The Trash Man

Foddy's Getting Over It, the concept of "trash" and understanding how trash hurts the high and low brow.

Bennet Foddy’s famous monologue in Getting Over It contains a small segment about “trash”. I want to explore “trash” as he posits, and to use it as an interesting example of why both videogame develop and the academic movements of the 90s and early 00s began to peter out in the Internet age. For what Foddy touches upon in his examination of “trash” in both the videogames and Internet sphere is gently gracing alongside something so beautifully catastrophic about the Academic rationalisation wheel. Many debates, issues and surrounding culture of videogames, return back to a sense of relationship between not the character and player, but the player and developer. The beautiful, but now lost teleological relationship between stepping into someone else’s “Thunderdome” and fighting them. Just as once we wondered over the Internet into boards, personal websites or Doom .wads.  

Let us start by examining the middle part, concerning “trash”:

‘For years now, people have been predicting that games would soon be made out of pre-fabricated objects; bought in a store and assembled into a world, and for the most part that hasn’t happened, because the objects in the stores are trash. I don’t mean that they look bad, or that they’re badly made- although a lot of them are- I mean they’re trash in the way that food becomes trash as soon as you put it in the sink. Things are made to be consumed and used in a certain context, and once the moment is gone they transform into garbage. In the context of technology, those moments pass by in seconds.’

Getting Over It was softly naïve, as it would be for it’s time, on how bad the prefoliation of stock assets truly went in the entire sphere. What he is touching upon is something a little more precise. When people claim the ~soullessness~ of a game, when they see remakes of games with a distinct unity or unreal flavour, it is because people are smelling trash. They are seeing the ontological gap between the original vision, and then vision pushed through trash. Not that, for example, the System Shock remake is bad, but it has hallmarks of trash; the rebinding menus do not allow for multiple mouse bindings, a leftover from its engines drawbacks, the trash scent rises. When people post compilations of the “sameness” of title screens: From platform/puzzle anti-capitalism Abe’s Odyssey, to Nordic schizophrenia-simulator action-game Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice sharing the same title screen style; it’s because they smell this underlying trash. Culminating with Starfield the main menu’s look now weighs more than any amount of cinematic trailers.

The thing is, there are useful arguments about trash, such as the need for accessibility. This, however, can also be achieved in many other different ways without resulting in trash. It is funny how the menus of Age of Empires or Heroes of Might and Magic have had UIs that have managed to stand the test of time, with readability and scaling. When the Battlefield 2042 UX developer pops off about Elden Ring’s UI while at the same time Battlefield 2042 has the infamous opposite colour switching options menu, I believe it goes beyond mere accessibility into a person noticing trash and having to defend their trash. Their trash is ontologically their own – a reflection of them written onto the chain of player experience. To give up on their bit of trash is to mean the player no longer sniffs the UX Designer’s own personal bit of trash. Not meeting or challenging the player, but using the player as a medium of their own experience.

Let me repeat that trash here is not always negative, as Foddy goes onto explain, but it’s that people can smell trash. Consumers can look at the difference between Forspoken and The Witcher 3’s Blood and Wine artstyles and be able to sniff trash out of one of these environments while appreciating the differences in menus in Forspoken’s favour. I imagine this is the same type of cope that leads people to lay down their lives in Youtube comments about adding raytracing to Breath of the Wild while still looking like outdated [actual] trash. It’s because they don’t smell trash. It’s interesting that even [bad] games sometimes get away with having a nice presentation or atmosphere because of it’s dedication to not-having-trash. YIIK: A Postmodern RPG is a deconstruction-maxxxxxing retooling of what should be popular mechanics and popular things from games with popular indie darlings doing the music. So nobody goes for the appearance or even the aesthetic too hard because it contains no trash. Deconstruction of mechanics with raw rationalism into a new thing is not trash. Yet even if it’s a good, half decent souls-like, people will sniff those Unity/Unreal assets and smell the trash.  

This is all to try capture a type of trash to explain certain harsh reactions to things and perhaps this means we would have strayed from Foddy’s point, but it’s worth expanding this out to a wider games industry. It’s been trouble for the big corps to try corral gamers, not because they are particularly smarter than a book or film goer, but because they tend to be more attached to this digital world of information and churn through it faster. These other industries have struggled to deal with this – the notion of blind items becoming the preferred gossip than approved interviews has been a pain for the entertainment industry,

We saw this even in (very) early web 1.0 days where someone posting something about a videogame problem leads to a function being built that helped make Quake possible. Now we’ve accelerated a little more, that the digital landscape has only been sped up with the rise of shorter-form BBS boards and then into social media. We’ve gone from perhaps waiting a fortnight to a couple months for a reply, to an instant reply if you’re lucky to have a videogame general on 4chan or an active subreddit (two sides of the same coin in this case, despite moderation/tolerance differences).

Compare the nature of walkthroughs through the years: From Sonic web 1.0 tiny notes that only sometimes would load; To the web 2.0 walkthroughs with crazy ascii headers and trying to pack as much as they could into 150kb; To the post-social media state of walkthroughs that are either a video by some prick in twenty parts or 200 pages with 3 sentences and 10 advert each IGN walkthroughs. Slowly as these old websites die (usually on purpose, sadly) the human element is being more and more condensed. Of course, academic literature is numerous on consumption, but it’s always in a certain political/social media/post-iPhone way. It is Never really something vastly more interconnected and interesting. Never the little niche corners, the little communities, the little knock on effects like you’re macroing in Starcraft. Especially since still to this day, journalists and corporations keep using this post-iPhone-non-gamer-literature on gamers. Then, the avoidable unbelievable PR disasters, or many schemes being quickly found out. Blizzard, doing their best to cover up the fallout from the Hong Kong protests were laughed at when nobody cared for Overwatch 2’s pushed reveal, and protests overtook Blizzcon. Even now Overwatch 2, is being called out for its “rainbow capitalism” after trying to bury lawsuits and exposed anti-labour practices. These are tactics and things you would see employed on The West Wing during election season, but it’s videogames! And so we have this gap between trash, gamers smelling trash, and then the slowly forming information trash. Foddy touches upon this next:

‘Over time, we’ve poured more and more refuse into this vast digital landfill that we call the internet. It now vastly outnumbers and outweighs the things that are fresh, and untainted, and unused. When everything around us is cultural trash, trash becomes the new medium- the lingua franca of the digital age- and you can build culture out of trash, but only trash culture: b-games, b-movies, b-music, b-philosophy. Maybe this is what digital culture is. A monstrous mountain of trash, the ash-heap of creativity’s fountain. A landfill with everything we ever thought of in it. Grand, infinite, and unsorted.’

This is the grand non-negative of trash, and this too is b-philosophy. From your favourite blogger to your favourite e-daddy’s podcast, It’s accessible information and culture, but in this trash, there are now obfuscations as I hinted above. With so much information, a couple of people can chuck some un-recyclables and spoil the recycle bin.

It’s always been like this mind you; there was a twitter thread talking about the humbleness forced by the online landfill of information, about the “Thunderdome” of internet forums that force people out of the Dunning-Kreuger narcissism spiral of so-called expertise. The thing is however, this twitter thread is the exact same example of trash in the landfill that Foddy posits. A culture built out of trash, it’s niche information being thrown into the ether to be consumed for a victory and then thrown away. A person in the replies to that twitter thread nails this:

Yeah the only people I’ve ever had do that have actual degrees and didn’t spend their life online. You can spot an always online person bc their perspective is always firmly rooted in things they’ve read on forums and not in books. You learn to see the scaffolding of commentary

This is the same on both sides of the coin. There is enough knowledge to scrape through A-Levels and Undergraduate poaching Internet forum arguments to vaguely throw together coursework. However, you then become outclassed, not by just one person on the Internet with hyper specific knowledge, but a wider range of foundations that were missed with the commentary complacency. That’s not to say it’s entirely useless – to wield it alongside the ability to use trash to navigate around certain pitfalls. There’s a fundamental understanding gap that is created by the fountain of trash, but trash is also a defence against slimeball arguments, slippery analytics and it’s a knife in those who fall on experience arguments.

However, I will draw a line between that as a time of trash-culture born of the information Ritalin of the internet and the current state of academic journals that were speeding towards trash in the same way people saw was happening with the gaming industry. In pursuit of money, more journals are taking advantage of the requirements that PHD students be published during their tenure – creating a forced need for trash, in academia. You must re-invent the wheel, or puke up some trash to prove you are part of the clan. Even Wiley’s esteemed political philosophy journal, in an attempt to make more money, is now being boycotted by academics who wish to preserve the elite-nature of the journal. Journals had rankings that bought prestige to them, trying to stop the flow of trash, but the trash pile is still forming. A very old professor I was under described them as journals made to re-invent the wheel, no prestige, just trash, in the exact same way Foddy explained.

Come up with a banal take, throw in an older philosopher for authority (but don’t forget you’re above such biases) and maybe a P-Formula because you’re a smart analytic philosopher who wants to LARP with the sciences. It’s no wonder why with all the Cognitive Bias articles that throw Mill or Rawls on the side like spit attaching chewing gum to the table, none have any real impact on ground to mid-level workers. Yet, Elitist Jerks, a World of Warcraft forum has been the centre of communications study many a time. Reinforcing the exact opposite of the divisive nature of cognitive bias in favor of gate keeping, community, self-made resources and self-responsibility.

This has been delayed by a decade or two from the internet and the videogame industry, but it sure as hell is hitting the same information-b-culture tipping point that Foddy exposed. It is okay to argue that this is a good thing. More journals are becoming open-access (with nice pay to win bonuses), piracy and academic papers are being thrown around over the Internet at lightspeed. Information and condensed videos on grand philosophical concepts are all over Youtube by professors (or gamers). It’s all more accessible even without student loans or going to university. Of course, these things are gatekept in a practical reality with needing a degree/doctoral on your CV, but the information isn’t. It should be a positive thing.

I believe many accelerationists probably have held the same opinion. With 56kb/s download speeds and cool zines of chaos magik journals we were gonna thump into the noumena with cool aesthetics. That we will bust out of the chains of traditional epistemology and capitalism by schizoing through information.

But it doesn’t work. Trash works for culture. Trash doesn’t work for information.

Foddy goes through a list of chewed up, transient culture which even swept up the accelerationist dream into some sort of trendy fad with no real substance. The sort of Jonah Peretti BuzzFeed flavour of cultural schizophrenia: ‘Everything’s fresh for about six seconds- until some newer thing beckons- and we hit refresh, and there’s years of perseverance disappearing into the pile; out of style, out of sight.’ And the result of this is that people are pushed to make an even more watered down version of trash that feeds the algorithms. To make a unity asset flip that causes controversy and then run away with the profits. For friendly handholding-games to appeal to what you want in a specific way. This is not about complaining about Dark Souls not having an easy mode, or an accessible nature, but the narrative of a game. The interaction of player and developer. You enter their Thunderdome, and you play by their rules. Or at least, that’s how it used to be.

Even Getting Over It, was a victim of this with Only Up being a viral, watered down, regurgitation that’s already become parodies in other games due to its pure trash nature. In Getting Over It, Foddy imbues in its assets a special relationship of the interaction of player and developer. When this becomes regurgitated, you end up with Only Up as a mod for the PC port of Jak and Daxter because there’s nothing beyond just the hard challenge for content. There’s a special relationship of the interaction of player and developer, hence the reaction content that comes out of Only Up is of a different flavour. Pure rage, pure snapping, all indirect but also replicable. There’s no arguing with Foddy when he makes fun of you or quotes Sun Tzu, there’s no ‘catharsis’ you arrive at because that relationship doesn’t exist. There’s no narrative, struggle or sort of character arc you both go on. Only Up is a chimp in a zoo, Getting Over It is a fist fight in the Thunderdome.

Academia had this moment too - In an article expanding on the accelerationist movement and Nick Land’s croaking into a microphone to jungle music, there was a particular comment: [“One person in the audience stood up, and said, ‘Some of us are still Marxists, you know.’ And walked out.”] but that was it, that was the churning that Foddy had touched upon, the nothingness of trash. They wanted the academic landfill trash, to feed up unactionable answers. You had to serve them. The same developer-player Thunderdome existed in academia (and preserved in internet forums) was rejected by this Marxist who did not want to take up a metaphysical fight. Before Foddy explains this relationship, he posits the same fruit of temptation that Academia inevitably ate from:

‘In this context, it’s tempting to make friendly content that’s gentle- that lets you churn through it but not earn it. Why make something demanding if it just gets piled up in the landfill, filed in with the bland things?’

Just like the person who stood up and declared themselves a Marxist, they too are feeding the trash heap while roleplaying as being against it. Now you can argue about cultural schizophrenia or go hard into the psycho-analysis accelerationists, but who was representing that? The Marxist who wanted the Marxist content that’s gentle but radical or the person trying to make something demanding. Any notion of satire, distain or any sort of human element gets washed away in arm-chairing trash. You were supposed to join the machine in the Thunderdome, not just feed it yourselves.

Arm-chairing nuance has been a fun ride in videogames as controversies get swept into trash. We saw this a lot with games that are merely fadroversies, Hatred springs to mind. Compared to radical games that have the same viral impact but people post gameplay videos instead of articles. The entire boomer-shooter resurgence I think is a deliberate attack on the trash of re-used assets by working in engines and environments that don’t allow you to have trash – (note that trash still did exist in the original era, as Duke Nukem 3d’s many expansions will attest). Sure, many of them like Ion Fury and Slayers X are just recycled nostalgia baits trying to capture a “terd” out of the sea of gold, but that’s not trash. Merely somewhat trash adjacent, hence recycling. Yet they have gameplay and accessible to players who did not play DOOM or any previous game that they are trying replicated. Like the old turn of phrase that a good parody can be enjoyed without knowing the original source material. It can be passed off as nostalgia bait, but they are challenging and have carved out a distinct niche for themselves.

This is the same way Demon Souls and Dark Souls found success. An old GDC talk by a game-developer-turned-business-grad called this “becoming Ikea”. Looking for a starved audience circling trash and feed them fish. Even if it seems arbitrary, contrary, or different, you’re the developer making the seagulls come to your net. Demon Souls punishes you and makes the game harder the more you die, its systems are antithetical to the standard wheel of actions games. Dark Souls arrived at the wasteland of the soon-to-be Gamergate era, where videogames were torn between slight-wider-rails shooters and walking simulators with narratives. Both equally as disastrous as each other despite the cultural differences: Dragging a player by the hair to experience their engine’s wonderful in-organic set pieces for all it’s worth, is the same as dragging a player by the hair to in-organically replicate your lived experience of depression. Everyone forgetting that even games like the later Castlevanias (in which their map design is found within Souls games) has immense depth to its lore, themes and exploration of grief if you care to look. What IGA and Fromsoft had captured was the original teleology before trash. The fact that the player steps into someone else’s world, with someone else’s rules and told to conquer it, write a narrative and feel It themselves. From the original vision of Megami Tensei 2 to Etrian Odyssey, there was this beautiful invitation to step into their world and being hurt by it. So conquer it

That’s the bit about teleology that I don’t entirely agree with from some the Christian Conservatives. There can be symbolic information presented in utility. A swing of a sword, a little synergy, a little stance switch. Scruton would say their information ends there, but for games it doesn’t. A staggered swing tells you the weight of your items, but also that this sword was not made for you but something inhuman. Soma In Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow being able to fire hellfire as a bat seems like a cute synergy but it shows his status as the true dark lord. This symbolic information is contained all within the teleological order stemming from the developer.

Etrian Odyssey was designed with this in mind, from the PC-98 styled music to the purposeful minimalism of the characters and their exploits. They give you minimum information but a world with harsh gameplay. The director wants you to smell the food your character eats, come up with their story and then struggle underneath his thumb as you die. To despair as you watch your beloved Bard get petrified and shattered permanently. (Such an exploration of a character and mechanic that it even spawned a subset of pornographic art because of how striking it was). This is preserves the original idea of teleology, the world of Ideas you find meaning in, not project outwards onto. All done with mechanics, and a simple world but creates a stronger, personal narrative beyond many a walking simulator. Foddy frames this, and the loss of it as such:

‘When games were new, they wanted a lot from you; daunting you, taunting you, resetting and delaying you. Players played stoically. Now everyone’s turned off by that. They wanna burn through it quickly; a quick fix for the fickle, some tricks for the clicks of the feckless… but that’s not you, you’re an acrobat. You could swallow a baseball bat.’

This relationship between developer and player has always been strenuous. Daikatana, is probably one of the biggest examples when the developers played it so much that the game difficulty was on their own specialised world, completely cut off from players. The Dev times in Crash Team Racing and other games were a more lax, but invitation of challenge. Let us not forget however the way teleology in this example works – just like academia, just like internet forums – you are stepping into their Thunderdome. Yet sadly, the machine, the b-culture, the trash has consumed this relationship and forced it back into the hands of the player. Fromsoft games have been a particular crass target of this - with people doing manic challenge runs for some interesting twitter clips or Youtube videos. They are expert feats of playing, dedication and knowledge of the game. Same with most speedruns, a deliberate tearing down. Even going so far to decompile games and rebuild tools or practice roms to peel away the developer’s control over their own game. No matter how hard you try preserve this teleology, it appears to be so brutally pushed back into the player’s projection.

Speedruns are most interesting in this regard -  a topic for another day – but in short, there is a strange “gatekeeping” between any%/major glitch abuse categories and a closer to developer vision  intended%. Not everyone likes the extreme glitched categories, with arguments that it is not really exploring the entire game or the developer intended way. People are happy cheer on the burning, pillaging the great lands that the developer has created. It becomes almost quaint when a Castlevania speedrunner is attacked for saying he likes respecting the mechanics given to him. Of course you can just consume the content but there’s a viciousness between YouTube comments saying how they love to see the game that hurt them be destroyed back. There are cries of “gatekeeping” when a speedrunner says he doesn’t want to watch 4000 resets at the title screen because of a frame perfect glitch. There’s protection around that projection which I find interesting. Foddy touches upon this gently, and talks about speedrunning in a video concerning people speedrunning Getting Over It, but that again is its own topic.

‘Now I know, most likely you’re watching this on Youtube or Twitch while some dude with 10 million views does it for you, like a baby bird being chewed-up food. That’s culture too.’

See the videogame walkthrough and let’s play culture is still second-hand but it’s not entirely trash. There is a reason why “let’s plays” are considered fair use after all, but that also represents the teleology problem I posed above. You are watching someone else’s projection of the game’s relationship, you are not having the intimate relationship of the Thunderdome. Twitch Plays Pokémon is an ontologically-interesting formulation of this – it respects the original vision of Pokémon as “the fun of a child catching bugs in the wild when the world is becoming more urbanised” to a degree that they are all watching, collecting and going on a sort of communal-adventure, building a narrative. If you weren’t there, it’s going to be hard for you to understand weird hyper specific moments, concerning Lady Helix for example. They are not being so directly derivative like the many, many Pokémon clones that tend to lean into “Pokémon for adults” or want to smoke smogon fumes. This however, is a interesting dive itself for another time.

This is prevalent in academia too, all the way to the highs and lows of culture. There’s a short story called The Machine Stops, and in one point, lecturers are just giving lectures on the previous lectures. Nothing but endless cycling of trash that’s never creating anything new, but recycling the old. What’s interesting about that sentence is that I have been aware of this book, and this commentary on it without actually reading it. So in this paragraph I too have committed the sin of regurgitating and creating trash. And it’s like that all the way up and down, and as long as that wheel can keep turning – not the machine, the wheel, the machine can stop but humans can push the wheel – the accelerationists can’t win, Benett Foddy can’t win, hell I even found out about Getting Over It years ago via one of the original 4-Heavenly-King-Vtubers when that fad was going off. Even then as they were playing it, they didn’t speak English. They had no care for Foddy’s monologue, it was there to be putty in their hands to feed their little baby chicks. That’s OK, because it’s the teleological utility that you’re fighting with, beyond language. The Vtuber doesn’t understand what he’s saying, but still tells him in a language he doesn’t understand to shut up. In that however, you do miss Foddy’s little sentimental acknowledgement of this relationship:

‘But on the off-chance that you’re playing this, what I’m saying is: trash is disposable, but maybe it doesn’t have to be approachable. What’s the feeling like? Are you stressed? I guess you don’t hate it if you got this far, feeling frustrated- it’s underrated.’

He goes on talk about a challenge, the relation between the player and the man in the pot, the nature of controls etc. It’s extraneous stuff, but it’s because he’s forming a relationship with you, directly. He’s forcing that teleology on you, he wants you to engage with his Thunderdome naked, and with sharp tongues. It’s Dagoth Ur welcoming you with calmness, with open arms and to not come by stealth at the end of Morrowind despite being akin to a god. You must duel Foddy, because that is what gets him hard at night. It’s far, far more pretentious than something raw like I Wanna Be The Guy or Super Meat Boy, but all they want from you to interact and fight with them.

There are traces of this all over the gaming industry. From fighting game directors accusing western players of being button mashers, to Tod Howard wanting you to meme him, wanting you to fight and explore Skyrim just in the case you missed something. Yet these examples also contain hints of trash. Easter egg hunting, contacting a developer to confirm it is cute, beautiful. Even more special when a modern game gets it patched out afterwards, because that isn’t trash and the machine only accepts trash. Even if this too has been preyed upon by Easteregghunter or Oddheader, they are still trying to capture this specific intimate relationship. Every hidden texture, every hidden failsafe, every hidden developer butthole was a challenge. Not just between you, the protagonist and the story/world, but a secondary more pure relationship. “Let me tell you my story if you can find it” they push out, and you must be forced to take it. Hello Neighbour is a wonderful example of this trash-in-culture when the game itself wasn’t – at least in the alpha stages – trash. The early builds showed exactly the same type of building, lore, and teleological battle with the developers and their idea of this booby-trapped house. For that to all come apart, to smell the trash, and start begging for Youtubers to examine their game for lore hints. Nobody cared, because again, consumers can smell trash. You can’t replicate Five Nights at Freddy’s without having the solid, arcade-y like gameplay loop with attention to detail and the teleological utility (that ends up becoming lore and symbolic). One has to remember that while Five Nights at Freddy’s is misconstrued as a Youtuber jump scare game, it did indeed have gameplay compared to most Slender clones, and at least more active gameplay than many RPGmaker horror games that were circulating at the time.

It’s no wonder why videogame projects like Under A Killing Moon or Harvester pulled in so many movie-types or crazy Lynchian art film grads, because it’s a medium that allows you to grab the player by the face and force them in. You have an intimate teleological relationship that you can force them through. Sometimes a little too hard in the case of David Cage’s games, but it’s important to know why videogames attract these people. Not just for budget or ease, but there’s a philosophical note there too. Omikron: The Nomad Soul purposely broke the fourth wall, you were literally meant to be a soul grabbing these dead human corpses for use to save the world. It’s disgustingly unethical, but such a blatantly jovial showcase of the teleology of videogames made by a prick who probably forgot this after snorting coke off of printouts of Eliot Page. Omikron has not aged well, but it’s not hard to see why it attracted David Bowie, who loved to be intimate in his work.  

It's a beautiful, treasured teleological relationship that is always being fought against in terms of trash in videogames. From terrible walking sims who only want you to sit quietly and listen, to multiplayer-only-live-service garbage that do not even want you to build relationships with your fellow man, only your own projections. Remember that even MMOs and multiplayer games have suffered from this as community servers were taken out of the player’s hand and finding past players becomes more and more gatekept. It’s because these live-service games do not want you to have a teleological relationship with the game, they want you to project onto these wonderfully representative characters and feed your narcissistic intake like a heroin addict crawling through rehab. Never did this make much sense to anyone who remembers the older console shooter content. Red vs Blue, an old machinima series was merely different coloured master chiefs that you would find in various multiplayer games, but they have so much character. They present the teleological relationship of you and your friends exploring these maps, forming friendships, finding value and purpose. This is all but gone in Battlefield 2042 compared to Battlefield 2142 where servers, friends, and genericly dressed people made friends for life. I suppose a Marxist would say it’s capital’s fault, or perhaps even take Lasch’s narcissism – because that is what it is on the shallow end. Yet I think Foddy hit a much more closer the bullseye, the purposeful post-information-enlightened-gamer who churns through content has forgotten the relationship that once drew us into the worlds:

‘It feels like we’re closer now, composer and climber, designer and user. You could have refused, but you didn’t. There was something in you that was hidden that chose to continue. It means a lot to me that you’ve come this far, endured this much, every wisecrack, every insensitivity. Every setback you’ve forgiven me is a kingly gift that you’ve given me.’

And thus is the challenge academia is faced with. And thus is the pushback between journalists and video games. And thus we see the hatred of live-services and the smelling of chewed up trash unreal games. Johnathan Blow will comment about how there’s no innovations or anything interesting happening, even if you think Alloy from Horizon Zero Dawn is so wonderfully accurate to a woman. Or the rope physics in The Last Of Us, which is a immense work of physics, maths and development but is stuck in a game of such blandness and lack of teleology that it goes unnoticed. While the game’s director directly jerks off into your mouth about how great of an experience of his writing you are having.  Foddy in Getting Over It, creates a beautiful statement of the teleology of videogames that represents not only the challenge faced by the accelerationists and academia, but underpins a lot of current discussions in videogames. I leave you with the most beautiful celebration of teleology from Foddy:

‘There’s no way left to go but up, and in a moment I’ll shut up, but let me say: I’m glad you came.

I dedicate this game to you, the one who came this far. I give it to you with all my love’