SUPERHOT is about abusive subordination

The SUPERHOT franchise is mostly about the “time moves when you move” ultra-violent combat mechanic from the original game jam prototype, but the full game hinges on an equally engaging story used as a framing device for the gameplay.

In SUPERHOT (2016), you’re sent a cracked copy of SUPERHOT, some sort of unreleased game you’re not supposed to play. As you play through the game, (which is a VR game in-universe), you’re continually “discovered” by the company whose servers you’re hijacking and kicked out of the game, but you continually break back in to play more. At first the levels seem like disconnected arcade-y action scenes punctuated by the mantra-like SUPER HOT screen, but as you progress through you’re teased by the promise of a narrative resolution as you seemingly reveal a throughline.

The penny drops near the one-third mark. Instead of just kicking you out of the game the program locates where the (fictional) player is playing the game in their real life, and then starts rewriting their own chat messages so they can’t communicate what’s happening. You’re unable to warn your friend or reach out for help. Instead, you can only make the game sound more enticing.

The game then keeps iterating on the theme that you have lost control over both the game and yourself. Using some combination of traditional hacking and Pavlovian conditioning, SUPERHOT is rewriting the player to be subordinate to the game. By playing the game you have trapped your mind in a cage, which the game substantiates in a somewhat literal way.

The more you choose to play the game, the more of your own personhood you lose. To keep playing this game is to lose yourself to it entirely. Just as the game’s been telling you the whole time, every level you play is “handing over control.” But the player keeps going anyway.

In the next escalation you pay yourself a visit. You find the random red guy playing SUPERHOT that is you. This reveals that the “random red guys” are real people. But more importantly, you learn — in the most visceral way possible — that this isn’t just a game, but a system that can destroy you.

But you still keep going. Whether it’s just the dopamine spikes of the gameplay or some more sinister sort of conditioning, you’re hooked completely by the trap, and fall fully into the system and its principles: Mind is software. Bodies are disposable. The system will set you free. Messages that have been encoded into the SUPERHOT mantra from the start, and you’ve been continually programming yourself with.

Finally, in the finale of the game, you’ve transferred your mind completely over to the system. You’re dropped back in the “real life” scene — the one you so badly injured yourself before with a punch earlier — but this time you’re given a gun. Seemingly on our own initiative, you “free yourself” from your body by shooting yourself in the head. No pain this time, just victory in the system.

This is a good story! It’s an intriguing meta-story about psychological conditioning and addiction that parallels the dopamine-hit structure of the game. It was also developed pre-Undertale, and game plot about questioning the relationship between player and game was novel and refreshing.

The story is dark, but not only does it still play well in practice, it’s backed by these interesting themes that mesh perfectly with the ludonarrative.

In SUPERHOT’s gameplay you are the perfect action hero. You can overpower impossible odds and dodge every bullet, and look sick as hell while you do it. It’s the moment in the Matrix when Neo overcomes the laws of reality stretched out into unlimited gameplay.

This is — of course — a power fantasy based on mechanics of player control. You can achieve total mastery over the environment because you have such granular control over how time works. Time moves when you move. Enemies only move when you let them move. If you die you restart with perfect knowledge of every move that’s about to happen. Everything shatters in the most satisfying way possible because their purpose is to futilely oppose you and make it as enjoyable as possible for you to kill them.

This isn’t a bad thing. Most FPS games are power fantasies (it takes a lot of fantasy to keep gunplay from being horrifying) and that’s fine, because they’re entertainment. They’re distortions of reality, and there’s a lot to learn about the human condition from how we distort reality, but it’s designed to be safe escapist fun, and it completely succeeds at this.

It is a masterstroke, then, that the narrative framing that gameplay critiques that power fantasy. Where the gameplay’s job is to be fun, the story’s job is to be intriguing. So it takes all these ideas exposed by the gameplay — control, agency, stimulation — and subvert them in clever and interesting ways. It’s not true that SUPERHOT is an allegory, strictly speaking; the mechanics were built first to be fun, not to support a preexisting narrative. But the narrative is built up along the lines of thought the gameplay naturally prompts. The structure of intense, satisfying, high-agency action followed by a replay and mantra creates a loop of dopamine spikes. The story is built to fit the structure of the game. Not everything has to be a deconstruction. But SUPERHOT is, and it’s good at it.

This story also serves explicitly as metacommentary on the game loop itself and the addictive cycle pushed on people by the gaming industry, as the game’s directory Piotr (somewhat frantically) described at GDC 2016:

Piotr Iwanicki, Game Design and Mind Control in SUPERHOT (alt) This game is strange because it has really no reason to continue for the character inside the game. The reason for to continuing the game it was always you. It was always like a player wants to play more games so he drives this character inside the game which is a lot like him into Insanity. So this strange game quickly turns into this kind of mind control that’s driving your experience like a game that doesn’t treat you really well. He said that “you are good dog” for following orders, things like that.

So our reference for that was a cruel and abusive relationship, or a drug, right? So it’s like totally against reason. There is this game that gives you this blissful in-control experience, but also there is this force behind it that just wants you to hook up to it. Like a cruel and abusive relationship, like a drug.

And evil masterminds behind the SUPERHOT ex[?] thing… there are also game developers. And like most because games do this thing a lot! Like there are idle games; like I love idle games, I love to play them, right? But it’s also… you know the feeling of playing this game, it’s often like this mindless feeling of just clicking things. And this is fascinating. Like imagine an evil cult or a sect a religious thing using idle games as a form of like everyday prayer. This is a thing like that.

So we took those things that games are doing, like you know “remember to play” whatever you say, in this evil Russian voice, it will always fit into this mind control scheme. “Remember to play our game”, like “tell others about the game”, like “stay in our system and bring your friends”, it’s just like that.

Everyone is so into this story that it’s impossible to find any discussion of SUPERHOT online that doesn’t include people parroting the line from the ending: “SUPERHOT is the most innovative shooter I’ve played in years.”

SUPERHOT VR has the same themes

SUPERHOT is excellent, but in my opinion SUPERHOT VR is where the series becomes truly spectacular. All the way back in 2013 — before VR existed as a real platform — the SUPERHOT development team saw the time-moves-when-you move dynamic and knew it would be perfect to experience in VR, and they were right. SUPERHOT VR has a few obvious mechanical differences. It’s shorter than the original, both you-the-player and the player character are in VR, and traditional FPS controls are replaced with full-body movement. And it still holds up as one of the best VR games, even ten years later.

The same dark themes are here too, seen from a (very slightly) different angle. SUPERHOT is still a mental virus that reprograms people, and the player is indoctrinated with the same mantra: mind is software, bodies are disposable. And the plot of the game is once again about horrifying mind control and subordination of the self.

In the same theme as SUPERHOT, the player continually subordinates themselves to this system they discover. After the first segment of the game, SUPERHOT asks the player to “prove their dedication” by shooting their avatar in VR, which is a parallel to the scene in the first game where you punch your real body. The shot knocks off the player’s headset and reveals the player’s room for the first time:

In an early scene, the player is made to take a leap of faith and throw themselves off a building in pursuit of the symbolic pyramid. Bodies are disposable. As the game progresses, the line between game and reality blurs, and even in the real world the player perceives more and more virtual conditioning and desensitization. Mind is software.

The idea of mental reprogramming is emphasized on further in the last chapter of the game, which requires you to load the SUPERHOT disc not into the computer, but directly into your own head:

After the last level, the final act of dedication parallels both the earlier pistol scene and the ending of the first game. You’re once again given a pistol in the room with your real body, and it’s obvious what you’re expected to do with it.

The exact ending after this is left ambiguous. Depending on your interpretation, this scene with the pyramid might have also been virtual reality, and your shiny hands after the ending imply you’ve successfully uploaded yourself into the system. Whatever the case, you’re now free to play SUPERHOT forever.

VR’s ending is visceral and profound

VR’s ending is undeniably a more visceral and profound experience. Both games end by emphasizing the main theme of self-destructive subordination by having the player kill themselves. In SUPERHOT, this just means highlighting your red guy and clicking. But in SUPERHOT VR, this means taking a gun in your hand, pointing it at your own head, and pulling the trigger.

What makes an “artistic experience”? An experience itself is a subjective phenomenon, but what are the inputs that determine how a person experiences a work? The work itself is one, clearly, but so is the person themselves. The experience is an interaction between the sensory inputs of the work and our preexisting knowledge, sensibilities, values, and beliefs.

ebbits

So how much is art able to communicate? If the qualia of experience is so heavily influenced by the state of the audience, the artist is limited in how much control they have over the effect, and so the amount of experience that is communicated by artist intent rather than generated by the viewer’s experience is limited. But this varies proportionally to the specificity of the work. A large picture can communicate more specifics about a scene than a small one. A movie can communicate more specifics about a scene than a radio play. In a hypothetical future with a virtual reality technology that’s truly indistinguishable from reality, it might be possible to record and replay the entirety of an experience, captured exactly as intended. Modern VR is obviously not this, but certainly allows for a particular deepness of immersion. And that creates a new scope of artistic possibilities.

All this to say that VR games are remarkable in their ability to communicate the feeling of experiencing specific scenarios. Video games in general are able to lead their audience through crafted scenarios, and VR allows for further immersion and intensity of experience.

The emotion SUPERHOT VR manages to invoke here is an experiential marvel. It’s been years since I played the game, and I still remember living through this specific scene. The ability to capture such a specific scene backed by narrative buildup and deliver it to people as art they can experience is magnificent. This intense, intimate communication of emotion to the audience is a kind of art specifically made possible by VR, and it proves the medium can be a canvas for profound artistic communication. Video games are art; pack it up, we’re done.

It’s much more than an artistic depiction of suicide, it’s something closer to communicating the experience of it. The quiet of the room, the expectations, the unknown.... It’s extremely not a glorification of suicide, nor is it a “trainer”, but it’s able to make your heart leap just a little more in your chest, because your mind is processing the ideas in a more intense way. Your mind is tuned a little bit less into the scenario as a hypothetical and your subconscious is more engaged with the scenario.

But my excitement about this doesn’t mean the effect is pleasant. I can still remember playing the scene, and what I got from it wasn’t enjoyment. The game so clearly leads to this point that you don’t get any special instruction. Having just been told “collect your reward”, I knew exactly what to do. I remember putting the gun in my hand and being so viscerally uncomfortable with the idea of acting out the act of pulling the trigger that I actually moved my headset so when I pulled the trigger on the controller, the trajectory of the virtual gun wouldn’t map to my position in real life. The game started in whitespace VR and then broke out a conceptual layer to create a more “real” narrative layer, and used the story to demand I self-harm in increasingly “real” ways. It was deeply uncomfortable.

And that’s fantastic. Art gets to do that. Art is a controlled and consensual environment where you can explore as much of the human experience as you can manage. And this particular technology demonstrated an ability to reach into that range of experience just a little bit deeper, to present a slightly more emotional moment.

I am astonishingly glad we do this. We should be exploring! We should be exploring art, we should be exploring mediums, we should be exploring the human psyche. Limiting ourselves beyond basic safety to specific little gardens of curated emotions is bad. Maybe emotional safety is the right place for some people at certain times, but we cannot generally confine ourselves. A deep and intrinsic part of human merit is exploration and discovery, especially in the domains of philosophy and art. And, on the flip side, the urge to regulate people into philosophical and emotional patterns is a classically evil one. This is the fascist monoculture, the thought policing of a repressive society, the town from Footloose.

Still, I do want to stress the importance of consensually engaging with art. It’s still wrong to force people into a deeply uncomfortable situation they don’t want or need to be in. This raises a problem with SUPERHOT VR specifically. There are several of these scenes in the game, and you have to play through them to progress through the game. This creates the possibility that someone who only wants to play the fun Matrix game but isn’t comfortable with these scenes being coerced into doing them. This is a classic accessibility concern, but in a game like SUPERHOT where the narrative is somewhat decoupled from the gameplay, it’s easily addressable with something like a skip button, or a preference option that skips these scenes for you. The developers clearly did put some amount of thought into this, as there is a “skip disturbing scenes” option in the preferences, even though most people probably never opened the menu.

But the story was cut from the game

All these scenes were all cut from the game.

In 2021 (after the release of MCD), a mandatory patch was pushed to SUPERHOT VR, removing all the story content and leaving abrupt transitions between disks. The game that’s available now is a hollowed-out arcade experience of disconnected scenes bridged by a strictly utilitarian hub area. There was no option to revisit the scenes, and while a Steam beta branch for the old version was temporarily available, the developers quickly removed it, leaving the story completely inaccessible except to pirates.

The game was bombarded with negative reviews for a short time, but as new players who bought SUPERHOT VR didn’t know it was missing anything, the reviews went back to reflecting the (still very good) gameplay shortly after.

Motivation is some feeling of “responsibility”

First, this is being done out of some sort of feeling of responsibility. From what I can see there was no outrage about the story as it existed. No complaints, no issue with ratings, no pressure to make a change. In fact, all the pressure was to keep the story as it was, and perhaps add to it. All the pressure here is internal, not external.

This is not a company trying to appeal to a market, this is a zealot.

• zxc 09:09 PM
  • When I wrote “you deserve better”, I really really meant it. We first developed superhot for a 7 Day FPS Jam in 2013 and it was a massive success ever since. This was a taxing experience for everyone involved, myself included. Almost 8 years have passed and we’re still stuck making games about self-destructive loops: this is a fingerprint of this pressure. You deserve better than the product of stress and depression that we feel obliged to preserve because of the possible outrage of content removal.

• Mr. OVERKILL 09:17 PM
  • What happened, @zxc ? Did the studio suffer a loss? What’s with this?
• zxc 09:21 PM
  • I realised that we cannot proceed further without addressing the toxic issues at heart of this work. It took me a while. If this game is to grow, it is through rethinking of fundamentals instead of just adding more and more
• Mr. OVERKILL 09:22 PM
  • These sounds like the ramblings of a madman at this point. Are you ok?
  • Toxic issues? There were no toxic issues
  • It was an interesting game within the VR space
  • A piece of art
• zxc 09:22 PM
  • Yes, I am. I feel lighter as the game is free of those scenes.

• zxc 09:52 PM
  • “updates that add content make people happy, updates that remove content make people unhappy” - lol. it became impossible for us to work without addressing the scenes in question.

The problem is that there is this “toxicity” in the game. Piotr felt he couldn’t “proceed” without purifying it. He found it “impossible to work” while the story remained as it was. Censoring the game made Piotr “feel lighter.”

• zxc 01:21 AM
  • I long thought that this kind of update - removing self-harm - cannot be done without adding something great to the game. When recently I played this game again I realized that removing some parts is enough to hugely improve the game. I’ve made a new cut of a game. It’s really different and already feels more complete. Taking anything away is not my intent, but as superhot grows it also changes? thay means confronting the past.

These themes are so offensive to him, in fact, that he feels it’s improved just by removing the content. He argues that a version with a toggle — even one that’s off by default — is so substantially worse than the “new cut” that just removing the content is a “huge improvement.”

He’s arguing here that there is something intrinsically wrong with the story as it existed, and he sees the act of cutting this content as meritorious in and of itself simply because it removes something he now finds vile. Something about the story — either the self-destructive theme or the act of suicide itself — is somehow objectively and universally unacceptable and there was an absolute moral requirement that someone in the position to eliminate it do so. We “deserve better” because what we had before was objectively bad.

For obvious reason I object to these assertions, but I want to circle back to that later. Let’s see what all else is in play first.

Objection to allowing even the option of restoring content

While the original announcement teased the possibility of optionally restoring content somehow, Piotr’s further comments solidified the fact that he was not going to allow this in any capacity.

• zxc 09:09 PM
  • Scenes alluding to self-harm will not be part of this place. …
  • I hope this clears up our intentions behind this important update. It was not easy to do and is not easy to communicate. I kept the original message minimal, but that only spawned confusion and in the end you deserve to know what is happening. I’m open to suggestions on how to preserve the old version, but maybe it’s better off as a folk tale rather than a working software.

…

• Mr. OVERKILL 09:12 PM
  • I don’t understand why be so adamant about “you deserve better” when this is CLEARLY not better?
  • Can we get a “beta” branch or a “DLC” with the deleted scenes then?
  • Or a “classic” realease for the current owners
  • This needs a fix, not a sweep under the rug
• zxc 09:17 PM
  • Well, people differ in definition of ‘good’.
• Mr. OVERKILL 09:17 PM
  • Yes they do. Very clearly.
  • Art is provocative sometimes.
• zxc 09:17 PM
  • The deleted scenes are not coming back.

The earlier line about being “open to suggestions” appears to have been an attempt to let off pressure, not an honest, good-faith explanation of intent. The desire here is not to provide content warnings or create a guardrail, it’s to forcefully deny people one specific experience.

• zxc 09:33 PM
  • Violence is part of gameplay of superhot. You shoot virtual enemies, you feel whatever you want doing it. It’s fantasy. Shooting others is not okay, but shooting virtual enemies I consider acceptable.
    
    Game gatekeeping you from further levels and requiring to shoot yourself is manipulative. That’s wrong.
• bustercody3 09:34 PM
  • That’s where the scene toggle came in perfectly fine
• Mr. OVERKILL 09:34 PM
  • Isn’t the core of the game that you’re manipulated?
  • The toggle was fine, as buster said
• bustercody3 09:34 PM
  • disable it by default, whatever, but what if other people (the main amount of people playing the game) finds those scenes intriguing
  • just leave the toggle

…

• bustercody3 09:35 PM
  • I get your point, it’s not like I’m going to quit the game over this, I love the mechanics, but I really liked the whole plot
  • it just seems weird
  • you had a toggle
• zxc 09:36 PM
  • Toggle is a lame solution. This toggle wasn’t really visible: you had to know about it to use it so it’s not a real interface solution

July 23, 2021

• zxc 01:10 AM
  • I don’t think toggle was a good idea. It wasn’t a visible toggle, the scenes still came as a surprise, which is careless design. we could have worked on it more and try fixing it: opt-in vs. opt-out, but that poses a question should we really enable this option. what good does it do for the game? i couldn’t find a reason to keep those scenes in the game.

There’s a nod here toward the issue of consent I discussed previously. If levels are locked behind something offensive or triggering, isn’t that a kind of coercion? You’re no longer consensually engaging in whatever art you choose, you’re being forced through one specific gate, forced to experience one specific thing.

But the idea of allowing the scenes to be available at all is still being treated as unacceptable. Including — explicitly — a version of the game where the scenes were off by default, which would subvert the issue of coercion completely by making sure most people would never know it existed. This shows that his supposed objection to the game “gatekeeping you from further levels” isn’t the real concern.

Piotr clearly isn’t at all concerned with audience consent here, as he’s trying to impose a specific artistic vision on people and actively fighting them to do so. He sees a problem here, but it has nothing to do with consent. The problem as he understands it is that the existing art is objectionable in such a way that the only adequate “solution” is to fully obliterate it.

Gesturing towards the idea of audience consent like this is dishonest and wears down my ability to imagine Piotr as acting in good faith. Pretending you’re willing to preserve the content but then revealing you’re not is suspicious, but then trying to distract people by pointing to a concern you don’t really have reveals this behavior to be dishonest and manipulative.

Authority to impose this vision

Again, from a consumer perspective, it’s straightforwardly unacceptable to destroy someone’s copy of a game after they bought it from you. No room for debate there. That being said, it’s worth seeing how he tries to justify it:

• zxc 09:09 PM
  • Scenes alluding to self-harm will not be part of this place. […]

…

• zxc 09:39 PM
  • We’re making games, this is personal software that reaches each and everyone individually. We don’t control the context those games are played in.

…

• Mr. OVERKILL 09:43 PM
  • I PAID for it
• zxc 09:43 PM
  • “It’s complicated”
• Mr. OVERKILL 09:43 PM
  • I buy music on CD and vinyl so that it doesn’t disappear on a whim. I buy games on GOG for the same reason.
  • The digital age is screwing with people’s perception of ownership, really shows
  • If I buy a piece of art to hang on a wall - I don’t expect the artist to show up 2 years later to change it
  • This would be nonsensical
• notradaem 09:46 PM
  • i guess my priorities when it comes to this art are different than yours.
• Mr. OVERKILL 09:46 PM
  • Happy for you, so?
• zxc 09:46 PM
  • virtual reality is different somehow. currently platforms are focused on ‘apps’ or ‘games’, but the atomic (smallest) piece of VR content is more like ‘an object’ or ‘a place’. If you think of superhot as a virtual place it’s only natural that this place changes over time.

There is a specific assertion of authority here. The claim is that VR — for some unspecified reason — fundamentally transforms the relationship between work and audience. Because the products themselves are like a “place”, and in the real world we often visit places that change on other peoples’ authority, people simply shouldn’t expect to have any control over virtual reality.

I find this really objectionable, for reasons I simply cannot stop talking about. It’s an unjustified claim of feudalist power that sees the player as a tenant of a space they have no claim to. It sees a chain of relationships based on unidirectional power disparities: the player as a subject of the game company, who is the subject of the platform, who is the subject of the hardware manufacturer, and so on and so forth forever until you get to the king.

But there’s a lot about this situation that makes it particularly strange to claim that kind of power. Live service games are very much a thing (one I famously hate) but this isn’t one. This is a standalone forever game that was feature-complete when it was sold. It got a few content updates, which were nice, but for the most part the developers moved on to working on other games, which was perfectly fine and expected. There is no expectation that this “place” would be something dynamic that would change over time, whether for good or for ill.

The specific basis Piotr uses here is particularly bizarre: it’s basically just vibes. There’s an argument here about power derived from intuitiveness: because it feels right for users to be subject to outsized outside influence in virtual reality. This is, of course, extraordinarily terrible. The presentation of a thing can’t change its ownership status, especially when the presentation is determined by an outside party with an interest in hoarding power.

In my wildest fears, this is why corporations were so giddy about the “metaverse”: the ability to manipulate presentation to keep a power grab from feeling objectionable creates the opportunity to further transform the business-customer relationship to one of owner-subject. This is a dystopia where, due to hard control over the technology used to access and define a space, there would be no limiting principle on what the worst people in the world could make “only natural.”

But there is potential for utopia in VR too. Like all computing, VR offers the possibility for people to realise incredible capabilities, so long as the architecture isn’t intentionally compromised. An incredible merit of every media format is the ability to preserve ideas and experiences. If it can be digitized, it can be perfectly saved in a format that doesn’t decay, and can be copied and shared freely. But to remove the security of the individual over their own affairs is to cripple the medium. As long as platforms aren’t held captive, as long as individual executives can’t wield arbitrary control over people’s personal choices, computers can be good. But SUPERHOT VR is doing its part to make sure we don’t get there.

Insisting the story doesn’t matter

Piotr also takes the interesting stance⁶ that the gameplay is the only thing of value in SUPERHOT VR, and the story isn’t part of the work. (Or if it is, it shouldn’t be, or something.)

Don’t confuse this with the purpose of the removal. The story being “insignificant” is not why it’s being removed — it’s being removed because of his offense to the darkness of the themes. The purpose of arguing that the story doesn’t matter is to defuse the obvious objection to the removal: that it’s a defining characteristic that should not be removed. The trivialization is a defense of the negative action, not a positive explanation for why it was done.

• zxc 01:10 AM
  • I don’t think toggle was a good idea. It wasn’t a visible toggle, the scenes still came as a surprise, which is careless design. we could have worked on it more and try fixing it: opt-in vs. opt-out, but that poses a question should we really enable this option. what good does it do for the game? i couldn’t find a reason to keep those scenes in the game.

• zxc 09:23 PM
  • Time freezing until you move is the real vr product here. It’s interesting to work on it, still.

…

• zxc 09:33 PM
  • Violence is part of gameplay of superhot. You shoot virtual enemies, you feel whatever you want doing it. It’s fantasy. Shooting others is not okay, but shooting virtual enemies I consider acceptable.

…

• zxc 09:54 PM
  • it’s not like the manipulative power of this game is so strong.
    
    It’s just not the message we’re want to send out. It’s not important to the game’s core.

• zxc 10:12 PM
  • From the inside view of development I see a lot of time put into things not significant (auto-destructive narrative), while the core of the game - physics, shattering in slow motion, sound - get skipped over. We focused on wrong things, because important stuff is difficult technically. That’s the negative message from my point of view.

…

• zxc 10:18 PM
  • We’re adults too and we don’t treat other adults with these kind of scenes. It’s not respectful to the kind strangers trying out our game
• Deleted User 10:53 PM
  • This is why piracy exists. People will pirate old versions because the devs won’t add major features back.
• zxc 10:54 PM
  • I’m okay with that. Piracy is default.
    
    I’m done pretending that this scenes are major feature. If they really are - we failed.

Piotr consistently insists that the story of SUPERHOT does not matter. The violence is fine, but because it’s part of the gameplay. The theme of the story — the game manipulating the player — is not essential to the piece. He argues that the time mechanic is the only thing of value and the story won’t be missed. In fact, he says that if people valued the story they told, it was a failure on his part. “Time freezing until you move is the real vr product here.”

I find this to be incredibly reductive. Even in a gameplay-first piece like SUPERHOT, there is something deeply juvenile about going “my game is tainted with this unnecessary story” akin to “my movie is tainted with this unnecessary set design”. It’s failing to see that the thing is its whole: that the flavorings and the connective tissue are the bow tying the work together, not dead weight to be hacked away. Like any art, the game is greater than the sum of its parts, and it’s much greater than any one of its parts by itself in a void. But you can’t just look at the different discrete components of a game and pick which one matters. When you have a perfect cake, you can’t ask for a list of the ingredients and pick your favorite off the list and expect that to be the same as cake but better.

But just to peel back the layers, let’s say the game mechanics are the most significant “core” of this particular game, and anything else in the package is only valid insofar as it serves that core purpose. It’s certainly true that a story could need to be removed or retooled if it detracted from the rest of the game. But that’s an important “if”! Does the story of SUPERHOT actually detract in any way from gameplay? Clearly not; everything up to this point has been focused on how well the mechanics and this plot cohered. Piotr even talked about this himself at GDC. The gameplay lends itself to sprints of intense focus followed by dopamine spikes, which meshes perfectly with the story theme which makes a commentary on that exact mechanic. Ludonarrative harmony.

• Plasmaguy 10:27 PM
  • have you even READ the DOG entries from MCD?
  • legitimately
  • have you?!
• zxc 10:28 PM
  • i legitimately haven’t

Piotr’s personal disregard for story also lines up with peoples’ roles on the project. The scenes aren’t a “major feature” and he won’t “pretend” they are, but they’re also notably not work he did. Based on the credits, the stories of both games were primarily driven by other writers. There’s this weird line “because important stuff is difficult technically” that reads as a snub: “they didn’t want to do the hard work, so they spent their time on this frivolous story instead.” I can’t help but imagine a bias here — “only my thing matters” — but hopefully that’s just projection.

The other writers may have been on board with Piotr’s effort, or this may have been against their creative wishes as well. (If the latter, how sad to have your work destroyed like this....) Everything I’ve talked about so far — the cuts themselves, the Steam announcement, the community response — seem to have been done by Piotr unilaterally without the involvement of other members of the team. Cezary Skorupk and Marcin Surma haven’t spoken about this, so it’s only a guess how they feel about it. As for people who have spoken about this topic… well, they’ve promised this exact situation wouldn’t happen:

Specific rejection of the theme of the story

As I described at the top of the article, SUPERHOT is a beautiful mesh of a power fantasy and a critique of the power fantasy. But Piotr specifically rejects this:

• zxc 09:09 PM
  • superhot is a place where time stops until you move. You cannot possibly experience that without virtual reality. This place is made of hard concrete and brittle crystal exacly because this physics of shattering can be so mesmerising in slow motion. This place is safe in a weird way: even if it’s crumbling around you, the danger will not reach you until you move. If you ever froze still, scared of an object fast approaching - we deliver what your instincts wanted in that moment. This is the core of superhot virtual reality.
    
    Scenes alluding to self-harm will not be part of this place. Neither will I allow for manipulative design and illusion of achievement. In Poland we call this ‘dzidzi-bobo design’. We’re past that. Time freezing for you means you are in control and let this be foundation for all things superhot from now on.

He unironically parrots exactly the sentiment the games point out as foolish and bad; “it’s just killing red guys.” The SUPERHOT games make a point of critiquing exactly this attitude of uncritical hunger for a raw power fantasy.

But to hear Piotr talk, uncritical hunger for a raw power fantasy is the whole point. It’s in VR because that lets you fully experience how rad it is. It’s supposed to feel safe because being able to feel safe whenever you want feels great. It’s supposed to be mesmerizing and beautiful and fun. What SUPERHOT means is looking cool as hell and bouncing from dopamine hit to dopamine hit and how great it is to be the best boy.

These are all things that make for good gameplay, but here Piotr is elevating them to be the goal of the work overall. The demand is that the control fantasy not just be a merit of the gameplay, it needs to define your entire relationship with the work. The aspect of the game that is most masturbatory needs to be the only thing. The pleasure needs to drown out any other experience you might have with the work.

Do we object so strongly to even the possibility of mental friction? Is this a toy that people should be able to interact with at their leisure; should we pick it up when we want, put it down when we want, and think our own thoughts about the matter? Or is Piotr simply the same as the villainous SUPERHOT? Is the only goal to keep people playing, keep people in that flow state, keep brains hooked up to that dopamine response?