game did let me, it encouraged me,
demanded I keep smashing guidelines, keep tearing up the manual — because Viewfinder
is set in a world that breaks all the rules. Typically, fictional worlds strive for immersion:
limiting themselves to certain parameters — even if those limits are more fantastical
than reality. But there’s another kind of fictional world,
the kind that shatters the confines of the status quo. So say goodbye to gravity, say goodbye to
time, say goodbye to space, and prepare for a voyage across realities with no restrictions... So how does one navigate a world that breaks
the rules? Simple — you break the rules right back,
and beat it at its own game. The world of Viewfinder consists of gravity-defying
islands separated by gaps that are impossible to cross. Impossible, that is, unless you line up a
photo of a bridge, and then simply… make your way to the other side. Confronted with a locked gate? Just hold up a photo of an open gate and…
pass right through. The world of Viewfinder might shatter the
parameters we’re familiar with, but it has its own internal conventions that you can
learn if you keep an open mind. Anything in the background of a photo just
kind of… deletes whatever’s in front of it, which can allow you to access walled off
areas that are otherwise unreachable. And anything in the foreground becomes something
physical, a tangible cross-section of reality you can walk through, thanks to some trick
of programming that, to me, borders on miraculous. But it’s not just photos that this effect
works on. You can also enter and wander through the
colorful brushstrokes of a painting. Or explore the cartoonish landscape of a postcard,
with the simple iconography transformed into material objects. Even the scribbles of a child can become something
corporeal — something you feel you can reach out and touch. It’s… bizarre at first. But the deeper you go into the world of Viewfinder,
the harder it is to remember things ever working another way. With each new layer, the rules of traditional
reality recede further and further into the background, and even as some things start
to seem off, you pay no attention, as if you’re trapped in a dream and need to find a way
to — (Wake up)
“— Our patent-pending somnasculpt technology provides safe and effective dream therapy
while you rest in the comfort of our flagship clinic —” The entirety of the 2019 game
Superliminal takes place within a dream. That’s not a spoiler like it would be for
most pieces of dream-centric media. The fact you’re in a dream is obvious. What isn’t obvious is how to wake up. Like Viewfinder, Superliminal is a game that
asks you to break all the rules, and see reality from a new perspective. In this world, if you pick up an object and
walk backwards, said object will grow in accordance with your changed viewpoint. It’s a feature of the dreamscape that on
paper makes little sense, yet somehow feels completely logical. And it also works in reverse: if an object
gets too big, you can shrink it down with a simple perception shift. With this reality-bending ability, outsmarting
the puzzle-filled world seems like a cinch. But the world of Superliminal will bend reality
right back. The ultimate goal of the game is to escape
a labyrinthine dream facility by finding a door to the waking realm. Yet this is easier said than done, because
the facility is a maze of false exits. One hallway that seemed to offer a way out
was actually a forced-perspective illusion, with an exit too small to fit through. Another wasn’t a hallway at all, but a camouflaged
sculpture meant to trick the eye. Once, the actual way forward was painted to
look like a dead end, a deception that caused me to stop trusting my perception altogether. These illusions are examples of anamorphosis:
distorted projections that require the viewer to occupy a specific vantage point to make
sense of them. Like the puzzles of Viewfinder, they require
you to, literally, change your perspective, and embrace the strange new paradigm of the
world around you. Indeed, many sections of Viewfinder feature
a similar anamorphosis mechanic. Yet notably, such illusions don’t just exist
in the virtual realm. Painted ceilings from the 1600s create depth
using analogous visual trickery. Those forced perspective tourist photos of
the Leaning Tower of Pisa fall into the same category. Such illusions are simple — even silly. Yet though often played for laughs, there
can be something… disarming about convincing optical illusions. Like having the rug of reality pulled out
from under you. Many films use oversized furniture and clever
angles to manipulate the viewer’s understanding of scale. It’s an effect that’s often meant to be
invisible — not a rug-pull, but a harmless technique to create a convincing fictional
setting. What’s uncanny about such effects, however,
is that the spatial distortion is happening within your mind. Modern cameras aren’t required: these illusions
work simply because our brains expect the world to follow certain rules, an expectation
that can be taken advantage of to, essentially, warp reality. A broken rule in a virtual dream is one thing,
but a physical optical illusion can leave you questioning the waking world, wondering
if the laws of reality are truly as consistent as they appear. In the world of Manifold Garden, the law of
gravity… is more of a suggestion. Floors become ceilings, stairs become bridges,
there isn’t really an up or down, there just kind of… is. Created by American artist Willian Chyr, Manifold
Garden might be advertised as a modern puzzle game, but the project’s primary inspiration
is the work of a Dutch mathematician born in in 1898. The drawings of MC Escher are mazes of impossibility,
using early perspective illusions and gravity-defying architecture to create landscapes that could
not exist… and yet Manifold Garden, through modern programing, makes these worlds explorable. In order for this to work, the geometry of
each landscape loops infinitely. You can jump off any structure and know with
absolute certainty you will eventually return to a place identical to where you started. As a result, falling — one of the most conventional
ways to lose in a game — just… isn’t a concern here. Falling is similarly deemphasized in Viewfinder,
as you can rewind time from any point if you make a mistake. This serves as a reminder that traditional
rules aren’t what you should be focused on. But the lack of guidelines can also leave
you feeling somewhat untethered, even frustrated — like nothing you do here has any real
consequence. Navigating a world that breaks the rules can
be, often by design, aggravating Superliminal is probably most upfront about its attempts
to provoke you, and notably, it frustrates you not just by removing guidelines, but by
creating illogical guidelines of its own. The game will frequently demand you follow
the exit signs located throughout the labyrinth, yet many signs lead nowhere, or are utterly
incomprehensible. At one point, if you trust the signs, you’ll
be trapped in a hallway that repeats forever. The only way to actually progress is to pick
up an exit sign, and use it as a ramp to escape — outwitting the dream with its own underhanded
logic. Yet Superliminal will even break conventions
during moments like loading screens —periods most players might consider a safe-zone. At different points in the game, the loading
screen will mutate, with the progress bar sometimes jittering backwards, folding through
3D space, or expanding beyond its typical borders — in one of the more literal moments
of fourth-wall boundary-pushing I’ve seen in media. Even the title doesn’t obey instructions,
collapsing to the floor if you click on it: another rug-pull in a game constantly pulling
rugs. It can make you feel like you’re in freefall. Why don’t the laws make sense? Who is in charge of this place? And why is this rabbit hole so deep? Lewis Carroll’s 1865 novel “Alice in Wonderland”
tells the story of a girl who falls through a rabbit hole into a land of illogical characters
and nonsensical scenarios. It is also, perhaps unsurprisingly, absolutely
foundational to the concept of worlds that break all the rules. In Wonderland, signposts give misleading advice. Sizes shift unexpectedly, brought to life
in early film adaptations through — how else? — forced perspective. The DNA of the story can be felt in pretty
much every piece of media in this video: from little references to full on character homages
(aa-muhj). Viewfinder even has its own version of the
Cheshire Cat — a figure that offers cryptic advice about how to navigate an illogical
world. Because critically, Wonderland is deeply frustrating
for Alice to traverse, and at times even a little sinister. In many ways, it feels like the world of adults
from a child’s perspective: chaotic, threatening, and governed by rigid conventions that make
little sense. The world seems a meaningless puzzle, made
worse by attempts at policies, occupied by people who don’t realize the absurdity of
their own lives… It kind of reminds me of going to the airport. The 2014* absurdist adventure game Jazzpunk
opens not with a bang, but with the slow procession of an airport baggage claim. The luggage leisurely inches along as the
name of the game’s studio hovers silently in the air like a signpost for a boarding
gate, and then… (music)
The game just absolutely loses it. With zero buildup or justification, it launches
into a nearly two minute, James-Bond-style intro sequence — the old-school espionage
imagery alluding to the Cold War spy genre the game parodies. But it just keeps going and going, the sense
of importance rising, the energy swelling, until it throws you, spinning… into an extremely dull office space. From here, the game becomes absurdly realistic. Though you play as an international superspy,
you have to sit down and actually peruse articles as you wait in real time for your boss to
be ready. When the waiting’s finally over, your boss
tells you to infiltrate Soviet intelligence, then proclaims he’ll be ‘in his wine cellar’
before pretending to walk… below his desk. Jazzpuuuuuunk! Like most works of satire, Jazzpunk points
out absurdity: not just with a genre, but with various aspects of reality. The world it takes place in — a retro-futuristic,
alternate history version of the United States in the late 1950s, is suffocating under suspicion
and bureaucracy. Yet though most characters treat this atmosphere
of espionage extremely seriously, their attempts at counterintelligence feel profoundly unserious. There’s an agent hiding in a mailbox who
tells you to go away, a milk van following you around with a completely unsuspicious
amount of radio equipment, a senior officer who uses top-secret carrier pigeons to…
bake a pie. Though gravity never inverts and space never
warps in Jazzpunk, through its parody of social conventions, its world feels just as absurd,
just as boundary-breaking, as any other discussed so far. But there’s one moment in particular that
feels… different. Early in the game, you can sit in a movie
theater and watch a never-ending loop of a commercial for something called a ‘Swing
Wing.’ And though the product seems too absurd, too
pointless to actually exist… the Swing Wing is, in fact, a real toy from 1965. One that was, unsurprisingly, discontinued
for giving children concussions. The game’s characters watch in silent rapture,
as if nothing in their parody universe can match the preposterousness of our reality. During the height of Cold War paranoia, the
CIA launched project ‘Acoustic Kitty.’ The plan, which is real, was to spy on enemy
embassies using a radio transmitter implanted within a cat. The plan failed due to the shocking revelation
that cats don’t like following rules. It cost twenty million dollars. Around the same time, British defense came
up with project Blue Peacock, a plan to detonate a nuclear warhead in the event of a Soviet
invasion on an eight-day delayed timer. The timer was to be set off by a live chicken
sealed within the warhead itself. When the plan was declassified, many assumed
it was an April Fool’s joke. The official government response was, and
I quote, “The Civil Service does not do jokes.” And it’s after learning things like this
that the world of Jazzpunk doesn’t seem so absurd. The fact that buildings have both a fire alarm
and an ‘ice alarm,’ starts to feel only a few degrees removed from the silliness of
real life. This is a video about fictional worlds that
break all the rules, but sometimes reality feels just as lawless and arbitrary. Okay, now it’s time to talk about An Airport
for Aliens Currently Run by Dogs. Released in 2021, the game takes place in,
well: an airport for aliens, currently run by dogs. As a result, the familiar conventions of an
airport are filtered through two degrees of distortion. The dogs, (or weird, floating jpegs of dogs)
who run the airport, have made various, canine-specific modifications. The bar serves toilet water, the bathrooms
are full of fire hydrants — you get it. Due to dogs’ poor short-term memory, if
you ask for a boarding pass, you might get… fifty. Yet even more challenging is the other layer
of distortion: since this is an airport for aliens, all the signage is in an unreadable
language. And the game does actually expect you to navigate
to your flight on time, a process that can make you long for the rules of a real airport. But here’s something that playing An Airport
for Aliens Currently Run by Dogs helped me realize. All airports are fictional. And by fictional I don’t mean they don’t
exist — you can, of course, go to one. But everything about an airport, from the
frustrating baggage claim, to the endless signs, to the dividing barriers, are, ultimately,
something invented. A kind of collective fiction of procedures
and rules we all buy into. And I’m not saying all these procedures
are meaningless — if a pilot decided to stop following the lines of a runway, there’d
obviously be consequences. But the lines of a runway have no inherent
meaning, only the meaning we’ve assigned to them. Sometimes it’s only possible to recognize
the arbitrary nature of these invented places when we see them from a new perspective, like
when they’re empty or, you know, run by dogs. It’s bewildering when a fictional world
breaks with the rules of reality, but many of the rules we follow in reality are their
own kind of fiction. Does it sound like I’ve lost my mind? A little bit? It’s hard to stay grounded when exploring
these worlds, particularly the very last one I want to look at for this video. Cuccchi (coo-key) is… not really a game,
not really a movie, um… it exists. Cuccchi is made up of simple icons floating
in a void, and if you steer towards one, it will be placed into the context of a surreal,
painterly environment. Many of these landscapes are about as abstract
as they could possibly be without being completely untraversable, with some made up of just a
few flat images in a completely white abyss. Each region is inspired by a different painting
by Italian artist Enzo Cucchi, hence the title of the game. Cucchi’s paintings are, similarly, enigmas
— a maze of doubt and tangled interpretation. Yet what’s most interesting about Cuccchi
— the digital world, not the man — is how rarely I felt lost when navigating each
environment. Even when things were at their most abstract,
I could always find a way to orient myself, latch on to some familiar iconography and
watch as the landscape took shape. In many respects, Cuccchi feels like ultimate
proof of how few rules we need to stay grounded, how our brains can conjure a full-fledged
world from the simplest 2D projections. Exploring the realms of Cuccchi made me reevaluate
how I think about some of the other pieces of media I’ve discussed thus far. I think there’s real significance to the
fact that the most frustrating fake exit in Superliminal… is also the simplest. It’s just a painting of the sky propped
up at the right angle to look like the real thing. And while your annoyance at being Wile E Coyote’d
is still fresh, the game offers a ‘Relaxation Room.’ Inside is a projection of a patch of sky — the
same patch of sky that all the fake exits in the game are modeled off of. It’s emotionally overwhelming knowing that
the goal of the game is right there — but it’s just a 2D illusion. But here’s the thing — everything about
the world of Superliminal is a 2D illusion. The same is true for the world of Viewfinder. Both from an in-universe perspective: everything
in Superliminal is a dream, and everything in Viewfinder is — well, I won’t give
that away here. But also, in the most literal way possible:
these worlds are flat renders on computer screens. No aspect of them has any more real-world
depth than another, the fake exits are no different from the real ones. The same holds true for all fictional worlds
in visual mediums, whether they break the rules or not. Every film you’ve ever seen is an illusion:
essentially a series of photographs played in quick succession to break your brain into
thinking that subject is moving. There are hand-drawn disks from the 1800s
that basically work the same way, deceiving you into seeing motion when spun at the right
speed. The photographs of Viewfinder, the false exits
of Superliminal — these feel uniquely illusory. But from a certain point of view, all fiction
is its own type of illusion. To return a final time to “Alice in Wonderland,”
as the novel wears on, the Victorian-era rationality that adults have taught Alice consistently
fails in an inherently chaotic world. It is only in embracing the irrationality
of Wonderland, in accepting that the rules are nonsensical and can be broken, that Alice
can return home — or, more accurately, wake up from a dream. Sometimes the value of worlds that shatter
conventions is in waking you up to the ways reality doesn’t make sense. So many things in our daily routines are arbitrary,
the result of looking at the world from a particular point of view. Sometimes that can be comforting, or even
useful. But sometimes, it’s worth changing your
perspective. As always, thanks for watching. If you enjoyed this entry, please lend your
support by liking, subscribing, and hitting the notification icon to stay up to date on
all things Curious. See you in the next video.
