24 / wfmag.cc
The nostalgia and discomfort of archaic user interfacesInterface
on users and communities,” Tholen says. “This
sometimes comes in the form of glitchy system
updates or security oversights, but pain is more
often caused by a blindness to the idea that
their users may take the online space they’re
inhabiting seriously. It may be all they have.”If games like EIGTBOK, Emily is Away, or
Hypnospace Outlaw toy with the darker side of
nostalgia, Pony Island embraces it completely.
Here, nostalgia strays into outright horror as we
fight for our soul on the battlefield of an arcade
machine built by Satan himself. Creator Daniel
Mullins tells me he “wanted to the player to
keep ‘digging’ deeper into the system from the
high-level game down to the most basic code of
its innards. The desktop is somewhere between
those. The aesthetic of the early 1990s seemed
to be the result of balancing between being
able to represent enough on screen while still
appearing antiquated.”
It’s a balancing act that pays off, as the
antiquated nature of the game’s interfaces feeds
into the creepiness. “Archaic interfaces are good
at creating discomfort and even horror due to
their unintuitive, sometimes unfriendly, and
ambiguous nature,” he says.
The deliberate crudeness
of its aesthetics only
enhances this sense of
discomfort. Even though
they’re rarely associated with each other,
there’s a strange kind of resonance between
its occult iconography and the lofi graphics
through which they come to life. “A creepy icon
or image is only made more disturbing when it
is distorted or improperly reproduced in some
way, yet still distinguishable,” says Mullins.
“Lower resolution graphics have a way of being
creepy by depicting something disturbing in low
fidelity and letting the player mentally fill in the
rest. Also, the glitchiness of the digital space
in Pony Island allows for imagery to appear
and disappear quickly, which can also make it
more disturbing.”The House Abandon, part of the game anthology
Stories Untold, also dives into the horror of oldavatars ȵying around together across
psychedelic landscapes. There was a very real
sense that the internet was going to change
communication forever – which did happen- and bring people together by fostering
understanding across cultures – not quite there
yet. I thinN once folNs finally
did buy in and sign on, it
became clear that the tech
and people pushing it weren’t
working towards that goal.”
Hypnospace Outlaw may have been inspired by
this kind of promise, but it’s no cyber utopia by
any stretch. As a HypnOS Enforcer, we witness
first hand how the policies and carelessness of
the company often change the digital lives of
HypnOS denizens for the worse: “A major story
beat in Hypnospace Outlaw centres around the
impact that seemingly minute changes can have
Daniel Mullins,
creator of Pony
Island. In Emily is Away Too,
characters message us links
to sites like YouToob or
Facenook, which open
directly in our browser.“TURNING THAT SOFT,
FUZZY FEELING INTO
SOMETHING UNSAFE”MY LITTLE PONY
“The way Pony Island uses
mechanics outside the main
application, like when you receive
a fake Steam message, definitely
inspired some of that stuff in my
own games,” says Kyle Seeley.
“Chat logs exporting to your
desktop, using your browser to
view retro YouToob, and so on.
And there’s actually a Hypnospace
Outlaw Easter egg in Emily is Away
To o! You can talk to hypnobot and
create your very own hypnopage!” The digital spaces of Pony Island are teeming
with demonic spirits trying to manipulate us.