vanitas

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Average Rating: Number of Reviews: 3 Write a review

Of the bad old days, and bad current days, of social media, August 28, 2023

For me if something is going to be linear and use effects, it either needs a buildup or payoff. And in vanitas it has both.

You can see where it's going pretty quickly. Two friends more or less stay in touch as the dominant social platform changes. They discuss how nice things were, well sort of, while also realizing how bad it was. (False nostalgia is touched on quickly and effectively.) You may or may not recognize each individual site as you hit space and go through various conversations.

The ending, which is very much worth it, seems meant to be open for interpretation. It's creative and lampshaded a bit. It certainly made me think of how exciting it must have been for my parents or grandparents to be using the telephone more regularly, maybe complaining about how people can listen in, or how the phone monopolies are ruining everything. It reminded me of a whole bunch of nuisances, such as busy signals with no answering machines available. And that is the unemotional side.

vanitas is not a very tangly game. You can just hit space a bunch, then tab your way to open the next social media site. But it's effectively done, and the aesthetics are not there to show off, and the final two scenes are definitely worth your time. I recommend just poking around to bulldoze through rather than noting this spoiler, but since we only have so much time, (Spoiler - click to show)the final two scenes look into communication into the past and are deliberately obscure, as people's complaints about Zuckerberg or Musk may seem 100 years from now.

A cute story about different social media, August 5, 2023

This game was written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less.

It is as far as I can see completely linear, but uses interactivity as you can click to make each line appear.

The gimmick here is that it's a single story but changes every few lines into the format of a different social media site like Twitter or Reddit, showing how some things stay the same the more they change.

Pretty neat. One crude joke that doesn't add much to the story, but overall some tight writing.

The Enshittification of social media, visualised., August 21, 2023

A conversation between two users start, as they meet once again after one of them left the social platform they connected. Thought this reconnection they discuss their experience of said platform and how changes have not gone over well, as well as the concept of anonymity through the ages.
The entry takes on multiple UIs through this conversation of different social media platforms, from the Tumblr DMs, Cohost posts, Twitter, Discord, Reddit, Youtube, and old Forum formats. It gives for a strange retrospective in parallel with the conversation, reminding us of what once was, and how those platforms (may) have changed over the years… often for the worst as they stop putting users first.
It is quite the relevant piece considering what has happened over the past years with Twitter, the past months with Reddit, or even more quietly with Tumblr…
Though, while our place on the internet may be temporary, the entry does give some hope that users who click will find each other elsewhere…

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