David O’Reilly is an artist known for bizarre, animated ephemera:
a cult episode of the cartoon “Adventure Time”...
...the foul-mouthed 3D simulation in “Her”:
— C'mon! Follow me, pussy!
— And now, he’s created a video game that allows players
to become anything, and everything, in our interconnected universe.
It’s called, appropriately, “Everything.”
— So how do you explain the game?
— I don’t explain it.
— You don’t explain it?
— No, I don’t think it’s my job to explain it at all.
I think I can describe it.
— So how do you describe it?
— That’s a hard one too.
But I could try.
— In “Everything,” the player can be anything.
If you see a tree, you can become it.
If you see a rock, you can be that.
Or an atom of nitrogen.
Or a galaxy.
You play the game by being.
— Mostly, it’s bringing you back to a version of Earth,
and it’s showing, hopefully, Earth to be the most interesting planet,
and, out of all of Earth, that creatures are the most interesting thing,
and we’re the most interesting creature that could exist.
And at the same time, you’re completely insignificant,
or let’s say, as significant as everything else in the world.
— “Everything” also has a narrator:
— When you came into this world,
there gradually rose into being the sensation of “I.”
And it stays there a while, it goes through development,
and then it drops off.
— The voice of Alan Watts, a famous philosopher who died in 1973,
talks to the player at various points in the game:
— So, we see one way of looking at things,
namely, that the organism is very frail against the environment.
It lasts a long time, the environment,
but the organism only lasts a short time...
— And so, we started making this game.
And I would just listen to him, just put it on...
— Oh, while you were working on the game? — While I was working on it.
And then, there was this strange reflection between
what he was saying and what we were making.
— Is it odd at all that you’re using this guy who passed away 40 years ago to narrate your game?
— Well it was I think anybody who's spent time listening to Alan Watts,
you have this deep respect for for him.
You know, I really worked hard to do justice to—
I hope to do justice to to what his material is.
— Sometimes it kinda feels like the game is almost a vehicle for for Alan Watts’s philosophy.
— Yes, yeah.
It’s the biggest use of Allan Watts material that’s ever existed.
I think that’s—and that’s cool.
Like, he was a philosopher, who was just incredibly wise.
And you hear that in the game:
— What is in other words conflict at one level of magnification,
is harmony at a higher level.
— And sometimes, it’s really uncanny.
He talks about everything a lot— which is to say, not the game,
but the totality of existence, or the universe, let’s say, or nature.
— “Everything” might look like a relaxing game,
but it actually goes to some pretty dark places.
— “Being” is simply a sudden experience,
which was nothing before it started,
and will be nothing after it’s over.
— And it takes the game from feeling like a weird acid trip,
into something that’s a lot deeper, and just… real.
— What do you want players to get out of this game?
— It is trying to get at this impossible thing,
which is an objective perspective.
If you do want to argue or make a point,
the best place to do that from is from understanding the other’s point of view.
And maybe even understanding it better than they do.
— David wants players to feel like they’re moving through their own documentary about the nature of existence.
But what you get out of that documentary depends on how you play it.
— To quote Alan Watts in a more concise way is that,
difference, and the interplay of difference, is the way through which unity is observed.
So what you are is changing all of the time.
But what it’s doing is always the same.