Extremely Vague Reflections About Life

Extremely Vague Reflections About Life
@lychee writes stuff - blog post #14
Accompanying listening music: nothing!



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Around spring of 2019, I had started playing an indie game called One Hour One Life, created by Jason Rohrer. The premise of the game is that you are born into a village as the child of another player, and you have one hour (sixty minutes) to live your entire life.

It sounds pretty simple, but the game is actually quite profound in a weird kind of way.

The game simulates various aspects of the human experience™, but accelerates it in a fashion that that leaves you totally lost and confused, especially since the game is highly complex (e.g. detailed and nonsensical crafting recipes) and technically challenging.

Much like life, in a sense.

Before you know it, an hour is over and you're dead... assuming you didn't starve along the way.

As a disclaimer, I won't say that the game particularly "good" or "well-designed", but I'm just choosing to blog about it because it made an impact on me — similar to how agar.io made a philosophical impact on me years ago.

I sort of recall the game fondly even though I am not playing it right now.

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To sort of describe what playing this game is like, I'll start from the beginning.

You start off born in the game as a baby, and you have absolutely no clue what to do. There's hundreds of stuff on the ground, and you're not even sure what to click on.

The tutorial of the game is extremely minimalist and explains almost nothing, because the game's philosophy is that it is a "parenting game" where players are supposed to teach each other how to do things. Essentially, you are overwhelmed with information in the first few seconds of your life, and you are genuinely helpless.

It's difficult to talk to anybody because as a baby you can only type messages 1-2 characters long. Babies can't even interact with items or pick anything up. If your mom abandons you or forgets to feed you, you're pretty much dead.

Usually, your mom picks you up and carries around, maybe dresses you, but otherwise she's busy with her own life doing her own little thing.

Eventually she puts you down and says: "Good luck BB. Don't die."

And then walks away.

Some parenting game.

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So most villages have some kind of berry farm, the and tutorial basically only teaches you how to eat berries, so I spent many of my first few games standing around eating berries my whole life.

One Hour One Life is actually a fairly technically difficult game, and it's extremely easy to starve if you don't bother to optimize various features (e.g. the clothing you wear, a healthy balanced diet). Consequently, I've definitely spent a many lifetimes as a new player where I tried to wander around and then end up starving to death because I can't find food. Alternatively, I get eaten by a wolves or get bitten by mosquitoes and die of Yellow Fever.

Basically, the main conclusion is that life is really hard.

The only safe thing to do seems to stand and eat berries like a child, but it's really embarrassing to be 45 years old and not know how to do anything other than eat berries. Most experienced players only eat berries until 4-5 years old and then move onto more nutritious food sources, like pie or stew.

It feels really shitty to be a freeloader NEET. The food situation in most villages is really sensitive, and starvation is always a risk for everyone. When there's a bear attack, all you can do is stand around and eat berries. When everyone in the village is freaking out about how there's no more oil, you just keep munching on berries. Finally, when the berry bushes dry up, you're lost because you don't know how to fix the berry bushes.

It's just sadness across the board.

And a feeling of worthlessness.

Being a new player is hard.

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And then poof! A baby (yes, you gave birth) pops out!

You think: "OH SHIT!"

WTF? You barely have your own life put together and now you got to deal with a baby?



Yeah, life is tough, man.

I spend like 5 minutes trying to tell my baby I'm new at the game and I'm sorry they have a bad mom.

Baby says: "K"

( The character limit)

Baby says: "I"

Baby says: "L"

Baby says: "U"

Wow my baby is so nice!!!

Um, and then I just stand around the fire for 5 minutes holding him until BB grows up.

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Afterwards my baby wanders away and starts to do their own thing, but a little bit later they end up coming back to find me.

Baby: "MOM"

Baby: "U NO"

Baby: "HOW"

Baby: "FEED"

Baby: "SHEE"

Baby: "P?"

And I say no, then then my adorable BB shows me how you go about feeding the sheep (filling a bowl with exactly six berries and one carrot, and then feed a sheep that has been sheared).

I learned something!!!!

Smart babies are awesome.

I think I probably got killed by a boar later though or something.

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Basically the way this game ends up working is that eventually someone teaches you how to do something.

Like make omelets.

Then, you spend an entire lifetime doing it because you don't know how to do much else.

But if you're making food at least that's better than eating berries all day like a useless person who is a burden for everyone else.

...The world could be ending around you with a murderer running around stabbing people with a sword and....

...nope, just keep making omelets.

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I think across many lifetimes, one theme that really stuck out to me in One Hour One Life is the transient nature of life.

Life is so short!

There's only sixty minutes, and a billion different things that you could do.

Sometimes you have a really amazing uncle or family member.

Sometimes, your entire village starves because the well dries up.

Other times, your baby finds a knife and runs around stabbing people.

There's a lot of insanity and unpredictability in life, and you have to know what to treasure.

It's really easy to stay stuck as that useless person who is struggles to do anything other than eat berries all day. Life is challenging, and sometimes it's hard to know how people do it — how people manage to get out of bed and keep themselves moving. Why is something that looks so easy for everyone else, so difficult for me?

What is a fulfilling life?

How can I live a fulfilling life?

How do I make my next life enjoyable for me?

When you've lived a certain number of lifetimes, maybe you get a better sense of what is really precious.

And the answer isn't always necessarily what you automatically might think.