Week 1: Every Day The Same Dream

The Office. https://harshcriterion.wordpress.com/tag/every-day-the-same-dream/

‘Every Day the Same Dream’ is a game created by the company Molleindustria. The protagonist in this game is a man. The first thing I noticed was that this is not a very colourful game it is mostly grayscale except for one orange leaf and a red stop sign. Eventually, I realised that this colour choice alongside the minimalistic graphics of the game really evoke the sad tone of the message it wishes to pass along to the player.

The Old Lady (Screenshot from: http://www.molleindustria.org/everydaythesamedream/everydaythesamedream.html)

At first glance the game makes you think it is extremely ludic and there is only one way that you could play it. The first thing I did in this game is move to the right and hit space where ever I could interact. I repeated this for numerous times thinking I was going to run into something new eventually however to my disappointment nothing changed. This disappointment quickly turned to interest as soon as I realised that I could break some of the rules. The first thing I did is not wear the suit to work and this resulted in the man getting fired. The next day I decided to see what happens if I go back to work but to my surprise only one thing did. The old lady in the elevator said “4 more steps and you will be a new person" instead of 5 like before. This meant that I had to encounter four more scenarios until I get to the end game. the rest of the scenarios were not completely easy to find. After you find them you are greeted with a grim ending. You go out on the workplaces balcony and you see a man, which looks similar to you, jump off the balcony. I think that the main message here is, that once you break your everyday routine you become a new person and the old you, whose freedom was chained, is now gone, hence the jumping person.

Final Thoughts

After finishing the game I realised it is not completely ludic however it is still far away from being paidiaic as there are movement constraints on the player (being he can only move left or right and cannot jump) and there are not a lot of places to experience.

The rule breaking side of the game is hidden well enough that the game appears to be more on the ludus side of the scale, until the player embraces the message of this game and starts to skip out on certain actions or move to the left.

This game is not the kind you would play for fun. Games do not give you anything valuable that you can hold on to for beating them, however, games like this might just be the kind of thing a person needs to realise that he/she must do something in their life to change.

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Paidia-and-ludus-as-a-combination-of-at-least-two-dimensions-Own-illustration_fig3_321001054