Gaming, Dreaming, & the City of the Everyday
By:
December 28, 2009
The art game Every day the same dream is a casual fantasia on the quotidian dialectic of work and reverie. It’s a mere bagatelle, tossed together in six days for the monthly competition sponsored by the influential Experimental Gameplay Project, and its rudiments are straightforward: as a cubicle-dwelling minion, the player’s avatar seeks opportunities for quiet insurrection amid the inescapable prison of days. The game’s evident simplicity belies its mesmeric power and its sleight-of-hand way with narrative. According to game designer Paolo Pedercini, his challenge was “to charge the cyclic nature of most video games with some kind of meaning (i.e. the ‘play again’ is not a game over).” In its quiet build from one “round” to the next, Every day the same dream evokes an iterative, all-but-impossible access of freedom.
In its approach to corporate culture and salary slavery, Every day the same dream reminds me of City of Work, the anti-anti-dystopian masterwork of HiLobrow friend Michael Lewy. Where the latter is enigmatic and sublime, Every day the same dream is lyrical and precise. Despite their differences in scale, both works encourage us to look beyond our inner Bartleby for transcendence.