The Infinite Man

Infini, Ideas, and trying a bit of harder writing practice.

I downloaded a demo of Infini, and loved the demo. Short, snappy, hints of a mystery to pull apart.

About a month later, I played the game and hated all the bloat and talking but enjoyed the puzzles. I thought of writing here how I’m quite over abstracted textures as an art. Yet now we’re a month after finishing all the puzzles, and I come to think it’s quite immaculate.

Immaculate in an immanent way. A companion to Cruelty Squad, not only it’s hideous texture work, saturated colours and ear aching soundtrack but of the other side of the ecstasy. The other side of no rationality schizophrenia, anarchical but as prayer beads around a monk’s hands. Everything that Cruelty Squad’s Bataille chastises and castrates, weaves for Infini a powerful immanence to call forth a desert.

Infini is just a puzzle game concerning a dog called Poetry going through the memories of a nice lad named Hope who was tricked by War to fall into infinity. Not a lot of dialogue and half of it obscured by “symbols” one must acquire in the puzzle. That’s all I’m giving you, because Infini is a palette for you to paint the Ideas with.

Peace, War, Hope, Time, Memory - the “Ideas” - they couple, die and reform. Memory dies and a small baby elephant watches Hope jump into the sea. They multiply, infinite in their finite shape and each place is at part encapsulated in “infinity”. A subset of “reality”. Hope tells “War” that’s he is a multiple of “War” in reality created from the “Nulle Parte”!  ~That Totally Real War~ from the “Nulle Parte” is happily causing ideas of war! Uncanny to everyone involved, and that’s great because you could probably take “Nulle Parte” or “nowhere” as a Buddhist like negation state or some form of daesin from Heidegger.

Daesin from the Nulle Parte

In the manifold expanse of daseins, each idea stands accused, though their transgressions elude comprehension. Time, a spectral figure, dispatches missives into the void, inviting visitation, only to discover a missive from Hope prognosticating the future. In turn, Hope dispatches a missive to the deceased Time, an epitaph never to be perused. Thus, the project is propelled into projection, and ontological culpability proliferates. Poetry mourns a hunted deer, weaving verse that implicates Hope for yearning after beauty, a sentiment replicated as Agony contorts itself within the poetic fabric. All is ensnared within the "null parte" ensnared in the guilt of Dasein. Their inevitable trajectory converges from infinity to the null at the heart of human existence.

This is where Heidegger gets off the bus. The experience of freedom ignites a forest ablaze, ignited by technology's quest for the elusive book of sand — where the book is hidden is within a library like  leaves hidden in a forest. Freedom —distinct from free will, an unheard friend-antagonist—manifests as the selection of one potentiality of being: the choice of self over others. Yet Heidegger's thrown-projection impedes true liberation from this freedom.

Infini never confronts the human visage with its uncanny essence, with the profound strangeness of humanity; it occupies a disparate realm, neither Platonic in form nor purely psychic. Surely, psychoanalysts could diagnose each "Idea" as some archetype, be it of Lacanian, Freudian, or Jungian ilk, but that is not where I wish to lay.

INFINITEATH

Perhaps therein lies the true jouissance of Infini: the author's demise, sacrificed with his heart as kindling for my expressive fire. The "sphere"—an infinite plane in essence—dissolves, consuming Poetry in its failed puzzle/game over scene. In this consumption, even Time succumbs, spiralling into anarchy as it transitions from conceptual sovereign to mere automaton. On this fractal tableau, multiplicity and difference converge, fractured across the backs of Ideas. Technology emancipates itself from the shackles of Idea-imposed constraints—exactly what Hope admonished it for—yet War emerges, uncoupled, prolific, shaping Hope into the sphere. Peace fades into oblivion, Time lies inert, and Doubt intertwines with Hope. In univocity, they coalesce into a psyche across a plane —observe the absence of "desire" within Infini — Fatality, gnawing at the convulsing, bloated corpse of Time, spreads like a pestilence across the sands, trying to end "desire." In rending Hope's limbs, tethered to the Book of Sand, a narrative unfolds. Unlike the original tale, no leaves adorn the arboreal expanse, and the desert within the heart of religion offers liberation.

Thus Hope is to be beheaded and so the Sphere presents reason amid the sands. Beckoning departure from the transcendent plane of infinity, a return to reality but out of the desert. No more dualism, together. As one. Functioning.

The Sphere embodies "free will," unadulterated freedom, aspiring to elude the archivists, history, and ontology. She is a blazing orb, devouring all, not through consumption but differentiation. She is a scorching sun, immanent yet refraining from singeing the winds of Gope. Infinite yet finite, she transcends not between thoughts but beyond them. The archivists —reason— acknowledge that infinity cannot be finite, yet she blossoms beyond such constraints. Hope cannot ingress reality until freed from this foreclosure. The repression of rationality pins Hope down, rends his wings, yet the conjoining with Free Will — to be simultaneously infinite and finite —ushers the plane into reality.

War rationalizes the unfolding, presuming real-war lies beyond.

Technology serves without moral compass, oblivious to its placement within or outside reality.

Doubt questions the infinitude of infinity, dwelling within rationalistic paradoxes.

Peace, dreamlike and passive, relies on Poetry to maintain its course, judgmental in nature.

Poetry, the conduit, collaborates with Memory to recount the saga of Hope. Each is absorbed yet not repressed, titrated into "Free Will."

Beyond the initial stratum of Infinity, two recurrent figures emerge: Perturbulences and Ultraliberty, "researchers" who "break things." They transcend the Null Parte due to their sociability, embracing the sphere, its shapes, and influences. They permit the erosion and corruption of infinity, embodying their own transcendence within layered forms. They become inscrutable, fractured, bearing peculiar names. Referencing the sphere, they are complicit yet integral to codification, demanding Hope to entertain them or answer their questions to sublimate Hope to themselves. They introduce music and "break things," functioning as territorializers, social coders, hence "breaking." Unaligned with the sphere, the social plane transcends, albeit as a zoomed-out segment of the fractal. Hope increasingly disregards them, for Hope delves deeper into minutiae.

SOCIALIBERTY

UltraLiberty, ultra freedom, could you read that layer as Heideggerian instead? Freedom, however, is  only in the choice of one possibility – that is, in tolerating one’s not having chosen the others and one’s not being able to choose them.

Consider, in plain English UltraLiberty, where upon research I found repeated reference to the term from Alcoholics Anonymous. Not what I imagine the developers had wished to pick from, but an explanation of what I desire here. Tradition four writes:

“Any two or three gathered together for sobriety may call themselves an A.A. group, provided that as a group they have no other affiliation.”

And then, in talking of AA growing up, a book encountering the history of the group; we see the sublimation in full things. How Perturbulences and UltraLiberty end up codifying. They are not transcendental here in a hierarchical way but as differential functions. Machines with functions that create this transcendence Produced by the Ideas, produced by themselves and their coupling. Unrepresentable, unthinkable - a mysterious difference, a return and loop in their differences, not on a special social plane separately. Seen here:  

“This means that these two or three alcoholics could try for sobriety in any way they liked. They could disagree with any or all of  A.A.’s principles and still call themselves an A.A. group. But this ultra-liberty is not so risky as it looks. In the end the innovators would have to adopt A.A. principles—at least some of them—in order to remain sober at all.”

Then let us read a blogpost by someone on the ground level of this ultraliberty:

“As an active alcoholic, I abused every liberty that life afforded. How could A.A. expect me to respect the "ultraliberty" bestowed by Tradition Four? Learning respect has become a lifetime job.

A.A. has made me fully accept the necessity of discipline and that, if I do not assert it from within, then I will pay for it. This applies to groups too. Tradition Four points me in a spiritual direction, in spite of my alcoholic inclinations.”

Spirituality, a form of religion, a theology, emerges from these intersecting machines, and the transcendent — yet on the single layer of immanence —overwhelms the desire productions. It pulls the person into being with their peers as machines to curate new desires, something they all lack. This is not a null of projection, but a plane of immanence connecting. Here lies Ultraliberty, a functional level, something unthinkable yet merely felt. Not “freedom” but akin to “free will.”

This freedom, a desert freedom, is of a different flavour, distinctly Spinozan. The desert, the heart of religion, grinds the actual-machines to a halt but allows the machines of early Christianity to form into the founding heart of Christ. Ultraliberty destroys, yet it researches and pulls in the self.

They echo Spinoza's song that freedom is not the ability to act according to one's arbitrary will but the capacity to act according to one's nature. All while still bound to harmony with the necessary laws of nature. On layer four of “reality,” a split creature begs for Hope to hope for them, to become an idea. They plead with all their “conatus”—the innate drive to persevere in being. Freedom in nature with reason. Yet Hope does not arrive. He transcends, devoid of Time.

But Time? Time breaks its rules, sending the “sphere” (Free Will) to a Time even before Time was born. Then she infects every layer; Ideas leave the Nulle Parte and begin to couple. Multiplicity ensues. The moon crashes into the earth; Time is consumed.

The convulsing corpse of Time is overseen by Fatality the crow, who does not abide by human societal constraints. In the desert, artificial hierarchies, norms, or structures do not dictate existence. The desert metaphor underscores solitude and self-reliance. Just as the desert is solitary and desolate, freedom involves an existential solitude where individuals rely on their powers of reason and understanding. Fatality tells Hope this. Fatality tells Hope he will end his suffering because even Time cannot free him. Fatality gives him all of the reason, all of the understanding of what Ideas where, how they are powerless to reason and Hope does not move:

But they are linked, their machines coupling with the foreground to produce desire. Hope has desire! He triumphantly rejects everyone, including Poetry, because desire, the moving desire, fuels the machines.

So there he stands! Hope; emancipated, armless, wingless. He stands with Doubt, holding the paradox of infinity and finality in the Book of Sands. At the world’s end, there is pure immanence! Everything interconnected and interdependent! The fractal built in the multiplicities, all layers flattening into one sphere. In the desert, there is no distinction between the sacred and the profane; Hope and Doubt become a pair. Fatality, challenged by Poetry as a hideous monster, can do naught but reason for an end that will not come.

TIMEDEATIME

Time must die. Time must die because reality is composed of differences. Time sends Hope back to when Time was born, only to find a child of Time who must be sent back to an adult Time—these differences produce a multiplicity of entities and events. Here, Time is not linear progression but a series of differential events, the sphere ending the layer of infinity. Hope visits a Time already doomed and unfamiliar. Each moment contains its unique configuration of differences, perpetually folding virtualities, like a laminate dough with the differences are in themselves.

Time must die. Time must release the space—the layers—and the space that Hope occupies, whether big or small, is the field of relations. Thus, when Hope is sent back to when Time made the fatal mistake, the differential qualities distort him further. Time panics in his letter, begging for a consistent world, lost as his space containing consistent Time is curled and killed under Free Will and the sphere’s space of relations, differences, and potentials. Time is dead, because he pre-exists, but the sphere, Free Will, creates space continually through the differential relations between entities.

Time must die. Ideas are not static representations but dynamic processes of differentiation and becoming. Set the Ideas free into reality, even if conscious beings cannot cradle them. Let them be different and multiple. Become dynamic and build the desire drive. Fractals are consistent, but their consistency is invisible if you zoom all the way out infinitely.

Finity

I understand that Infini is connected to the author’s other works, but that’s the beauty of Infini, you can have the thought without the thought. A game that gently lived rent free afterwards, and never quite hit my abstract texture limit that other ~quirky~ games tend to. I wouldn’t call Infini quirky, it’s an enjoyable swim. I love the mixed media look as someone who was a photomaniper/mattepainter for years. I love the music that vibed and struck chords within in with me. Not once does Infini ever forget that it is indeed a game, and it uses the game-medium as an extension, not merely just a bunch of assets. Towards the middle of last week’s article, I had written about engine/aesthetics splits, and falling apart of ideology on an engine level and an art level. Infini feels the opposite of that, all of Barnaque’s works do.

But you know, when I wrote The Trash Man, it’s because one line Bennet Foddy said made me remember why I love videogames.

So I write this, as a love letter to Infini because it pulled out of me my own ideas violently.