And Then There Was One: Inside and the Feeling of Human Connection

Last night I had the worst experience playing what will probably be one of the best games released this year, Inside by Playdead. For those of you who haven’t played the game yet I’ll try to be as unspoilery as possible. Inside is from Playdead, the maker of the 2010 puzzle platformer Limbo. In Limbo you played as a young boy who set out to save his sister and was destined to die a million (if played by me) gruesome deaths by spider, bear trap, and myriad other devices. Having played Limbo (and having seen the trailer for Inside) I knew that this beautiful new game’s protagonist was in for the same fate and I was kind of prepared for that.

It’s no secret that I am not a fan of games where horrible things happen to children, but Limbo’s graphic style was obscure enough that it didn’t bother me as much as a game with a more traditional art style would have. I could more easily ignore the black splashes that squirted up from time to time and the rag doll physics of the lifeless body being thrown around. That being said when I say the amazing art style of Inside and heard people raving about the game and refusing to spoil it because the experience was one that needed to be had first hand, I decided to give it a shot. I knew what to expect, right? 

With game being so new and with the fact that I agree that this is an experience that needs to be had first hand I am not going to give anything that remotely resembles a review and it will be as spoiler free as humanly possible. There are numerous reviews and Let’s Plays of the game available online for your ready perusal.

When I put my own child to bed and decided that it was time to unwind with a little game time I decided that streaming Inside could be a blast. I am not afraid to admit that I die (a lot) when I play platformers, but I have an insane love of puzzle based games so Inside was right up my alley. I grabbed an energy drink, a fruity beer, and my “fancy controller” (according to my kid) and sat down to play. When I started the game there were only a few people in my stream (because who is really watching me stream at midnight except people who know me?) so I chatted them up while I got familiar with the game’s controls and then it happened. Not 10 minutes in a big fucking gut punch and I stopped playing. I sat there with my controller in my hand staring at the screen in front of me with tears running down my face. I apologized to the few folks watching and told them that I was going to need a few minutes to get my shit together. And I watched as the number of viewers slowly dropped to 1. One. One single viewer. But I was ok with that because I needed to take care of me first (reason #249 that I will always be a crappy streamer). Finally I started playing again and apologized for the break and tried to talk through how I feel about kids in games to the one soul on the other side of the screen and then it happened again. Gut punch. New fist, new pain and I declared that I didn’t know if I was going to be able to play this game and that I had probably just wasted 20 dollars.

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I looked at the young nameless boy on my screen and it all became too much. In that moment he became way too many children all over the world. He was a child in Baghdad at the market with his mother buying good to celebrate the breaking of a Ramadan fast, he was a child excitedly waiting in a Turkish airport to visit a family member or pick up a loved one, and a little girl waiting for a cookie at sundown in a Bangladeshi bakery. He was a little boy executed in a park in Cleveland and a little girl murdered in Detroit. In those moments that nameless, faceless child had become a child with many faces and many names. They have been paraded across my screen in the the days, weeks, months, and years past and now they were being projected again. But this time I was the one who was not keeping them safe. And all the while I could only try to make myself focus on the soft snoring coming from toy strewn bedroom where the child that the universe has left in my charge slept. She is one who I can keep safe. She is one that I fight for, even as I simultaneously fight (in whatever small way that I can) for the hundreds and thousands of nameless children who parade across my screen, the victims of cowards and liars who fight not for love or justice, but rather for hatred and oppression.

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After playing the Prologue, I sat there silent for a good while, but that 1 kept staring back at at me and then they said in a reassuring way that it was cool because they were just listening to an episode of our podcast and watching the stream while they worked late at night. Amazing, a friend of the show. Someone who could have heard me talk about my feeling about kids in games before or heard me get teary on the podcast when I talk about the injustices of the world and what I want to do to make the world a better place for my child. Maybe. Quite possibly. They were were the perfect 1 in that moment. One that listened and engaged. One that talked to me about the graphic nature of the game and the gameplay itself. One that listened as I talked through the puzzles, my errors, and the horror that I felt as I played through the game and encountered certain narrative bits. They listened and responded. It helped me to re-center. And in the end I don’t know if that person had any intention of comforting me, if they really knew what I was feeling in those moments, or if they just turned on my stream because of a notification and a need for background noise, but what I do know is that they are what I needed at that moment. A fellow gamer. A fellow human. One that I felt connected to. And in the grand scheme of things that’s what it’s all about, right? Human(e) connection. Connecting to one another on a level that compels us to not only not harm one another, but to actually help one another in a way that make the world a better place in which to live. 

As we watch the horrors that unfold around us in the world everyday and feel compelled to do something, perhaps we can start by sitting quietly with another human being for just a moment and being their one.