Platformer

content/trigger warning: discussions of nationalism, capitalism, and imperialism, brief references to death and police/state violence

The game was needlessly simple: an endless series of platforms, moving up and down the screen at various speeds and in various directions.

You played as a little blue-green blob, trying to jump onto the platforms as they whizzed by, so you could get as high up as possible (a reason why was never given), sometimes falling off the platforms because the platforms were small and the physics of your body sometimes making you think you’d made a successful jump, only to slosh a little too hard towards one of the edges and fall off, usually onto another platform, probably moving in a direction you weren’t expecting and ruining your score.

Your score was determined by how many jumps you successfully landed (each successful landing removes 1 point from your score) and how high you got (little tick marks on the left and right sides of the screen indicated arbitrary units of altitude; each tick mark you passed also removed 1 point from your score).

Each day players would start with 100 billion points, the dozen-digit number floating near the top of the screen in bold, translucent type, counting down as your blob moved upwards, landing on platforms without falling off.

The platforms moved in mostly straightforward patterns—up and down, left, and right, diagonally—but not all, and not always. Some of their paths curved or formed loops; sometimes they accelerated and decelerated suddenly, the speed (or unexpected change in speed) of a platform often why you did or didn't land a jump.

Sometimes the changes in acceleration followed a pattern you could learn if you remained on the platform long enough (the platforms were repeated along their paths and spaced evenly across them, looping as they ran into the sides of the screen, so that if you were on a platform and it moved off of the left side of the screen, you’d appear on a platform moving left from off the right side of the screen, on the same path as your platform’s neighbors, and vice versa), but not all and not always.

Success in the game required luck.

Your goal was to get as low a score as possible; the lower the score, the more successful your jumps and the higher you got before you gave up. The game didn’t end unless you gave up, so technically, you could just keep playing all day, trying to get your score as low as possible. The game paused when you exited the app too, so its initial Japanese player base could start playing and lowering their scores in the morning, keep lowering their scores over lunch, or during breaks, and finally compete seriously in the evening, when most players were rapidly changing places at the top of the leaderboard, trying to get their score lower than everyone else’s by the time the game reset at 9:00 PM.

The game expanded internationally almost immediately, but kept its 9:00 PM reset time for all players, despite user outcry, as well as the proliferation of clones that offered different leaderboards for different time zones, usually resetting for those users around 9:00 PM local time, among other features like the ability to change the color and appearance of your blob, and of the platforms (the original had glossy white platforms against a purple-yellow starry sky, and, of course, your blob was only ever round and aquamarine).

But the original remained the most popular version, and its rabidly loyal fanbase, including users in, it seemed, every time zone, adapted quickly to the universal reset time and single global scoreboard. 9:00 PM was noon in UTC (Universal Time Coordination, an internationally recognized time-measurement standard), which the developers said was, in part, why they insisted the time stay fixed, though, as with many massively multiplayer online games, often the appeal was simply the idea that your time zone could become a strategic advantage; players in Hong Kong, for example, constantly bested players in Tokyo for the first few months after the game’s release, which users soon realized was because players in Hong Kong, who started playing after work, tended to play more aggressively, knowing they had an hour less to win than their Japanese competitors.

This became known to players outside east Asia after a strategy pioneered by some of those players went viral worldwide, in the many multilingual online communities that had sprung up devoted to the game. They’d discovered that lowering your score by sticking your landings was a distraction. There was no penalty if you fell off a platform after jumping; it wasn't like it added to your score, as was the case in some of the knock-offs. In fact, the players had discovered that by intentionally falling off the platforms—especially by quickly making many successive jumps, picking up speed and using the momentum to fall off of one platform onto another, and then another, and so on—you could move higher faster, and make up for not landing jumps with your increasingly rapid ascension.

Users were learning to do more with less.

Other strategies like this went viral in other time zones: where scores reset when most people were working (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran), players went all in during their lunch breaks, discovering that simply mashing the jump button without stopping, though ineffective for besting international opponents, was an easy way to beat local players who spent their lunches talking or eating. Where scores reset during lunch (Spain, Algeria, Greece), players began waking earlier to maximize the amount of time they could play before work began. Where scores reset in the morning (Ecuador, Mexico, Cuba), players started going to sleep as soon as they got home from work, waking around midnight and staying up all night, past sunrise, to play and get their scores as low as possible before crashing for an hour or two, after the reset, then waking and going to work.

These strategies had stopped, at a certain point, being about gameplay, per se. They were more like strategies for successfully scheduling your life around the game.

For scheduling your life around being successful at the game.

The global scoreboard was anonymized, so no one could create an offensive username and ride it to the top out of hatred, or the desire to be edgy. Instead, you were represented by a randomized combination of letters and numbers, and by a little rounded version of your country’s flag. The game, while in beta, had assigned your country to you based on your IP address, but concerns over user privacy prior to the game’s official release led them to scrap this. Instead, players could select what country they were represented by, and you could change this once per play session, right before you started playing. The developers had realized, and said so in interviews, that most people identified more with a country they didn’t live in than with the one in which they did, and that the game was perhaps so successful because it respected the diasporic nature of identity and migration (the game included Palestine, Taiwan, and Kosovo, among other countries with limited international recognition, as options for players) and that sometimes people want to play for the other team, so to speak, if only temporarily.

Of course, this meant that the gameplay, on a daily basis, revolved around keeping players who selected places like the United States and Israel (trolls making it public that they “obviously” weren’t from there) from topping the leaderboard, or selecting places like Palestine or Taiwan (activists making it public they were doing so to increase their visibility) in order to cover the leaderboard in those countries’ flags. Teams formed in group chats or on Discord; each day brought a new battle, sometimes obvious (one week saw the Top 1000 leaderboard almost exclusively comprised of users whose chosen country was either Colombia or Romania, simply because the flags were nearly identical), sometimes inexplicable. Early on, for example, an unspoken enmity had begun, for no reason, between Swiss and Somali players, and never ended, such that every so often, totally unexpectedly, white crosses and white stars would flood the leaderboard for a few hours, then vanish almost entirely; reportedly, neither a Swiss nor Somali player had yet to place a win with the country's flag (wins were, at that point, tracked on sites that aggregated content about the game, which were popular since they tended to report on which country vs. country match-offs were trending over the course of any given day) because influencers from other countries liked to score wins with either the Swiss or Somali flag in an attempt to go viral, which often worked.

It was obvious that nationalism was key to the game’s success. Knock-offs that allowed players to make up new countries or be represented by the flags of fictional places—Middle Earth, Westeros, Hogwarts—didn’t have the same allure. That you could only win as an existing country, but that this included countries without total sovereignty, was why its audience grew into the billions. At its peak, January 1 of its second year in existence, 2.5 billion people, a third of humanity, all played together at the exact same time between 11:00 AM and 12:00 PM UTC. (As many had predicted and moaned about, a player represented by the Canadian flag won that day, due to a months-long campaign run by Canadian players lobbying aggressively for the world’s best players to choose Canada on that first of January, which fell on the first Saturday after the scheduled release of a highly anticipated update that added a long-term leaderboard that ranked countries based on how many times players who had chosen them had won. Though Canada indeed became the first country to appear on that leaderboard, it quickly moved down the chart as resentment over the stunt ensured, that, for many months, players represented by the Canadian flag almost never won. The top of this new scoreboard, of course, centralized around a few countries that players generally preferred, either because of what their flags looked like or represented, or because they had obvious enemies to fuel match-ups. These included Macedonia, Palestine, Bhutan, and the United States.)

It was the Olympics democratized. It was international war fought with well-timed taps on a smartphone screen or keyboard. It was absolutely meaningless and yet dominated so much of so many people’s time. Worse, it remained on their minds, all the time, throughout every single day, like an irremovable stain, even when they weren’t playing.

Even if they didn’t play at all.

*

No one ever ended a day with zero points before the game shut down, though the closest anyone ever came was 105. It seemed impossible as it played out, though accusations of cheating didn't affect players’ excitement: hundreds of millions, probably more, watched the player’s score continue to drop lower and lower over the course of the day, even as it was tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands, then, millions below its closest score. The lowest score up until that point had been somewhere around 132 million, which had astounded fans and made the player who’d won that day, and revealed herself publicly as the winner, a household name across the planet; no one else, in the full year since, had come anywhere close to dethroning her.

But now someone (a player who never made themselves known, even after winning) had gotten so much further. The speed at which this player’s score had fallen was so fast that it seemed certain it would hit zero; just a few minutes before noon UTC, their score was just over a million, and plummeting.

But when the reset came at 12:00:00 UTC, the score stopped at 105, and though you could almost feel humanity let out a collective groan, the feat was unignorable. It left those who knew the game best speechless. 105? That was possible? Players, online, reeled with shock, dreaming up all kinds of new strategies that that day’s winner must've used to win, assuming they hadn't cheated.

But whatever the winner had done, it upset the developers. Though the pair publicly stated that the player hadn't cheated, and that they had even reached out to the player to allow them to verify this (which they had), they also reported that the player did not wish to make their identity known, or even discuss the game further, and that their interactions with the player, and how close the player had come to the game’s seemingly unreachable endpoint, had made them decide to shut down the game. They said it was because any attempt to get a lower score would go against the game’s philosophy: once it had been made clear that the game could be beaten, there was no reason for anyone to play anymore.

Players rioted.

94 people were killed in demonstrations around the world, all beginning at 12:00 PM UTC the day after the record had been set, the first day the game was unavailable to play since its official launch. Almost 11 thousand people were arrested across five continents, many while draped in the flags of their (or their preferred) countries.

None of it mattered. The developers publicly called for peace and diplomacy, but the game and its knock-offs were banned overnight in every country in which they had been available.

Eventually, finally, former players stopped caring, and people moved on to the next viral app. Since then, no game has beat its record for highest number of concurrent players. The way the game had ended had been so shocking (traumatic, even), it was doubtful that many players would ever embark, together, on any kind of similar experience again. The only way to beat the record set by the game itself, some theorized, would be to make a game that appealed to and involved absolutely everyone, amassing far more than 2.5 billion devotees, by going as far and as hard as the one (unknown) player who’d almost gotten to zero; by trying, even if quixotically, to get all (or nearly all) the people on the planet to do the exact same thing at the exact same time.

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