Posted by: Ryan



Paolo Pedercini, who created “Every Day the Same Dream” for the Experimental Gameplay Project, describes his game as "a slightly existential riff on the theme of alienation and refusal of labor."


I played "Every Day the Same Dream" about a week ago now and I can still hear the music in my head sometimes. It's a weird, haunting track, which is fitting for the game it's used in. And then once the music gets in my head, I can't help but think about the rest of that game again for a little bit too. I wouldn't want to ruin anything for you, so if you want to read the rest of this post, you should play it first. It'll only take about ten to fifteen minutes of your time.

You can play "Every Day the Same Dream" at:
http://www.molleindustria.org/everydaythesamedream/everydaythesamedream.html

Don't give up. There is an ending.

Five more steps and you will be a new person.

Spoilers after the jump.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

I work at a desk in an office, and I work every Monday through Friday. I'm slightly worried that because I work a regular job at a computer and many of you don't, that this game won't mean as much to you.

The game is completely flat. Not just in the sense that it's a 2D game, but there's also no shading at all, as if the game is made out of gray cutouts. You can only move left and right, and everything you can interact with has it's name written at the bottom of the screen. It feels incredibly linear and rigid.

And that's the point. At first glance, all you can do is walk to the right, press 'space' when you get a prompt. It's easy to assume that you have no choice other than going straight to work. And if that's all you choose to do, the game will let you spend day in and day out just getting dressed, driving to work, and sitting at your desk. I've certainly had days in real life where I felt like I had no choice other than that very thing.



It's a long walk to get to your desk, and the view zooms out showing your identically-dressed coworkers working at their identical-looking desks, putting the conformity of your job at the forefront.


The first time I played the game, I got dressed, went to work, but I didn't sit at my desk. I kept on walking and ended up on the roof, where I promptly jumped off... and woke up the next morning completely fine. I didn't know what to think, but I was certainly intrigued. After that, I went to work, sat at my desk, and woke up again in my bed the next morning just as I did when I jumped off of the building and killed myself. It felt like nothing had changed. Why was I playing this again?

In real life, we're willing to spend our lives doing the same thing over and over. But in the context of a game, it only took me one repetition before I asked myself, "What's the point of this?" When I play a game, I expect there to be an end goal: a win condition. In a game, most of us won't do something over and over again without a clear goal and without a reward.

The only thing that kept me playing was reading somewhere that "there is an ending." There was something that the game wanted me to do. When I didn't know what I was doing, the whole thing felt pointless. But once I was assured that there was a purpose to it all, I buckled down and tried to figure it out. The game appears so rigid at first, but the only way to move forward is to not do what obviously comes to you.

I had to not get dressed in the morning, I had to not drive to work, and I had to not walk to my car. I had to break the mold, and do something different and unexpected to progress. That's what makes the game interesting, and that's where the interest comes in my real life. I never write about work on LiveJournal. I write about going to find a donut on the weekend. I write about spending time with my friends and I write about playing games. I write about everything that is not getting dressed and going to work, even though that's what I do five days out of every seven. I'm searching for something different, something interesting, something more than my weekly grind.

Then once I had done the five things I could to subvert my daily routine, they took my routine away from me. In the last act of the game, everyone is gone. And even though moving though the entire game means trying not to be the same as everyone else, it feels empty without them. My character's wife is gone, the street is empty, and no one is at their desks.

I'm not sure exactly what it all means. But I know that I've spent day after day in this game trying to figure out ways to have some kind of different outcome, a different path, walking through this obvious, predictable, boring world.

But in the end, the world changed. I got dressed and drove to work, only to find that there was no one there.

.
.
.