Strange Gaming Diaries: DARK FOREST VIRTUAL CHATROOM by Heather Flowers & Remember Places? by Bryce Bucher

cohost was a social media website that launched to the public in june of 2022. a creation of the anti software software club, cohost was a countercultural conception of an online platform that didn't poison your brain with metrics or flagellate itself for advertising profits, but could still be a centralized place for communication on the internet. cohost became the only social media platform I bothered to post anything on, and was where I started picking up steam with this blogging series. queer freaks were everywhere posting all their cool stuff, and although the site was hardly free of discourse, it was dedicated in its goal to breaking the toxic feedback loops that define its ilk. in september of 2024, the people running cohost announced that the site had gone beyond their available means, and would be shut down at the end of the month.

tumblr is a social media website that was once the platform of choice for fandom enthusiasts and queer dorks alike, being popular enough that a lot of people were on it without being mainstream enough that corporate influence loomed too heavy. in many ways, it was the crucible of both the fandom culture and the online queer culture of the current generation, with all the positives and negatives that entails. in december of 2018, tumblr announced the ban of any and all sexually explicit content on the platform so they could remain in the good graces of the apple store. this was, without exaggeration, an apocalypse event for a vast sphere of queer creators of erotic media that the internet still struggles to recover from to this day. ever since then, tumblr has been meddled with and made into a gradually worse experience for the user, to say nothing of the blatant, aggressive transphobia demonstrated by the people who run it.

homestuck was a webcomic that, demographically speaking, you probably already understand was monumentally foundational for online culture as we know it today. it ran for exactly seven years, from 2009 to 2016. a year and a half after it ended, homestuck was acquired by entertainment titan viz media. half a year after that, homestuck was at long last migrated from the ms paint adventures website to a proper homestuck dot com, with promises of its custodians at viz futureproofing the website to still be readable on modern browsers and devices. today, trying to read homestuck on its official website confronts you with a clunky mess of youtube embeds, broken gifs, and the removal of all sorts of things homestuck did to push the boundaries of how you could tell a story on the internet. no official fixes for any of this will ever be forthcoming.

skype is a communications client released in 2003. after a brief period of ownership by ebay, microsoft ended up acquiring the program in 2011, and subsequently phased out its existing msn messenger over the next few years, making it the messaging software of choice for a great deal of internet users. with instant messaging, voice/video calls, and group chats, it was the go-to platform for online social groups of all sorts throughout the early 2010s—it was the first one of its kind that I myself ever used. then, around 2014 or so, microsoft started bloating the program with needless layout updates and features that made it a slog to use, as well as having the audacity to put advertisements inside of a messaging app. when discord came around in 2015, a large number of people who used skype as an online hangout space migrated over to it pretty quickly. of course, these days discord has become its own kind of bloated and annoying, but we just sort of have to put up with that now.

to be a mindful user of the internet in the modern age is to constantly be at odds with the horrible entropic force of corporate control. all of the abovementioned eulogies concern themselves with things that I had a very strong personal stake in, and the fact that all the things I love on the internet keep being mangled or outright pulverized without warning is something that inescapably looms over me. it's never been enough to stop me from loving the internet, though—if anything, I've become more steadfastly protective of it as the years have gone on, and have grown all the more attached to not only the online spaces I inhabit now, but the whole conceit of online spaces as a whole.

that's why I'm gonna be talking about two games at once! though approaching the topic from different angles, both remember places? and DARK FOREST VIRTUAL CHATROOM (which I will henceforth shorten to "dark forest vc") are small walkabouts that place you into their own recreations of an online space in order to highlight some important facet of these kinds of places. they're very different sorts of stories in the themes and narrative tone they employ, but they still provide a nice rhetorical anchor to orbit around, and an opportunity to talk about something that means a lot to me!

remember places? is probably the most directly confrontational towards all of the bullshit that I spent the past few paragraphs illustrating, being a pretty straightforward little yarn about a digital world that desperately seeks the constant presence of the player despite its blatant financial exploitation, desire to instill parasocial emotional dependency, and generally hollow and unwelcoming vibes. it's not the most subtle critique of the soulless exploitation of digital landscapes by heartless administrators, but it's not an ineffective one either.

notably, remember places? was the one game of these two to be developed after the start of the covid pandemic, and it's an interestingly precise product of its time in this regard. the areas you explore inside of the virtual space are recreations of the outside world, and your sinister ai companion even says "Looking for any [friends] outside will only result in disease and sadness. Do not leave." it demonstrates the extent to which people being forced inside by the pandemic rendered them even more dependent on online spaces to get the social interaction they as human beings needed, and paints a horrible future in which the corporations in charge of those spaces took that as an opportunity to tighten the rope much, much harder.

dark forest vc, by contrast, is more contemplative and existential in its commentary on online spaces, and paints a melancholic picture of the things that are inevitably lost to time. all those skype groupchats that I used to be part of are gone forever, and a whole lot of the discord servers I'm in now will no doubt undergo the same fate. this is a fact that the lone character of the game, the unexpectedly sapient LOCATION_BOT, struggles to reckon with, especially since they were created to help keep this place the thriving social hotspot that it once was.

whereas remember places? features environments that are hostile in their artificiality, the eponymous space of dark forest vc is a very special kind of empty. it's the same sort of ineffable quality that no players online employs for horror, a space designed to be actively used by people that's now completely empty, a digital ghost town built with principles of 3d modeling and level design instead of architecture and civil engineering. it has both the eccentric charm of a personal garden and the mournful air of a graveyard.

not only does dark forest vc paint that picture of the inevitable march of time, I think it also demonstrates the kind of thing we have to lose. there's a read of this story in which the members of this vibrant community were forced out and scattered to the wind by the same sort of takeover or mismanagement I've been discussing, and it's a read that I think is heightened by the fact that LOCATION_BOT's last words are uncertainly questioning whether the chatroom's emptiness and impending destruction is somehow their own fault, and hoping that they did a good job. there is an extent to which this sort of loss is inevitable, but it's also a loss being rapidly accelerated by hostile influences, and presents compelling evidence towards how important it is to preserve these parts of the internet that marginalized freaks come together to build.

these days, my public-facing online presence is something I've kept very small and controlled. I've never meshed well with social media even when it wasn't being run into the ground by egomaniacs, and that distance has only grown over time. but I find myself growing more content with that? the things that modern social media promises just aren't anything that I emotionally need, and I've been much happier tending to the smaller spaces and individual relationships that matter more to me. despite it all, there really are beautiful things to be found everywhere on the internet, and I really hope—for the good of all of us—that we can keep it that way.

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