NO ME: The Future Is ours (2023): Going HOME: Dystopian World-Design through the lens of two Homes.
NO ME: The Future Is ours (2023): Going HOME: Dystopian World-Design through the lens of two Homes.
By Quinn K.
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CW: blood, guns, disturbing concepts
NO ME - The Future Is ours is a satirical zine game I finished in mid-2023 as my first foray into Game Maker programming, and as a tribute to the games of video game zinester Matt Aldridge (a.k.a. “biggt”). Truthfully, it may be one of the least substantial games I’ve made - Being only 15 minutes short, and very flawed in its writing. However, due to its status as a “first”, and the adoration it contained for a creative whose work greatly influenced me, I still think of it fondly.
At its core, NO ME is two things:
A learning-project, useful as such due to biggt’s works being mechanically simple, and themselves created in a 14-years-past version of Game Maker
A story with which I tried to speak about my anxieties about the uncertain future.
In early 2023, the future was seemingly left in the powerful, inept hands of silicon valley venture capitalists and their rampant disregard for the humanity of the impoverished. I was gravely preoccupied, and as it happens, that usually makes me want to create a game.
A tribute to biggt’s style may not have been altogether ill-fitting: His work, as I would describe it, is characterized by a grave oppressiveness, a rampant hostility towards its player character and player, an obtuse approach to progress, and finally, a mid-point bait-and-switch that leaves a pit in your stomach and, frequently dooms its protagonist.
A great lens for examining humanity’s powerlessness in the clutch of the 1%. “The Future isn’t Yours, it’s ours.”
NO ME’s title is a reference to the word “Home”; in biggt’s game La La Land 3, there’s a sign in the sky pointing back to the home of biggt, whose grinning cat-sona acts as the game’s protagonist.
I used to misread it as “NO ME”. In an effort to adapt the autobiographical elements of biggt’s La La Land series, and to project myself into this subjective dystopian future I’d confabulated, I carried my old misreading into the title. Like La La Land, NO ME also uses its creator as its protagonist: Quinn, in the form of a little sheep in a dress.
NO ME contains two Homes. I want to single them out in this post-mortem, as they’re good examples for my approach to the game’s world-design. The two of them, when placed side-by-side, also embody my misreading of biggt’s “Home” in La La Land 3, and by extension, my insignificance, and a decimation of the nostalgia I hold for video games I cared about in my late teens in the face of an unraveling future.
The screenshot above shows the present-day Home, ruptured by the forceful entry of the Stranger and his time machine. The future forces itself in, represented by its glow color-grading the drab blues of the background into its oversaturated neon pinks, splattering the bright blood of Quinn’s family everywhere. Life means little to the rich Stranger.
Color was very important to me in NO ME. While I admire biggt’s color choices in La La Land, they’re often read as “childish”. This was an interpretation I wanted to avoid - not to mention that the large futurist structures and oppressive parallax views of NO ME’s world benefited from more detail than most of biggt’s work affords its settings.
At the same time, I attempted to keep the spirit of biggt’s spritework alive by using a lineless style, minimal shading, and a limited color palette. Dithering would often ease two colors into each other.
Detail is mainly given to outside-spaces; inside-areas are mostly black boxes, outlining a space rather than representing it fully. This had the added benefit of easier collision-calculations.
After Quinn enters the time machine, the game shows its hand.
I wanted to underline this vision of the future as a nightmare; the ways in which it represents a catastrophic scenario for the world at large, and a personal hell for Quinn. I did this by employing dream-logic:
In the future, inside a tunnel, Quinn finds an exact copy of her Home, mirrored.
The placement of this Home is nonsensical, and thereby perturbing. A billboard that reads “LOBOTOMIZE THE POOR”, directly inspired by my experience visiting Silicon Valley for GDC in 2023, stands outside it. The color palette in this scene differs from the rest of the future; its muddy blues, reds, and purples are supposed to make it feel old-fashioned, “grandfathered in”. In previous future maps, the sky was cloudy, but still there; the tunnel is fully underground, making this home an inside space within an inside space.
The Home inside the tunnel houses Quinn’s parents. Also represented as sheep, they have undergone the previously advertised lobotomization. Grievously wounded in the stranger’s arrival, most of Dad’s body had to be replaced with a machine. The device on their heads has “A.I.” embossed on it; they’re large language model copies of Quinn’s parents, wearing their skin and bones, but prone to repetitious freak-outs, and never again as they were.
Greebles are a tired sci-fi design trope, but here, I wanted them to give a sense of their house being stripped to the studs. There’s no furniture, no amenities, nothing. Quinn’s family no longer eats, or drinks, or dreams; they don’t even need electrical light (or can’t afford it).
You progress through the “Home of the Future” by going left to right. The player can interact with Quinn’s parents, and to this end, I used a technique I lifted from thecatamites’ works: Conversational progress is denoted through running into the same NPC again down the same hallway. I found it fitting for a game about the progression of time; we’re used to time being shown on scales: The turning of clock-hands, the boxes on a calendar, the diachronic line on a graph.
NO ME also lampshades this with the Stranger, who shows up again and again in the game even if Quinn shoots him, but will remember what Quinn did to him and grow vengeful.
While I’m on that topic- Quinn’s gun created problems in this second Home. Quinn’s parents are based on my own; I didn’t want to let the player kill them. Naturally, I spent several days trying to make the gun check for disallowed targets prior to shooting. With help from my friend Jan Malitschek, I eventually succeeded, making Quinn shake her head and lower her gun if the player aims at Quinn’s parents. I’ve carried this type of override forward into my current project, “BLANKSWORD”.
After Quinn fails to find herself in the future (with “no me” in the seat inside her mirrored bedroom instead), the house and tunnel collapse, breaking under the weight of a billionaire’s enormous play-mech. The last remnants of the past are decimated.
History, memorials, and memories are only as precious as those with the means and reach to destroy them allow them to be. Home, for those who have one, is a present-day state, and the future may well make it harder to keep, or impossible to find again. Community is killed at the altar of technofetishistic social media companies - because community is dangerous to those who wish to destroy the world like entitled toddlers, as only community, solidarity, mutual aid and an understanding and care for the devastation and struggles of our fellow people alongside our own can shape a rampart against society’s slow descent into techno-feudalism.
NO ME has a secret, third ending, where Quinn, at the very beginning of the game, sees that brief glimpse of the future, its inhuman towers and grimacing rulers, and steps back through the time machine to stay in the present - staying in the Home the Stranger’s time machine just destroyed - to prevent what she just saw.
“Make your own future.”
Take the hand of someone you love; hold it tight; squeeze it.
In these locked hands, find the mortar for the bricks of your new Home. The future isn’t yours, but maybe it can be ours.
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