The nostalgia and discomfort of archaic user interfacesInterface
wfmag.cc \ 23schooler chatting with friends and navigating
the treacherous waters of teenage relationships.
“I chose to mimic AOL Instant Messenger because
that’s where I grew up,” Seeley says. “I know what
it’s like to talk with a crush on AIM until three in
the morning, to juggle multiple conversations, or
to go Facebook official with someone.”
Seeley calls Emily is Away the “social media
equivalent of my hometown,” to which he’d
returned after college prior to creating the first
Emily game. “My nostalgia for being home, and
the awkwardness that came
with it, seeped into my work.”
Playing the Emily is Away
games is an intensely
nostalgic experience for
anyone who was a teenager
during the 2000s, but its nostalgia comes with
a sting. “Having grown up, we can relate to the
teenage main character, but we aren’t them
in 2006,” says Seeley. “And ultimately, that
rift between the person we are now and the
person we were in high school comes to a head.
The player often chooses to talk to Emily, to
reach out and fix things, but the person we werethen doesn’t allow us to. The player is forced to
rewrite their messages and slowly lose touch
with Emily. And the game ends on that note of
discomfort, of not being the person we wish we
could have been.”Hypnospace Outlaw places you in the role of an
Enforcer in HypnOS, a kind of alternate version
of the internet set in a fictional 1999. It’s your
job to surf the quirky, garish
homepages of HypnOS
users and report abuses. Its
creator Jay Tholen shares
Lawhead’s appreciation for
early digital spaces: “I love
the short window of time when people do weird,
interesting things with new technologies that are
just hitting the mainstream.”
Tholen’s HypnOS is a janky, glitchy, sometimes
broken space that bristles with creativity. It’s a
callback, he says, to a past that never existed:
“People were being sold this dream of a digital
global village with ads containing 3D Jay Tholen, creator
of Hypnospace
Outlaw.“‘NOSTALGIA’ IS
DISMISSIVE OF WHY
THERE’S APPEAL IN
OLDER SOFTWARE”WHY UI?
“The fact that there was always
something pushing us to be more
open-minded makes it easier
for such work to be embraced,”
Nathalie Lawhead says. “I
remember doing this exact same
thing in 2007 and people were
much more indignant. Like, why in
the world would you even want that
in a game? You work on a desktop,
why make a game about that?” In EIGTBOK, apps and
files have a life of their
own and communicate
their anxieties to us.