At the heart of Everything lies a contradiction. Though the narration dotted around this seemingly infinite universe—cherry-picked from the archive of philosopher Alan Watts—speaks of “interconnection”, of life being “one organism,” the game itself is obsessed by the idea of discrete, separate, identifiable objects. “You are girder” states the interface, as Watts outlines an adapted retelling of Zen philosophy. “Opened Tools category” I am informed when I inhabit a wrench, as Watts explains that “the world is a great wiggly affair.” And as I reach “50%” of all planets discovered, Watts professes that “the individual and the universe are inseparable.”
Watts, with his odd turns of phrase, warm voice and love of vast over-arching statements almost manages to convince you this contradiction isn’t there. But, once you are aware of it, it is impossible to ignore. How can everything be connected if, by the games own structuring, naming and cataloguing, nothing is? It’s possible to imagine that this might be a mistake, a misreading of Watts by Everything‘s creator, David O’Reilly, but I don’t think that’s true. After all, Everything slots perfectly into O’Reilly bizarre body of work: Its animals all roll around like his part-philosophical, part-absurdist The Horse Raised by Spheres, and the half-mocking, half-sentimental “thoughts” he gives inanimate objects is a trick taken straight from Everything‘s spiritual predecessor, Mountain. In truth, O’Reilly’s work has always operated simultaneously on both sides of the slash between authentic/ironic; Everything is simply the grandest vision of that slippery position, a universe that delights in both the absurdly obsessive objectification of everyday minutiae and the misty-eyed grandeur of pop-philosophy.
An exploding of the encyclopedia back into the world that spawned it
With this in mind, Everything connects to a particular and unlikely history. Though with its borderless sessions of object-and-animal-hopping, it might be tempting to compare the game to stream of consciousness fiction, or the kind of narcotic-fuelled existential wandering that many an Alan Watts quote has inspired, the form the game actually resembles most accurately is an encyclopedia. This is a universe is entirely hinged on proper nouns. Whether you are inhabiting a “Traditional Skyscraper,” “Stacking Chair,” “Alien Planet,” “Giraffe,” “Dirt Chunk (Small)” or simply “DNA” the game separates each off from the world as if it was an object of study. Buildings glide along roads, shorn free of their foundations, sticks roll end over end as if stop-animated and trees and grass grow and shrink in ever-repeating patterns of transition. Each has definable borders, and a weird sense of sentience. The game, and O’Reilly, like the great encyclopedia writers of days gone by, displays a kind of mania towards the total classification of these objects down to every molecule and particle.
This comparison with systems of encyclopedic organization might make Everything seem like it would be a cold or distant work, and yet it is exactly the opposite. After all, though we might often assume encyclopedias to be non-fictional, scientific tomes, they are in fact highly prone to nonsense, abstraction and poetic turns. For example, what does “Plutonium” have to do with “Plymouth” despite being next to each other in the first edition of the Columbia Encyclopedia? And then there are the omissions, errors and false entries (designed to protect the copyright of encyclopedias by making plagiarism obvious) that have been a core part of the encyclopedia as a project since its inception. In reality encyclopedias have a potential, alternate history as surreal, subjective structures, founded on the often illogical labelling of language. Everything’s vast catalogue of objects, flora and fauna—organized alphabetically in its pause menu—feels very much like a realization of this potential, an exploding of the encyclopedia back into the world that spawned it, literally blowing the near infinite objects of the universe into their constituent bits.
In this way, Everything takes the combinatorial possibilities of the encyclopedia and uses them to create a surprisingly narrative, emotive and comical game. Take the example of “Plymouth” and “Plutonium,” just by placing this words side-by-side we are greeted by a kind of additive effect: we try to find a connection, and in doing so we manufacture a host of narratives and images. This is the process that gives Everything its chaotic sense of life. A lost key, for example, trundling along a pavement, can’t help but take on a sorry atmosphere, but when it encounters a set of dice… Or how about the hot air balloon that wants to swim with whales, the multicolored parade of chairs that take over a busy intersection, or a horse statue that finds itself confronted with the real thing. Everything’s obsessive cataloguing, when combined with its overt openness, and O’Reilly’s subtly present poetic hand—which has a tendency to place flotillas of rubber ducks in city canals or flocks of crows circling Rapunzel-esque stone towers—is what generates these spiralling and oddly human narratives, which become the addictive heart of the game’s structure.
The result is a game space that is at once surreal, touching and thoughtful, without abandoning O’Reilly’s distinctive sense of humor. At one point I even started to wonder if Watt’s musings were there as a kind of eternal straight man to O’Reilly’s clowning, not a way to create an uplifting, life-changing, existential experience, but instead to generate a constantly self-undermining see-saw of the silly and the profound.
“The individual and the universe are inseparable”
Trying to catalogue the oddness of this experience became, by proxy, an equally obsessive experience: which parts of Everything to show? However, over time I found myself drawn to the distinctly human detritus of the game’s “city continents”, their collection of trash and treasure, from VHS tapes to stubbed cigarettes, literally taking on a new life through being inhabited. As I guided them by my hand they were ultimately elevated to the level of protagonist, pulled up out of the dirt to have their suggested dramas played out at the centre of the screen. Carrying not only the fingerprints of individual humans, but the marks of our entire civilization, it is this set of objects that demonstrates the connective, combinatorial nature of Everything so well. Like all lost and abandoned things, they are haunted by their previous owners, and dogged by their purpose. In comparison to the revelatory experience of flying a flock of birds into a sunset, or a galaxy across the cosmic plane, these tiny object dramas come to represent the game’s ever absent humans, as both possessing an absurd lack of perspective and yet a undeniably unique position in the existence of the universe.
And there we see the contradiction once more, the one that animates the images I have tried to capture. The contradiction of a universe that at once represents a beautiful connected process in full flood, and yet is also a non-nonsensical collection of objects, named, classified and put in their tiny boxes. The contradiction that makes watching the sun rise on a quiet city square from the perspective of a concrete bench one of the most powerfully melancholy experiences I’ve had in a game, until I whistle to my bench friends and we race off in absurd wobbling steps to jump in the canal and do a constantly circling, infinite dance, that might be beautiful if it wasn’t so damn stupid.
At the heart of Everything lies a contradiction. Though the narration dotted around this seemingly infinite universe—cherry-picked from the archive of philosopher Alan Watts—speaks of “interconnection”, of life being “one organism,” the game itself is obsessed by the idea of discrete, separate, identifiable objects. “You are girder” states the interface, as Watts outlines an adapted retelling of Zen philosophy. “Opened Tools category” I am informed when I inhabit a wrench, as Watts explains that “the world is a great wiggly affair.” And as I reach “50%” of all planets discovered, Watts professes that “the individual and the universe are inseparable.”
Watts, with his odd turns of phrase, warm voice and love of vast over-arching statements almost manages to convince you this contradiction isn’t there. But, once you are aware of it, it is impossible to ignore. How can everything be connected if, by the games own structuring, naming and cataloguing, nothing is? It’s possible to imagine that this might be a mistake, a misreading of Watts by Everything‘s creator, David O’Reilly, but I don’t think that’s true. After all, Everything slots perfectly into O’Reilly bizarre body of work: Its animals all roll around like his part-philosophical, part-absurdist The Horse Raised by Spheres, and the half-mocking, half-sentimental “thoughts” he gives inanimate objects is a trick taken straight from Everything‘s spiritual predecessor, Mountain. In truth, O’Reilly’s work has always operated simultaneously on both sides of the slash between authentic/ironic; Everything is simply the grandest vision of that slippery position, a universe that delights in both the absurdly obsessive objectification of everyday minutiae and the misty-eyed grandeur of pop-philosophy.
With this in mind, Everything connects to a particular and unlikely history. Though with its borderless sessions of object-and-animal-hopping, it might be tempting to compare the game to stream of consciousness fiction, or the kind of narcotic-fuelled existential wandering that many an Alan Watts quote has inspired, the form the game actually resembles most accurately is an encyclopedia. This is a universe is entirely hinged on proper nouns. Whether you are inhabiting a “Traditional Skyscraper,” “Stacking Chair,” “Alien Planet,” “Giraffe,” “Dirt Chunk (Small)” or simply “DNA” the game separates each off from the world as if it was an object of study. Buildings glide along roads, shorn free of their foundations, sticks roll end over end as if stop-animated and trees and grass grow and shrink in ever-repeating patterns of transition. Each has definable borders, and a weird sense of sentience. The game, and O’Reilly, like the great encyclopedia writers of days gone by, displays a kind of mania towards the total classification of these objects down to every molecule and particle.
This comparison with systems of encyclopedic organization might make Everything seem like it would be a cold or distant work, and yet it is exactly the opposite. After all, though we might often assume encyclopedias to be non-fictional, scientific tomes, they are in fact highly prone to nonsense, abstraction and poetic turns. For example, what does “Plutonium” have to do with “Plymouth” despite being next to each other in the first edition of the Columbia Encyclopedia? And then there are the omissions, errors and false entries (designed to protect the copyright of encyclopedias by making plagiarism obvious) that have been a core part of the encyclopedia as a project since its inception. In reality encyclopedias have a potential, alternate history as surreal, subjective structures, founded on the often illogical labelling of language. Everything’s vast catalogue of objects, flora and fauna—organized alphabetically in its pause menu—feels very much like a realization of this potential, an exploding of the encyclopedia back into the world that spawned it, literally blowing the near infinite objects of the universe into their constituent bits.
In this way, Everything takes the combinatorial possibilities of the encyclopedia and uses them to create a surprisingly narrative, emotive and comical game. Take the example of “Plymouth” and “Plutonium,” just by placing this words side-by-side we are greeted by a kind of additive effect: we try to find a connection, and in doing so we manufacture a host of narratives and images. This is the process that gives Everything its chaotic sense of life. A lost key, for example, trundling along a pavement, can’t help but take on a sorry atmosphere, but when it encounters a set of dice… Or how about the hot air balloon that wants to swim with whales, the multicolored parade of chairs that take over a busy intersection, or a horse statue that finds itself confronted with the real thing. Everything’s obsessive cataloguing, when combined with its overt openness, and O’Reilly’s subtly present poetic hand—which has a tendency to place flotillas of rubber ducks in city canals or flocks of crows circling Rapunzel-esque stone towers—is what generates these spiralling and oddly human narratives, which become the addictive heart of the game’s structure.
The result is a game space that is at once surreal, touching and thoughtful, without abandoning O’Reilly’s distinctive sense of humor. At one point I even started to wonder if Watt’s musings were there as a kind of eternal straight man to O’Reilly’s clowning, not a way to create an uplifting, life-changing, existential experience, but instead to generate a constantly self-undermining see-saw of the silly and the profound.
Trying to catalogue the oddness of this experience became, by proxy, an equally obsessive experience: which parts of Everything to show? However, over time I found myself drawn to the distinctly human detritus of the game’s “city continents”, their collection of trash and treasure, from VHS tapes to stubbed cigarettes, literally taking on a new life through being inhabited. As I guided them by my hand they were ultimately elevated to the level of protagonist, pulled up out of the dirt to have their suggested dramas played out at the centre of the screen. Carrying not only the fingerprints of individual humans, but the marks of our entire civilization, it is this set of objects that demonstrates the connective, combinatorial nature of Everything so well. Like all lost and abandoned things, they are haunted by their previous owners, and dogged by their purpose. In comparison to the revelatory experience of flying a flock of birds into a sunset, or a galaxy across the cosmic plane, these tiny object dramas come to represent the game’s ever absent humans, as both possessing an absurd lack of perspective and yet a undeniably unique position in the existence of the universe.
And there we see the contradiction once more, the one that animates the images I have tried to capture. The contradiction of a universe that at once represents a beautiful connected process in full flood, and yet is also a non-nonsensical collection of objects, named, classified and put in their tiny boxes. The contradiction that makes watching the sun rise on a quiet city square from the perspective of a concrete bench one of the most powerfully melancholy experiences I’ve had in a game, until I whistle to my bench friends and we race off in absurd wobbling steps to jump in the canal and do a constantly circling, infinite dance, that might be beautiful if it wasn’t so damn stupid.
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