phywreks - Tumblr blog

phywreks · 14 days ago

Text

the end of rain world

written on 10/1/24, lightly edited 10/23

(vague spoilers for the end of the video game rain world)

the ending of rain world has been fucking with me. it’s deconstructed the patch of stability i spent a big chunk of my summer building for myself.

the night i finished rain world, i walked a friend home. she hadn't been doing great- her usual routines for emotional regulation weren't working, her creative work often more frustrating than fulfilling, stuck at a point of being unable to match her skillset to her aesthetic tastes. she talked, i listened, i tried to ask helpful questions, i stumbled over my own words, i lost cohesion. i felt like i'd maybe managed to distract her from a spiral, if only through confusion. we lingered for a while outside her building. we hugged good night.

i felt like i'd failed her. this chance i had to be there for someone important to me, to help them, to offer a lifeline, and all i could think to do was cry and say i’m sorry i can’t give you better advice but i care about you.

so i quietly sobbed my way home. i stumbled into playing rain world at 3am because i was grasping for more of the kind of meaning and joy and love for its design, grasping for the emotional state playing rain world had come to embody- escaping and spending time with this friend i felt like i'd failed. i finished it. i spent half an hour climbing through tunnels and temples and threw myself into the golden void. the culmination of a journey only possible through acts of random generosity from pebbles, the void worm, this friend. all of this generosity, and the thing it was leading towards was what? suicide? ending the cycle? becoming a big worm and swimming in the void with the other big worms? seeing myself and dozens of my other selves who have all died eventually make it to the end, escape the mortal plane, and leave behind a world destroyed, ravaged, full of suffering?

art reflects us. it shows us, without us realizing, who we are. what we believe. the feelings we stuff away. i get from rain world an indictment of the concept of afterlives. they are a technology, a concept we invented in pursuit of how it might enhance our ability to live in this world here and now. this is all there is. despite this goal of creating a philosophically airtight seal on motivation, a framework that tells us that at all times, the best thing we can do is to continue living and giving everything we have to the world because otherwise there will be nothing that remains of us when we die.

this framework is not enough. in rain world (this is my understanding of the world of the game after a single playthrough, i’ve certainly got substantial parts of this wrong and am thus filling in the gaps), the ancients live deep spiritual lives which connect themselves to the world and create a desire to protect it, to live in harmony with it. their desire to escape the cycle of death and rebirth which traps all living creatures trumps their desire to make life worth living for those creatures, though. they construct artificial intelligences who require a resource load so intense that it completely transforms all ecosystems on the planet. the surface of the world is now pelted by rainstorms so intense they kill anything not able to find shelter. they move above the clouds, away from the danger, and ramp up their consumption even more.

rain world says that no matter what we say, believe, how we cloak our beliefs, how we justify our actions, we’re still acting without a plan for long term sustainability for those who live here. now.

i woke up after going to sleep with all of this rolling around in my head, sobbing silently so as to not wake up my two roommates, and spent three hours in bed staring at the atrocities of the world. algorithms designed to rewire your behaviour so they’re the first thing you see in the morning dominate most of us. they curate what you see to maximize the amount of attention you give them. i went to sleep emotionally raw, scared, unsure of my ability to maintain faith that humanity will survive the hell we’re constructing for ourselves out of our home. i woke up confronted with damning evidence that hell must be what we’re searching for. why else would we ruin the climate? escalate the frequency of environmental disaster to the point that towns flood monthly? to the point that millions lose their homes every year?

reckoning with reality inevitably drives us insane. the only way to remain productive, to climb up in society and gain power, is to conform, in the depths of your soul, to the metrics established by those in power before you.

massive societal shifts happen not as a reaction to injustice, but as a power move from those just under the top, to put themselves on top.

i don’t want to kill myself. i don’t want to live. i want all of us to be free from the threat of death if we aren’t able to work. i want us to be able to live good lives for the simple fact of our humanity. i want all creatures to be able to live good lives for the simple fact of their existence. i want beauty to flourish.

wealth accumulation, rent seeking, capitalism, techno-feudalism, whatever you want to call it. it preys on our fulfillment at seeing lines go up. it conveys power to those of us most capable at making lines go up.

a metric can never capture goodness, or beauty. there is no metric which, on its own, is sufficient to allow universal morality to hinge upon its continual increasing. the world, the universe as we live in it and know it, is a constant flux, it breathes: expanding, contracting, always. since i was young, i’ve never believed in a god, but the idea of the expanding and contracting of the universe as analogous to the breathing lungs of a god as being the reality we live has been inescapable.

i have nothing else but this angst, currently.

everything is insufficient, so far. no process, no belief, all eventually run up against a situation where they prove insufficient at providing an answer, or worse, provide an answer which causes pain.

from this, do we maintain the path, forever carrying the weight that at any point it may cause us to hurt ourselves or others, or do we jump to a new path? do we trudge through as many disparate paths as possible, hoping that if we’ve devoted ourselves to the construction of wide webs of heuristic knowledge, we’ll be able to find connecting patterns across them all which we can give to others. that we can increase the possibility space of human thought, action, possibility, and reach something better than this?

do we continue to love, despite the fact that sharing our most intimate fears, desires, embarrassments, leaves us necessarily vulnerable to having those secrets break containment in a moment of carelessness on the part of our beloved?

of course we do. my instinct is to try and justify the act of loving from first principles. i do not want to do that today, so instead i'll just say that we should love to understand each other. we should give ourselves not just to the euphoria of knowing and being known, but also to the inevitability of crushing pains and betrayals, so we may know and comfort others. experience everything, so you may empathize with everyone.

living is not conscious-reminiscence is. i believe this, now. i may not believe this tomorrow. belief is a shaky thing right now.

i’ve often dreamed of living forever. free from the restrictions of time, i escape into the fantasy of being able to study to my heart’s content. i want to spend my days reading, thinking, writing, and being good to the people in my life. nothing else really matters to me, at this point. even making “good” art is something i’ve sort of given up on. i’ll keep making stuff until i die, but i can’t care if it’s good. i don’t control whether or not it’s good. the process of creation necessitates that my relationship to my own work isolates me from those who experience it. i can never experience it how they can.

i won't live forever. i'll live imperfectly, die imperfectly, and hopefully contribute something to this world in a way which honors the grace i have been given, while doing my best to give that same grace to others.

anyhow, play rain world if you get the chance. it gave me this, it'll give you something Else.

#rain world #essay #thoughts

2 notes · View notes