terminal connection

terminal connection is a metaphor for doomscrolling. You fly a plane. Stay close to surfaces to keep your engine running as hyperreal landscapes flood your senses.

You find yourself in a cozy airplane hanger, seated in a cockpit. As you attempt to start your flight, a glowing cave fades in around you. You go through the standard flight checks, testing your controls, and begin to glitch through overwhelming and disorienting spaces. Terms and conditions fly by you, the love you've never had is advertised – demanded – of you, your interests are weaponized in your workplace, and you're forced to see visceral vulnerability. Finally, space seems to collapse onto itself, threatening to overpower you, but you find yourself flying into a never-ending void. Will you end your terminal connection?

terminal connection is an observation of the resting state of capitalist-hyperreality. Capitalist-hyperreality is a phenomenon brought about by the exponential growth of hyperreal influences within a capitalistic structure.

Hyperreality is – the abstracted and self-referential understanding of reality that comes about as a result of human communication and, more relevantly, mass media. It identifies the distance we have created between our subjective realities and objective reality as a result of our construction of experienced reality based on the subjectivity of others rather than what actually might be real. If a rare flower were to be found in the modern day, a hyperreal construct of the flower would be created through language, videos, images, songs, artworks, and poems of said flower. The average person’s understanding of the flower would almost certainly be based on the hyperreal construct of the flower, and more hyperreal constructs would be created based on the existing hyperreal constructs. This perpetuating web of abstraction extends until the real flower itself is nearly forgotten. Only a minute few would have ever actually seen the real flower.

terminal connection diagnoses the consequences of when hyperreal abstraction is driven by monetary incentives. This game is a metaphor for doomscrolling and expects to simulate the emotions brought forth by ever invasive social media, in a critical space. We hope to accentuate the adverse consequences of capital incentives on the otherwise natural processes of abstraction spreading throughout mass media. We've attempted to depict some of the relational cycles of oppression/oppressing present in capital driven social media and provide the player with the first step out of the cycle - the moment you choose to leave.

Extensive writing about terminal connection and the process of creating it can be found on our blog, artgamesthesis.com.