Wireframe - #35 - 2020

22 / wfmag.cc

The nostalgia and discomfort of archaic user interfaces

Interface

 Nathalie Lawhead,

creator of EIGTBOK.

 Kyle Seeley, creator

of the Emily is

Away games.

WRITTEN BY

ANDREAS INDERWILDI

n the last couple of years, there’s been

a slew of indie games that use mock

desktop environments or other UIs as

their main setting. Here, narratives are

experienced in purely virtual spaces

as we rifle through text files, talk to characters

via instant messaging, or navigate a detailed

simulacrum of the internet.

Many of those games have an almost

archaeological feel to them, since they take

inspiration from UIs that have been outdated

for years or even decades. They hark back to

early text adventures, DOS, Windows 98, and the

social media platforms of the 2000s.

“The aesthetic era that I usually draw heavily

from is eighties to late nineties computer

software,” says Nathalie Lawhead, creator of the

darkly humorous interactive zine, Everything is

Going to be OK, which explores virtual spaces full

of tortured cartoon animals and glitchy desktop

environments. “I know a lot of arguments could

be made about ‘nostalgia’, but I think that’s kind

of dismissive or missing the point of why there’s

so much appeal in older software. Early software

was just starting to find itself. People were

exploring ways of conveying what a UI even is,

and how you should interact with one. I feel like

with the loss of customisation, experimentation,

and the way freeware used to thrive, we

I

now have these very dead, highly functional

corporate environments where the focus is on

productivity rather than all the exciting things

that are possible on computers.”

Capturing an era when things used to be

different “is a way of keeping these philosophies

alive,” says Lawhead.

EIGTBOK’s desktop environments are lived-in

spaces with idiosyncratic quirks and files that

contain poems and diary entries that deal with

serious personal issues. As a result, it’s easy to

feel like an intruder into someone else’s private

space. “If you give someone a new machine,

they start virtually inhabiting it,” Lawhead says.

“Notes, pictures, files saved in odd places,

website history... It’s kind of like your virtual

home. Software and UI has its own language,

too, so you can convey these emotions through

the way things glitch, break, function against

expectation. UI is really an under-appreciated

narrative tool. UI isn’t just an interface, it’s an

actual space.”

In Kyle Seeley’s Emily is Away series, digital

spaces are similarly personal. His games

recreate the interfaces of the instant messaging

and social media sites and programs of the

2000s and ask us to inhabit the role of a high