User:Thijshijsijsjss/Gossamery/Deep Simulator

• Book recommended by and borrowed from Senka
• Read Febuari 2025

Deep Simulator is a single-player video game and physical book publication by aaajiao in collaboration with Ag, XuCong, nara, Oxi pëng and WLL. The book presents a story about being sucked into a videogame in a classic choose-your-own-adventure format. Decently novel is how it doesn't wrap this story in metaphor: pixels are pixels, and seemingly there's no 'greater story being told' for which the stuck-in-a-videogame schtick is an allegory. In a wildly different way, the videogame version is just as 'honest': heaps of erratic objects and graphics that are barely navigable fill the screen. In a transcript of a zoom meeting in the book, the creators note something that speaks to the human experience quite well, in general:

Xu Cong: It's the lack of boundaries that causes this overwhelming and disorienting feeling, right?

Ag: Yes. That which we see in our experiences has boundaries, then suddenly you're in a world that has no boundaries, no clear path, and you don't know what to do.

(Over the years, I've made a great effort in embracing videogames as a wide and reaching format, and the scope of games I tend to consider justified is much different from what it maybe once was. But the videogame version of Deep Simulator does present the awkward confrontation that there's still room to grow, maybe.)