The problem is that there’s only so much of that which can be expressed, the only way to experience the latter part is if that madness drove the experiencer to becoming your story’s or game’s antagonist force tearing their world apart trying to recreate the conditions they think will take them back to that higher world of alien understanding.
Congratulations, you reinvented the Faust saga. Faust was given not just a brief moment but several years of understanding before the devil would claim his soul but narratively speaking that’s not a bad idea, gives our protagonist (not every protagonist needs to be a hero) plenty of time to fuck up. Goethe gave the whole thing a happy end, quite non-standard actually.
No I meant antagonist because the best way to actually give perspective to this madness is to see it from the outside. It’s a prospect that inherently defies the ability of humanity to understand, so don’t try to, make our protagonist a secondary actor who enters the story where some raving mad lunatic has already torn through screaming about the flipping towers of lightning or words who’s writings encompass the universe or having witnessed and moved the hands of a god.
Leave the incomprehensible for a perspective we don’t need to fully comprehend to be able to interact with it.
The player will always have a somewhat outside perspective on the protagonist. Gameplay-wise the player could be trying to keep the protagonist sane… or if the player leans into the insanity suddenly the game reacts and punishes the protagonist for trying to immanentise the eschaton. Make the player fight for the fate of the protagonist within the protagonist.
Also I’d highly recommend against going that route if you don’t have a well-marinated schizo as script writer, we know dealing with that “eldritch horror” all to well it’s called the genome. Ever wondered why virgins can have realistic dreams about sex? Realistic as in sensation, I mean. Certainly can’t be personal memory.
I mean babysitting a lunatic from the outside feels like a risky manoeuvre from a game design perspective.
It’d almost have to be a 2nd person game to get the weirdness in a way that doesn’t require you try to explain the incomprehensible to the perspective of the player, because honestly I feel even letting the lunatic act as a narrator has too much of a risk of failing the test of incomprehensibility.
It’s like we’re trying to pass the anti-turing test, you know that protagonist you’re controlling is a human but they’re just so fucking cracked in behavior and mannerisms that they feel completely alienated from the player empathetically, like we’d be trying to send them into the uncanny valley just on how they talk and act.
Also, it can’t be a 4th wall breaker, that’s an obvious reach for “I saw beyond the veil and into the eye of madness” but it’s been done so many damn times that the players would immediately catch wise once the hint was dropped and we’d be the latest cash grab for MatPat by the end of the week.
Honestly the writers shouldn’t be able to imagine what the protagonist saw either, this is a guy we sent into the void of madness and we gotta write him as if we’re just watching someone who went insane then recovered then went insane again in a cycle lasting what could have been nanoseconds or eons by the protagonist’s reckoning.
This guy needs to be the perfect equivalent of that ant that saw the circuitry and understood it then came back only remembering that it understood for the brief moments its was “above”
I seen a similar explanation that would work quite well for a game. It was a 2D world and the knowledge was seeing it in 3D. Combined with your description would definitely be able to be translated into a game.
Oh wow, I was coming in here to mention the novel. I always thought that the square should have gone insane rather than try to convince everyone of the truth.
I understand that, but this is a truth he shouldn’t have been able to comprehend. It would be like if a 4-D being took you a positive direction along the W axis. What’s the W axis? You can’t even conceive of a W axis. Your brain did not evolve to hold the concept of a W axis as part of basic rationality. Then the being allowed you to look at your family in 3D space from a distance along the W axis. You’re literally seeing something your eyes would not be able to see. That would drive anyone insane.
I mean I get that a 2D living square is not a human, but he seemed to have the same ways of thinking as we do.
I made a game like that for a game jam. It’s very short, somewhat janky and the level design isn’t too great, since I barely had any time left to thrown some levels together by the time I had the base mechanics somewhat working, but I’m still pretty proud of it.
I might return to this and turn it into a proper game at some point, but I always seem to be busy.
The problem is that there’s only so much of that which can be expressed, the only way to experience the latter part is if that madness drove the experiencer to becoming your story’s or game’s antagonist force tearing their world apart trying to recreate the conditions they think will take them back to that higher world of alien understanding.
Congratulations, you reinvented the Faust saga. Faust was given not just a brief moment but several years of understanding before the devil would claim his soul but narratively speaking that’s not a bad idea, gives our protagonist (not every protagonist needs to be a hero) plenty of time to fuck up. Goethe gave the whole thing a happy end, quite non-standard actually.
No I meant antagonist because the best way to actually give perspective to this madness is to see it from the outside. It’s a prospect that inherently defies the ability of humanity to understand, so don’t try to, make our protagonist a secondary actor who enters the story where some raving mad lunatic has already torn through screaming about the flipping towers of lightning or words who’s writings encompass the universe or having witnessed and moved the hands of a god.
Leave the incomprehensible for a perspective we don’t need to fully comprehend to be able to interact with it.
The player will always have a somewhat outside perspective on the protagonist. Gameplay-wise the player could be trying to keep the protagonist sane… or if the player leans into the insanity suddenly the game reacts and punishes the protagonist for trying to immanentise the eschaton. Make the player fight for the fate of the protagonist within the protagonist.
Also I’d highly recommend against going that route if you don’t have a well-marinated schizo as script writer, we know dealing with that “eldritch horror” all to well it’s called the genome. Ever wondered why virgins can have realistic dreams about sex? Realistic as in sensation, I mean. Certainly can’t be personal memory.
I mean babysitting a lunatic from the outside feels like a risky manoeuvre from a game design perspective.
It’d almost have to be a 2nd person game to get the weirdness in a way that doesn’t require you try to explain the incomprehensible to the perspective of the player, because honestly I feel even letting the lunatic act as a narrator has too much of a risk of failing the test of incomprehensibility.
It’s like we’re trying to pass the anti-turing test, you know that protagonist you’re controlling is a human but they’re just so fucking cracked in behavior and mannerisms that they feel completely alienated from the player empathetically, like we’d be trying to send them into the uncanny valley just on how they talk and act.
Also, it can’t be a 4th wall breaker, that’s an obvious reach for “I saw beyond the veil and into the eye of madness” but it’s been done so many damn times that the players would immediately catch wise once the hint was dropped and we’d be the latest cash grab for MatPat by the end of the week.
Honestly the writers shouldn’t be able to imagine what the protagonist saw either, this is a guy we sent into the void of madness and we gotta write him as if we’re just watching someone who went insane then recovered then went insane again in a cycle lasting what could have been nanoseconds or eons by the protagonist’s reckoning.
This guy needs to be the perfect equivalent of that ant that saw the circuitry and understood it then came back only remembering that it understood for the brief moments its was “above”
I seen a similar explanation that would work quite well for a game. It was a 2D world and the knowledge was seeing it in 3D. Combined with your description would definitely be able to be translated into a game.
Super Paper Mario
Flatland: The Video Game!
Oh wow, I was coming in here to mention the novel. I always thought that the square should have gone insane rather than try to convince everyone of the truth.
From an outside perspective, trying to convince people of a truth they can’t comprehend looks a whole lot like insanity.
I understand that, but this is a truth he shouldn’t have been able to comprehend. It would be like if a 4-D being took you a positive direction along the W axis. What’s the W axis? You can’t even conceive of a W axis. Your brain did not evolve to hold the concept of a W axis as part of basic rationality. Then the being allowed you to look at your family in 3D space from a distance along the W axis. You’re literally seeing something your eyes would not be able to see. That would drive anyone insane.
I mean I get that a 2D living square is not a human, but he seemed to have the same ways of thinking as we do.
I made a game like that for a game jam. It’s very short, somewhat janky and the level design isn’t too great, since I barely had any time left to thrown some levels together by the time I had the base mechanics somewhat working, but I’m still pretty proud of it.
I might return to this and turn it into a proper game at some point, but I always seem to be busy.
Fez made me quite mad ngl.
Do you mean something like this?