Environment Makers
In the dark, the door clicks, swings and closes with a slight squeak. Padding feet brush the concrete until familiar fingers find the workbench light switch. Returning to her earlier project, she bends over the cool and dusty counter, light illuminating her silhouette. Tinkering with tiny tools, her neck hunches in concentration.
Frankensteining the previously defunct elicits a precious (and nearly extinct) jewel. Soon, she lifts the CD-ROM drive from the workbench, gently with two hands, like lifting a baby fresh from the womb. However, this one is soon installed back into another kind of womb: the creamy grey Dell Win ’98 tower case.
Pressing the computer “on” button, she hears the drive whir to life – a successful repair. Next, she holds the drive button until the tray rattles and protrudes. Oh-so-carefully, to avoid scratches or fingerprints, she places the hallowed CD-ROM disk into the tray and pushes the drive shut with a finger eager for the next click.
After several minutes of loading, she begins playing the sacred game:
In the first environment, she finds a large conference room with purple glass table. With each click along hotspots on the floor, she discovers that her mouse can plant grass around the table. She watches it grow, filling the room with green.
In another room, everything is clickable. She clicks tables, chairs, and even a conference room phone. All of the objects flip, rotate, and become inexplicably glued to the ceiling.
Moments later, she wanders Zen-like into a sea of endless wooden work cubes. With a few swipes of the mouse, her avatar spins in a circle. Around her forms a yurt, the spiritual center of the “community”.
Tired from exploration, she finally enters an empty room and sits in mid-air. A cozy massage chair forms around her body, and her avatar drifts to sleep.
Somewhere in another dimension, years earlier yet coinciding with the game play, a “real” environment forms. The green grass is there, as well as the upside-down room. The yurts hold team gatherings, and the one-on-ones are done in massage chairs. The charmed environment spawned digital development, full of people and politics, of layoffs and stepping stones, of long hours and gadabouts.
They recently graduated from the Warehouse Zen Garden and Front Deck, and doubled-down with a quirky office space creative enough to bolster a belief: they were The Premier Digital Agency. (Or if nothing else, proximity to a chic neighborhood meant the power would never again go out.)
Yet, none of them knew of the strings pulled by the distant act of ancient CD-ROM game play. And so, the Digital Deliria Puppet Master continues to play...
This story was inspired by another “sacred” game, one unlike any other created in the CD-ROM era. “Eve” was part socio-gender commentary, part art exhibit, and part meditative garden manifested in the technology world. Game play was a deeply immersive through music-driven meditations: at times baffling, at other times transcendent. It is hard to believe this game “pulled off” all of this in 1996. Long since out-of-print and unplayable as technology marched on, one hopes some version of it will someday find its way onto the web. Perhaps, it may just shape the next digital/physical world. 🙂
As always, I hope you enjoyed this and it brightened your day.
Please “like” if you did on social media (@DigitalDeliria), share, and post your comments.
Don’t want to miss a future story? Be sure to sign up for our mailing list.