Watch on YouTube

My favorite kind of film is the kind that, through some combination of masterful artistry and life’s own timing, manages to seem to touch my soul. The kind of film that leaves me stunned, unable to move as the credits soar towards the heavens. Whether it takes me to a new world, or allows me to appreciate our own just a little bit more, I love films that strike me with beauty and awe. This video, however, isn’t about those films. This video is about something far, far dumber.

It began with what was supposed to be a chill type of hangout over voice chat. When one of my friends claimed to have something for us to watch, I didn’t think much of it, at least until I saw the title.

The Seventh Seal (Zoomer Edition) … Right.

To be completely honest, I didn’t know what The Seventh Seal was in the first place, so I bolted to Wikipedia for an easy answer.

Wikipedia: The Seventh Seal is a 1957 Swedish historical fantasy film written and directed by Ingmar Bergman. Set in Sweden during the Black Death, [...] [it's] considered a classic in the history of cinema, as well as one of the greatest films of all time.[1]

I felt a sinking feeling in my chest. If The Seventh Seal is so renowned, surely my first experience with it should be watching the film itself and not the alleged “Zoomer Edition”. Out of respect for the film as well as myself, surely this would be a mistake. Why don’t we watch the original film instead? My friend insisted, however, and against our better judgment, we proceeded. Right before pressing play, I thought to myself, “What makes this the ‘Zoomer Edition’, anyway? And, by watching this, what of the original film will I miss out on?” I would get answers to both questions very soon.

As the film began, I immediately realized what I had gotten myself into. The Seventh Seal (Zoomer Edition) is The Seventh Seal, untouched and unedited. It has, however, been delicately sandwiched between Subway Surfers on the right and oddly satisfying videos on the left. The core conceit is clear.

felipecampos1403: I can finally watch a cult, old, philosophical black and white movie with that dopamine boost just a slight tilt of the eye away[2]

You’ve probably seen something similar before. Known as “sludge content” or “overstimulation content”, videos like this proliferated across platforms like TikTok and YouTube Shorts in the early 2020s.[3] The idea behind them is simple: add colorful motion, and people will watch longer. The Seventh Seal (Zoomer Edition) is pretty plainly a parody of this type of video, the joke being that the only way to get someone in my generation to even survive the film is through a serving of Subway Surfers on the side.

Duncanster: I can't focus on the movie. Do you think you can throw in some Family Guy clips too?[2]

As the film continued, a certain sense of horror began to set in, not from The Seventh Seal’s themes of death and futility, but from the futility of trying to watch the film itself. And it’s not like I didn’t try. We may have put on The Seventh Seal (Zoomer Edition), but I wanted to watch The Seventh Seal. And so, I poured all of my attention into…uh…hey do you think the subway surfers is looped? like, i know the score is really high, but like, surely there’s a cut somewhere. i mean, you can’t cheat the guard, and you can’t outrun the guard, so like, whoever’s playing will have to die at some point, right? oh wait what just happened

Bergman is a director known for striking, high-contrast cinematography in his films.[4] His films are the kind to leave you in awe, or as film historian Peter Cowie puts it, “nearly everyone who sees The Seventh Seal emerges stunned and thrilled by its visual splendors”.[5] These visual splendors are, however, no match for the vibrant colors and perpetual motion of the parasites possessing the margins.

No matter how hard I tried to keep watching, no matter how hard I tried to stay focused on what mattered to me in the moment, I simply couldn’t. Ten minutes had passed, and I wasn’t sure I had paid attention for a single one. To make matters worse, not only are its visuals a critical component of The Seventh Seal and its storytelling, the entire film is in Swedish. The Seventh Seal (Zoomer Edition) embeds subtitles, but you do have to look at them. Every second spent subconsciously staring towards the side of the screen would cascade, relentlessly shoving understanding even farther from reach. I was completely lost. And—oh my god why is that person cutting towards themselves. the blade is gonna slip. the blade is gonna slip. the blade is gonna slip. it’s going to slip. the blade—

As time marched on, the film only continued to slip from my grasp. Every few minutes, I’d check back on the film, hoping that maybe—just maybe—I’d be able to understand. Invariably, I couldn’t, and I’d again let myself be washed away by the empty embrace of oddly satisfying slime videos.

There was a certain disturbing level of lucidity I experienced throughout all of this. To my abject horror, I was wholly, blindingly aware of my own inability to focus. With eyes wide open, I watched as my own eyes, wide open, betrayed me in what they watched. And yet, no matter how concretely cognizant I was of my own situation, I couldn’t do a thing. It was as if I was trapped in a nightmare I couldn’t wake up from, and Jake Subway Surfers was my sleep paralysis demon.

---

Overstimulation content, as a genre, is one that’s fairly unique to the online landscape of the 2020s, and that’s because of the types of algorithmic feeds we see on platforms like TikTok. This form of social media feels ubiquitous today, but it wasn’t always that way.

Whenever you access a website, your web browser receives data through a protocol called HTTP. It stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol, and its function is as its name suggests. Hypertext, by the way, is a term that simply refers to text containing links to other text.[6] Considering the vastly varied varieties of media that are now ricocheted across the web, HTTP’s definition feels quite quaint. That’s because the web was originally conceived simply as a way to store and retrieve hypertext documents over the Internet.[7] In the earliest days of the web, there were no algorithmic feeds, “social media” was an alien term, and search engines were no more than hand-curated lists. As idyllic as this sounds, the problem is obvious—as the web grows, it becomes increasingly difficult to manually sift through. Eventually, code was written to automatically crawl and rank websites, which would then be organized by topic.[8]

When you think about it, these early search engines aren’t too dissimilar in purpose to the recommendation algorithms of today. At a very high level, they both solve the same basic problem of “too much content”, and they both solve said problem by parsing and ranking said online content. Still, it took some time for algorithmic feeds to reach widespread adoption. Social media algorithms aren’t new—Flickr holds a 2006 patent for ranking content by “interestingness”,[9] and Reddit has used upvotes and downvotes to rank content since 2005.[10] At the same time, it’s a little surprising how long they took to reach some major platforms. MySpace was the dominant social media platform for a sizeable portion of the 2000s,[11] yet it didn’t include a feed during the peak of its popularity. Facebook introduced a reverse-chronological feed in 2006, yet this wasn’t changed to a ranked feed until 2011.[12] And Twitter’s feed was reverse-chronological all the way until 2014.[13]

There’s always a bit of controversy tied with algorithm changes. Just look at the hundreds of thousands of people who signed a petition protesting Instagram’s algorithmic feed in 2016.[14] Despite this, it’s important to remember that algorithmic feeds solve a genuine problem, at least in theory. There are a couple of reasons why a user may want an algorithmically ranked feed. Without manual, intentional cultivation, it’s easy for a chronological feed to become burdened with uninteresting or irrelevant content—the weeds of the feeds. Using an algorithm to filter out irrelevant content may help the user to better spend their time on the platform. And maybe, just maybe, with all the spam gone, you could finally reach the end. Now, there are also a couple of reasons why a platform may want an algorithmically ranked feed. With uninteresting and irrelevant content filtered out, users are less likely to leave, meaning they spend more time on the platform. For services that profit from advertising—that is, every major platform—more time spent on the platform is more opportunities to extract revenue. And maybe, just maybe, with all the spam gone, users won’t ever leave the infinite flow of content.

This is where the concept of “engagement” comes in. “Engagement” is nearly a meaningless term—it refers to the fact that a user is engaging with a platform without any information about how they engage—and yet, it’s one that’s crucial to content creation and distribution on the Internet. As a result, social media companies have found a multitude of ways to calculate and predict a user’s level of engagement.[15] I previously mentioned Flickr’s “interestingness” patent, which appears to aggregate views, favorites, comments, tag relevance, and timing.[9] Reddit’s algorithm was public up until 2017, and at the time, it was basically the difference between upvotes and downvotes decaying over time.[16] Regardless of how it was calculated, however, user engagement has been incredibly important to social media companies for a long while, at times even more than revenue itself. In 2012, as Facebook was preparing for an IPO, Mark Zuckerberg himself warned investors:

Mark Zuckerberg: Our culture emphasizes rapid innovation and prioritizes user engagement over short-term financial results. Simply put: we don't build services to make money; we make money to build better services.[17]

It’s funny to peer into a time when Facebook was a widely beloved service. It’s also funny to see “user engagement” and “better services” used as interchangeable terms. Make no mistake, these algorithms were doing their absolute best to get people hooked for as long as they existed—Facebook ultimately always had financial interests at heart—but there’s a pretty fundamental difference between the social media algorithms of then and now. During the late 2010s, social media companies shifted their recommendation algorithms towards deep learning models.[18] A brief explanation: by shoving massive amounts of data down a complicated data-processing network, these companies could more accurately predict how you will use their platform. Not “you” in the general sense, but you, specifically.

In order to both build these models and use them, these companies need a scary amount of data, and they get it from tracking you, everywhere, from news sites to actual physical stores.[19] Of course, a lot of the data comes from your usage of their platforms. Every link clicked, every post seen, is obsessively logged and fed into the machine. This creates incredibly important incentives surrounding engagement. When you engage with platforms, you’re shown ads, which provide income to these platforms. This has pretty much always been the case. Now, when you engage with these platforms, in addition to providing revenue, you provide them with more data, which allows them to create better models, which creates more engagement. When you use social media, not only are you giving social media companies your time and attention, you’re arming them with the resources to make social media even more enticing. In 2012, Facebook claimed to prioritize engagement over revenue. In 2025, these incentives are intrinsically and cyclically linked.

One interesting effect of using deep learning models is that we don’t actually know precisely how they work. Deep learning models are trained on user data to find patterns, but even the developers making these algorithms can’t tell you why exactly a certain video is ranked higher than another.[20] And as data continues to be collected, these algorithms are constantly evolving.[21] We may not be able to understand the specifics, but we can get a decent idea of the broad strokes. Attention, for example, is pretty commonly understood to be a major factor, especially on platforms like YouTube and TikTok.[22] TikTok themselves have stated that watching a video to completion is a “strong indicator” of interest, and therefore will have a significant effect on a person’s recommendations.[23]

The result of this is pretty simple: TikTok—and likely similar services like YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels—will show you videos it thinks will capture your attention. If a video can hold your attention, not only will you see more similar content, the video will be pushed to more people. For creators that wish to have lasting success on these platforms, holding attention is a key consideration because it has a tangible impact on their reach. And whether consciously or not, creators on these platforms mold their content and persona to succeed in the eyes of the algorithm, ultimately striving to make content to better grab your attention.[24]

All of this creates an ecosystem of engagement, where posts are pitted against each other in a strife for survival. An arms race of attention. And oh boy are there arms available…

Colorful visuals. Unholy amounts of saturation and contrast. “Wait for it…” Math problems to keep you from scrolling, and so you can argue in the comments. (cut music) Genuinely interesting and insightful content. (pause) Car crashes. Arrows! And! Circles! Extremely loud music and noises. shutupshutupshutup— Is that just a picture of an AI-generated cat? Why… I don’t know what this is, but I’m disturbed! People actually freaking dying—I wish I was kidding about this one.[25] Lots of motion! Why are there so many AI-generated cats? I don’t understand—looking up the problem just brings me more AI cats. “Wait for and”? Oh, is this just baiting corrections? Wait, it has 17 million views? Huh… What about straight sensory input?! Who needs anything else?! And, of course, Subway Surfers on the side.

Obviously, your feed doesn’t look like this. I hope it doesn’t look like this. I found most of these logged out in a private tab, flying past YouTube Shorts at supersonic speed, so it’s not going to reflect the tastes of a given person watching them. (Though, actually, if this is supposed to be the most general-audience, widely targeted form of YouTube Shorts…maybe people actually are watching this? Scary.) This doesn’t change the fact that there are a lot of tricks creators can employ to manipulate your attention. Some are as brazen as what I just showed, but others are a lot more subtle, like including a camera shake at the beginning of a video to introduce a bit of eye-catching motion.[26] And these tricks can change over time. Adding Subway Surfers was especially common a couple of years ago, but it seems to have somewhat subsided. Of course, it’s just one of a long litany of techniques that creators have to keep you watching. It’s simply a fundamental part of the current online landscape.

---

As the playhead bumped the corner of the screen, and The Seventh Seal (Zoomer Edition) came to an end, I was distraught. For 90 minutes, there was something I wanted to watch right there in front of me, but I just…couldn’t.

To be honest, before the movie, there was a part of me that thought I was “above” this sort of thing. I hadn’t really used TikTok or other short-form video platforms pretty much at all by then, and so I thought that, somehow, the Subway Surfers and oddly satisfying videos just wouldn’t affect me. Obviously, that wasn’t the case. I didn’t have the control over my attention I thought I did—that, or these videos are just that entrancing.

Either way, watching The Seventh Seal (Zoomer Edition) left me regretful and scared. Before it began, I asked myself, “What of the original film would I miss?” It turned out to be “everything”—an answer to my question, but also no answer at all. I still wanted to watch The Seventh Seal. I still wanted to know what I had failed to witness. But a certain thought pestered me. Even if I did watch the original Seventh Seal, would I even have been able to pay attention, or would I have simply become bored? Did I want to know the answer?

The Seventh Seal (Zoomer Edition) led me to realize just how distracting Internet content could be, and not in the way we normally talk about it as a “distraction”. It’s not merely a distraction from work, or cleaning, or any other “important” task. The Subway Surfers distracted me from a movie, one that I think I would have otherwise really enjoyed! These cheap tricks didn’t just distract me from obligations and chores—they distracted me from things I genuinely wanted to spend my time doing. Something had to change.

And, in a funny way, things did change a bit. The despair I felt after The Seventh Seal (Zoomer Edition) was shared with my friends on voice chat. And this inadvertently led to a lengthy conversation about social media, its content, and their effects. By now, I don’t remember the specifics of our discussion, but that hasn’t changed its impact. It’s kinda silly, but after watching Zoomer Edition, I began to think about it whenever I went online. I try for the most part to avoid YouTube Shorts, and if I watch one, I make a conscious effort never to scroll to the next one. I realized I wasn’t getting any value out of Twitter, so I deleted my account. It didn’t stop or prevent all of my bad habits—I very often find myself distracted as the secondary screen I put on for YouTube becomes the primary focus of my attention, and I certainly catch myself stalled scrolling sometimes—but, oddly, it helped. This all happened two years ago, and, well, obviously, I continue to think about it even now.

---

So, is the Subway Surfers sidebar shortening our attention spans? What about short-form media as a whole? As obviously true as it seems, we don’t actually know for sure. Significant correlations have certainly been found between media multitasking and shorter attention spans,[27][28][29] and the same is true for short-form video at large.[30][31][32] Correlation is not causation, however, and the latter is much more difficult to investigate. It’s possible that there’s causation here, but it’s also possible that we’re not getting less attentive—social media is simply getting better at grabbing us. Or, that people that are easily distracted simply gravitate towards these platforms naturally.[33] Besides, media multitasking, at least, isn’t anything new. I mean, take a look at Disneyland’s Main Street Cinema, originally opened in 1955. And we’ve used television, and radio before it, as background noise since the introduction of those technologies.[34] It’s not like I can judge, either, as a heavy media multitasker myself.

We don’t know if TikTok and overstimulation content are strictly bad for us, but at the same time, it can’t be good for us, right? And even if media multitasking isn’t new, engagement-driven algorithmic feeds are. It’s my personal opinion that algorithmic social media platforms are, ironically, uniquely isolating as a form of media. By hyperpersonalizing your feed with complex engagement-driven algorithms, social media companies are able to create an experience crafted specifically “for you”, and this makes it harder to share the experience with others. Sure, you can share a video with someone, whether that’s by handing over your phone or using the dedicated “share” button. But in the same way that showing a friend vacation photos isn’t the same as them being there, sharing an individual video is sharing a small snapshot of your experience, not your experience as a whole. Movies, shows, games, music, and even books to an extent, are designed to be shared—to be discussed with others, if not experienced together outright. Short-form video feeds, by design, aren’t. And it’s not like there aren’t places on the Internet where you can find both meaning and meaningful connections with others—but the largest platforms have other incentives in mind. All else will fall before engagement.

Clearly, as many people say, we need to be mindful of what we watch. But that’s tricky to actually do, for a couple of reasons. To start, it’s not immediately obvious what that actually looks like. And even if you know how to be mindful online, it’s even harder to find the innate motivation to use that knowledge in the first place. It doesn’t help that mindfulness runs counter to social media platforms’ goals. In the words of Princeton computer science professor Arvind Narayanan, “The fact that users might sometimes exercise judgment and resist their impulses is treated as a problem to be solved.”[22] This is even reflected in the overall designs of these platforms, especially surrounding short-form video. Most social media platforms—even ones without complex recommendation algorithms—structure their feed around an infinitely scrolling page, leaving no natural stopping point from scrolling. This is even worse on platforms like Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and TikTok, which inundate you with a continuous stream of unending content. This leaves you with limited agency, as you don’t actually pick what videos you watch—another video is already playing as soon as you decide to stop watching the previous one. Paired with the loud (and honestly obnoxious) ways creators try to grab your attention, there’s intentionally little opportunity for reflection.

This endless barrage of content is designed to induce flow state in the user—the same feeling of focus that you may feel playing a sport or difficult video game. According to psychologists Jeanne Nakamura and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the preconditions of flow state are clear goals, perceived opportunities for controlled or skillful action, and immediate feedback.[35] If the goal of watching TikToks is to see entertaining content, swiping provides an illusion of control towards that goal, and the feedback in the form of the next video couldn’t be more immediate. The effects of flow state are incredible in many contexts, but somewhat alarming in the context of scrolling social media—they include the distortion of time and a loss of reflective self-consciousness.[35] In other words, these platforms get exactly what they want out of you—even more engagement as time itself appears to evaporate around you. And this can be observed—a 2023 study found that the experience of flow state was significantly correlated with problematically excessive TikTok use. Worse, the researchers failed to find a significant correlation between enjoyment and excessive TikTok use.[36] To platforms like TikTok and the algorithms they create, it doesn’t matter if you found something meaningful during your time there, or even if you had fun—it only matters that you’re enveloped and engaged. It’s meant to break your mind. To quote cultural anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll, “the immediacy of the machine’s response joins human and machine in a […] closed circuit of action such that the locus of control—and thus, of agency—becomes indiscernible.”[37] Though, you’d be forgiven if you didn’t realize she was talking about gambling addiction here, not social media.

---

So how do we break the machine? One of the biggest challenges with answering this question is how varied people’s experiences are with social media, and I think this makes specific advice and techniques less helpful than one might think. I’ll mostly be going off of my own personal experiences here, and of course that comes with the caveat that my suggestions may not align with your own experiences; though, I’ll also be referencing some other videos on this topic.

In general, I personally believe there are two key factors to consider: desire and convenience. It’s the desire to use a platform that prompts you to use it, and it’s often the convenience of access that keeps you captured and coming back, even when you don’t intend to. These factors are deeply intertwined. The frictionless experience of scrolling isn’t just convenient—it prevents you from reflecting on whether you want to be there in the first place. Of the two, however, I find it important to prioritize taking care of the former. This is because it’s really easy to form new habits that circumvent any reductions to convenience you make. Once, I wanted to reduce how much I was opening YouTube. I had a habit of clicking this shortcut on my new tab page, so I removed the shortcut. Instead of decreasing my YouTube usage, it only created a new habit: rapidly typing “ctrl+t, y, o, u, enter”. Even if you make social media less convenient, if you still strongly wish to use it in the first place, you’re going to find your way, anyway.

This desire can come from anywhere: the want to be entertained, the want to keep up with news or communities, even the want to distract yourself can be a reason. It’s hard for me to give advice on this area, because it’s so dependent on your personal situation. For me, finding low stakes, low effort hobbies and activities gave me less reason to turn to social media for entertainment. I’ve also noticed the more socially isolated I feel in real life, the more I’ve turned to the Internet in search of connection, but once again, this is just my own experience. And if you want something concrete to try to take matters into your own hands, you can try the method Internet Shaquille suggests in a video on his second channel:

Internet Shaquille: Navigate to the explore tab and find the least relevant, least shareable post with which you'd never interact. [...] Open it, tap the share icon, and back out. Refresh the explore tab and do that again with the two or three similar posts that are sure to show up. Rinse and repeat five times and your whole feed looks like you care deeply about this topic that's totally irrelevant to you.[38]

The goal of this technique is to, hopefully, nudge you to become repulsed by your own feed, decreasing your desire to come back for more. Becoming repulsed by social media seems a bit drastic, but it may be effective where simply finding alternatives isn’t. It’s also not lost on me that my experience watching The Seventh Seal (Zoomer Edition) probably gave me a bit of that repulsion.

The second factor is convenience. As I mentioned earlier, social media platforms are designed to be frictionless—designed to keep you from consciously reflecting on what you’re doing. And it’s very easy to fall into a rhythm of using these apps and platforms—it’s frankly embarrassing how many times I’d catch myself in a loop of opening and closing YouTube, as if pulling the lever of a slot machine, hoping for a big win. There are a ton of ways to add friction and make accessing distracting apps and websites less convenient. Most obviously, you can try to block them outright whether by uninstalling the app or installing a blocker. This may work for some, but it only takes a single lapse in judgment to reinstall an app or bypass a block, and it’s really easy for these override maneuvers to simply become mechanical habit, functionally identical to not being there at all. You could, of course, try to escalate the situation—have a friend or partner set the app blocking password, so you can’t enter it yourself, and many app blocking apps on both iOS and Android can be granted admin privileges to prevent them from being uninstalled or easily bypassed. But I don’t think you need to.

Adding a delay as brief as six seconds can give you a chance to reflect and rethink your use of the app or website. This is what I do, using the browser extension LeechBlock NG on my computer and the free version of the app Ascent on my phone—though, LeechBlock NG is sort of confusing to configure, and I can only hope that Ascent doesn’t remove key features from its free version. Especially when I started, I caught myself absentmindedly activating addicting apps an alarming amount, and I’ve definitely noticed a significant decrease in my use of them since I implemented this system. It’s important to use those seconds to actually reflect, especially since it can be easy to submit to numbing nothingness and zone out. You ultimately have to make a decision about how you’ll use that time. You can also reclaim this reflection while you’re using the app itself. I really like the strategy outlined by HGModernism in a video about social media addiction:

HGModernism:
Before you open your app, start a five-minute phone timer. When the timer is up, pause the app, and ask yourself the following questions.

First question: "How did this experience make me feel?" Neutral: "Is there something else I could do that would make me feel something?" Positive: "What else could I be doing that would also give me that feeling?" Negative: "Is there a useful way for me to harness this negative energy, or is it just draining me?"

Second question: "Was this a good use of my time? Did it bring me closer to others, update my understanding of the world, or even calm or relax me in a way that will give me the energy to do something else I enjoy?" 

Now restart the timer, go back to your app, and repeat.[39]

I really like this strategy because it allows you to restore the self-awareness these platforms want you to lose, while still allowing you to use them. It also feeds back into helping you dampen your desire. Remember from earlier that excessive TikTok use has been tied to flow state, but not enjoyment. You may discover that, most of the time, you don’t actually enjoy using these platforms as much as you thought you did, discouraging future use. Regarding this technique, the tools I mentioned earlier, LeechBlock NG and Ascent, are both capable of automatically providing these periodic reminders for reflection—and of course, the same disclaimers from earlier apply. Additionally, a commenter on the video has a similar, simpler strategy: starting by scrolling down a bit and then reading in reverse, which provides a point for reflection when you get back to the top.

I don’t believe you need to quit social media cold turkey to have healthier Internet usage. You just need to be aware of your own thoughts and feelings, something that can be done by managing your desire and adding just a little bit of friction to the experience.

---

Despite the inexplicable impact The Seventh Seal (Zoomer Edition) had on me, something was really bothering me. I still hadn’t watched the original Seventh Seal. I still hadn’t done what I had initially set out to do. I told myself I would, but it ended up sitting on the backburner for a while. The more time passed, the greater the mystique surrounding the original film was to me. Like I wondered when I first watched Zoomer Edition, what have I been missing out on for all this time? Yet, I still didn’t watch it. Maybe part of me was scared that I still wouldn’t be able to pay attention. That Subway Surfers and oddly satisfying videos weren’t strong distractions—I was just weak.It’s not the right time. I’m not in the right headspace for something this heavy. I’ll watch it tomorrow. I kept coming up with excuses, hoping to avoid this film and whatever it contained. But I couldn’t run away forever.

I was at the used bookstore, browsing. After looking through books, CDs, and Hatsune Miku figurines, I stepped into another aisle. I started scanning through the shelves, until, suddenly, I stopped, surprised. Two years after I had first faced the demons of distraction, there it was. The Seventh Seal. I couldn’t escape it. One Blu-ray disc’s worth poorer, it was at last time to face my fears head on. I sat down, slotted in the disc, and let it begin.

---

The Seventh Seal[40] is a film about God and death. This is fitting, considering it takes place in Sweden during the Black Death, right after the Crusades. The film begins with the character of the Knight, as he becomes face-to-face with Death itself. In a desperate attempt to cling onto what little life remains for him, he challenges Death to a game of chess. If the Knight wins, he may continue to live. And as the Knight and his Squire continue to travel around a plagued Sweden, his game of chess slowly and inevitably marches forward.

What leads the Knight to hold on to life so tightly? There are two internal conflicts that create his desperation. The first is his wavering confidence in his belief in God—his lack of knowledge about what happens after he dies leaves him with a deep-seated fear of death. The second is the animosity he feels towards his own life, which he describes as “nothing but futile wandering and pursuits”—he wants to perform just “one meaningful act” before he faces God, the abyss, or whatever it is that lies beyond the veil.

Thus leads to the central question The Seventh Seal asks its cast of characters: In the absence of answers about God, how do you live your life? Where do you find meaning? It’s a simple question, but it’s also one without an easy answer. Of course, that doesn’t mean there aren’t a ton of answers, though most of them are, ultimately, distractions.

The Seventh Seal wields its historical setting to create burning dramatic irony, portraying actions from the past that we now see as horrifically futile. As the Black Death spread across Europe, a growing group of people began to practice self-flagellation. Believing the plague to be punishment from God, the flagellants would whip and scourge their bodies, hoping their suffering would bring mercy from the heavens.[41] It didn’t.

There’s another character the Knight comes across, further highlighting the futile places people look for meaning. This character is a girl who many think is the origin of the plague, including herself. She claims that the Devil lives in her eyes, and that you can see him simply by looking there. But when the Knight peers into her eyes, all he sees is “dumb terror […] nothing else”. In the end, she’s burned at the stake, senselessly, needlessly.

There are other places people try to find meaning in The Seventh Seal. There’s the Knight’s Squire, who turns to bitter cynicism. There’s Raval, who turns to petty thievery. There’s Skat and Plog and Lisa, who engage in a romantic(?) dance of cheating and revenge. And then there are the actors Jof and Mia. They find meaning in life a couple of ways, the most crucial one being the time they spend with each other, as well as with their son, Mikael. This attitude seems to do them well. They’re undoubtedly the happiest characters in the film—perhaps the only ones truly happy in the first place. By the end of the movie, these characters are the only important ones not to be reaped by Death. This leads me to believe that the film treats Jof and Mia as having the true “answer” to the question posed earlier. In the absence of answers about God, how do you live your life? Where do you find meaning? By bringing joy to others and yourself through kindness and connection.

This message is perfectly illustrated through a scene that takes place when the Knight first encounters Jof and Mia. The two offer the Knight fresh strawberries and milk, and they, alongside the Squire and his servant, partake in the snack. While eating, the Knight talks about some of his inner turmoils—noting that it all feels “insignificant all of a sudden”. He continues:

The Knight: I will remember this moment. The stillness, the dusk, these wild strawberries, this bowl of milk, your faces in the evening light. Mikael asleep, Jof with his lyre. I'll try to remember what we spoke of, and I'll hold that memory in my hands like a bowl full to the brim with fresh milk.

Some time after this interaction, Death asks the Knight if his reprieve was “of some use”—if he was able to perform his one meaningful act. He says he was.

As a character, Death is omnipresent—always lurking in the background, ready for when the time comes. The Knight tries his best to outsmart Death—ironically attempting a gambit consisting of “a combination of bishop and knight”, a symbol of his time fighting in the Crusades.[42] But, inevitably, he loses. In the end, you can’t cheat Death, and you can’t outrun Death. One of the Knight’s main struggles was his thirst for knowledge about what happens after death. In his unease, he asks Death itself. But Death doesn’t know, and perhaps doesn’t even care. The answer to the Knight’s question isn’t of particular concern to Death—no matter what happens after you die, you will die.

And so, if there isn’t meaning to be found in death, the best you can do before that inevitability is to find meaning and fulfillment in life through time and kindness shared with others. It’s a perfectly imperfect answer—if cherished memories are to be held like a bowl of fresh milk, then perhaps these memories are as fleeting as life itself. Milk spoils. But that doesn’t make these moments and memories worthless. No, their impermanence makes them all the more valuable. After his “one meaningful act” is complete, the Knight cannot let go of his fear of death. In fact, he becomes even more desperate to hold onto life. But the character of the fear is different. He’s no longer scared that his life had been meaningless. Instead, he now wants to protect the meaning he’s found.

I loved The Seventh Seal, once I had finally watched it. The cinematography, soundtrack, and performances were all masterful. The film came with impeccable timing, too—it held a lot of the questions and anxieties I had when I watched it. And, ultimately, my worries about watching it ended up being for naught. I didn’t have a single problem paying attention during The Seventh Seal. It’s a phenomenal film, rich with narrative and visual depth in every scene.

Like, for example, one of my favorite shots in the film occurs shortly after the strawberries and milk scene I mentioned earlier. In it, the Knight’s game of chess against Death creates a frame around the characters that the Knight had just spent valuable time with. It’s as if to communicate that the very inexorability of death, and therefore the very transience of life, makes every moment spent with each other all the more meaningful.

(subway surfers and oddly satisfying videos slowly slide in)

Right.

So, the funniest thing about The Seventh Seal (Zoomer Edition) is how it actually seems to play off of the themes established in the original Seventh Seal? In the same way that all of these characters, trying to find meaning, end up falling prey to distractions, the Subway Surfers and oddly satisfying videos are right there as literal distractions. It’s even to the point that, when I first watched it, the silly sidebars of slime and subways obscured the very message of finding meaning that was present in the original movie. That’s what I had missed out on.

And besides, how am I supposed to spend that valuable time with others if I’m just constantly consuming content alone on my phone? How can I truly share kindness on a platform that taints every facet of its experience with the need to vie for your time and attention above all else? The Seventh Seal depicts a multitude of dead-ends and red herrings in the search for meaning. The Seventh Seal (Zoomer Edition) simply adds one more ingredient to that pot.

This single stupid, stupid addition to the margins ends up adding this absurd, deeply ironic layer of texture and meaning to the original film. And it’s…kinda genius??? I don’t know if Piper Paige, the creator of this edit, intended this or not. The only comments I’ve seen her make about this video are essentially just saying this bit is hilarious (which, objectively, it is).[2][43] And I really don’t know if she would’ve wanted me to examine it to this idiotic degree. But, regardless, this asinine analysis I’ve accomplished gives me a deeper appreciation not just for the satire underpinning The Seventh Seal (Zoomer Edition), but, somehow, for the brilliant themes of the original Seventh Seal. I…can’t believe I’m saying this. Am I insane? Maybe I’m just insane.

---

The Seventh Seal is a film that means a lot to many people. It’s even been referenced in Muppets Most Wanted. And now, it’s a film that’s incredibly important to me, too, albeit in a wild way. It’s extremely silly, but the strong emotional reaction, let alone the actual substantial change it brought to my life cannot be understated. I feel like there’s already a bit of an innate understanding that services like Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and even more traditional social media platforms like Twitter and Reddit may not be the best for us, but it takes a lot more than that knowledge to actually evoke change. And, in my case, The Seventh Seal (Zoomer Edition) was a strange piece of that puzzle…

Vsauce: Have you seen those videos where it's a split screen and one part of it is a Family Guy clip and the other part is just someone cutting up slime? [...] We get panicky about like "Oh, attention spans", and, "What's wrong with us", and all of this, and I'm like, "Hmm, what is really going on here?" [...] Before TikTok, before the Internet, people would talk to each other but, like, watch the birds, *at the same time*.

Anthony Padilla (sarcastically): Wait, people had short attention spans *in the past*?!

Vsauce: People would divide their attention. They would talk on the phone, and they would also watch the cars driving by on their street. [...] It's just human behavior doing what it's always done for tens of thousands of years, but with a new costume on.[44]

In some ways, Michael Vsauce is right. Multitasking isn’t new. Attention grabbing isn’t new. But the actual problem here isn’t either of those things. The problem, unique to social media, is the churn of the algorithmic addiction machine, prioritizing “engagement” over the very social connections it claims to create. And that is new. I also think it’s interesting that the examples he gives for multitasking in the past both involve directly spending time with other people. Like, these are not the same thing as watching Family Guy and Subway Surfers simultaneously. When we’re so surrounded by complex algorithmic feeds, it’s easy to feel as if it has always been this way. It hasn’t. And it doesn’t need to continue like this, either. It’s completely possible to reclaim your attention, something I hope I’ve made clear.

Life is full of distractions. It was true during the Middle Ages. It was true in 1957, when The Seventh Seal was made. And it’s true now—we may even have distractions more powerful than ever before. But, like how death creates a frame around the quality time we spend, these distractions make it even more important to actively and consciously protect what little time we have. By being more thoughtful about social media and algorithmic feeds—by adding friction and reflection back to my experience—I can take back some of that time, and I’ll hold it in my hands like a bowl of fresh milk.

---

Watch on YouTube

When I’m feeling alone, or stressed, or otherwise down, I often turn to Yuru Camp. I doubt this is a surprise to anyone familiar with the anime or manga. Yuru Camp, often localized as Laid-Back Camp, has an almost absurdly simple premise: “some girls go camping”. And if you were to ask a fan of Yuru Camp to describe it in one word, “cozy” is almost certainly the answer you’d get. Some may even pull out the Japanese word “iyashikei” (癒し系), which often translates to “healing”. This sort of thing is not terribly unique. Anime and manga are filled with relaxing stories, often constructed as a cozy reprieve from the harsh realities of salary work. There are plenty of Western films and shows that bring a comfy vibe, especially those centered around the holiday season. Heck, Twitch and YouTube livestreams are now where a lot of people turn to for comfort. There’s no shortage of cozy media. Yet, despite all of the options available, Yuru Camp is the one I turn to nearly every time. In one way or another, Yuru Camp is special to me.

---

In some ways, the reason why is quite simple: I love camping, and Yuru Camp deeply reminds me of it. I was in Boy Scouts for the majority of my childhood, and one of the reasons why was that I thoroughly enjoyed the camping and backpacking trips I went on. And, as a result, I have a decent amount of experience in the outdoors. So, one thing that honestly really surprised me when I first watched Yuru Camp was the realistic way it depicted camping. One of the very first scenes of the show has Rin, a seasoned camper, setting up her tent. And we get, in a fully animated sequence, shots of Rin laying out a tarp, unfurling her tent, assembling the tent poles, attaching the tent to the poles with a combination of hooks, clips, and cables, laying out the rainfly, and staking it with a rock. Or, in other words, we get a complete, step-by-step list of instructions for how to pitch a tent, all without a single line of dialogue. And that’s not even to mention all of the narrated instructions and tips sprinkled throughout the show. Yuru Camp has a lot to teach, such as how to start a campfire, the pros and cons of various sleeping bag materials, how to safely split wood, or how to build a DIY alcohol stove—and why you may not want to use one. And most importantly, Yuru Camp includes a plethora of camp cooking recipes to follow. Some friends and I even cooked sukiyaki on a campout after seeing it on the show.

Yuru Camp’s depiction of camping is honestly quite grounded, containing the sorts of details that can really only come from an author who’s an avid camper themselves. Sometimes, it takes the form of the exasperation expressed by the characters when they look at the often eyewateringly expensive prices of camping gear. And, I mean, what other series like this has an entire companion book on the equipment the characters use? Sometimes, it’s a lot more subtle—one detail I recently noticed was that Toba-sensei, the girls’ club advisor, wears glasses while camping, but (presumably) wears contacts elsewhere. And, yeah, I know a lot of people that do exactly that—with all of the dirt and dust that exist outside, contacts can be a bad idea. But it’s not a detail that Afro, Yuru Camp’s author, had to include. But they did, and I really appreciate it.

The grounded nature of Yuru Camp is also deeply ingrained into how it captures the vibe of camping. The realistic depiction of camping itself certainly contributes. But beyond that, Yuru Camp’s coziness is elevated by its presentation. Backgrounds are rendered with painterly detail, less focused on a dramatic romanticization of nature than in capturing what’s truly there. The locations featured in Yuru Camp exist in real life, of course, and I find it absolutely adds to the show’s groundedness. This is an aspect of the show that was only further emphasized in season three, after animation was moved to studio 8-bit, with studio Creative Freaks painting the show’s background art. And I mean, just look at it. It’s beautiful.

Yuru Camp’s soundtrack also contributes a ton to its immaculately cozy vibe. Soft guitars evoke the image of huddling around a campfire. Whistled melodies contribute a lighthearted, carefree tone. Tracks like “kyanpujounothema mososuko” (キャンプ場のテーマ～本栖湖～) build a sense of wonder, while tracks like “solo camp no susume” (ソロキャン△のすすめ) have the ability to melt my heart whenever they play. I don’t know what else to say. It feels like camping. It feels like home.

I always get a certain sense of nostalgia from Yuru Camp. I guess that’s because when I watch it, I’m reminded of my own experiences camping, and how much simpler my life was then. The ordinary stressors of my life today—school, job applications, everything else—they don’t matter—don’t exist—on a camping trip. When the girls wander into a restaurant from the scent of its food or make an impromptu onsen trip, it captures the feeling of freedom you get in the outdoors, a place where there’s so much less you’re forced to do. It captures the joy of aimlessness. Camping is in many ways a brief escape from society, and Yuru Camp is not only able to realistically depict the motions and technicalities of camping, it authentically recreates the vibe of camping, bringing that brief escape to video form.

---

There’s a specific feeling I get at the end of a camping trip that’s a little hard to describe. I’m absolutely filled with exhaustion, but at the same time I feel refreshed, renewed. I feel like at least part of this is from the fact that being in nature, disconnected from the rest of the world, gives you the chance to shift your mindset a little. There are certain lessons you internalize on a camping trip, lessons that make camping more meaningful than mere escapism. A lot of these lessons are reflected in Yuru Camp, too, and to me, it makes the show refreshing in much the same way as camping itself. I’d like to discuss some of these lessons—both how I experienced them myself, and how they’re represented in Yuru Camp—because I think it’s truly important to how Yuru Camp captures the core of camping.

I was eleven years old, and it was my first time going to summer camp. Alongside earning merit badges and buying way too much candy and soda, one of the activities I participated in was a sort of “wilderness night”. In other words, a dozen or so of us were to hike to a remote part of the forest and spend the night without a tent or any other shelter. Looking back, it’s kind of insane that we were allowed to spend a night literally in the middle of the Sierras, supervised only by a couple of college-age staff members. And to be honest, I wasn’t looking forward to it then, either. I was already feeling lonely and homesick, even though my dad was with me at the summer camp. And since my dad wouldn’t be attending this adventure, I would lose my one connection to home. I’m pretty sure I cried on the outbound hike. But to this day, I’m still so glad I went. After laying out our sleeping pads and sleeping bags across the dirt, as well as an admittedly delicious meal of barbecue baked beans, the sun set, and there really wasn’t anything left to do besides sleep and stare at the sky. As the stars slowly started to show themselves, I saw something spectacular.

I had always assumed that pictures of the night sky weren’t real. That those beautiful images showcasing the brilliance of the Milky Way weren’t just exaggeration but in some way a fabrication. I mean, I grew up surrounded by light pollution. I didn’t know what night actually looked like. So, to look up to witness what appeared to be one of those pictures—to not just see it, but to be enveloped by it—it was sublime. I wish I could convey exactly what it was like.

One by one, the other scouts fell asleep—we would have to wake up at six in the morning, anyway. But I didn’t. I couldn’t help but continue to cast my sight towards the stars. Looking up, transfixed by the endless expanse of space, I felt truly and utterly alone. And it was one of the greatest feelings I have ever felt. Before I knew it, it was four o’clock, and only then did I finally drift off into sleep.

The biggest lesson I took from this experience (alongside the dire need to reduce light pollution) was the joy of appreciating solitude. Being alone doesn’t mean I have to feel lonely. I can truly enjoy myself, surrounded with solitude. I think that’s one of the greatest things about camping. It teaches you to appreciate loneliness.

Rin[1]: It’s camping all the same, but the outdoors is different when you’re alone. The things you see, the things you eat… And you get to spend time contemplating things. I think solo camping is a way to appreciate loneliness.

One of Yuru Camp’s themes is that both group activities and solo activities are fun and worth doing, something I find most apparent in Rin and Nadeshiko’s character arcs. Rin is an avid solo camper. She mostly camps during the winter, partially because it makes warm soups and onsen trips all the more pleasant, and partially because there aren’t other campers around. One night, on one of her camping trips, she encounters (and is jumpscared by) Nadeshiko. Nadeshiko, a girl with a bubbly and outgoing persona, had fallen asleep on her trip to see Mount Fuji, leaving her with no way to get home until morning. Rin shares some of her Curry Cup Noodles with Nadeshiko, who quickly falls in love with the outdoors, so much so that she immediately joins the Outdoors Activities Club at her new high school. The club is tiny, its only members besides Nadeshiko being these girls, Aki and Inuko, and their “club room” is sized accordingly. Notably, Rin is not a member, despite attending the same school. In fact, she makes an active effort to avoid Nadeshiko and the Outdoors Activities Club, not wanting to deal with the socialization, though Rin’s friend Ena ensures the socialization happens anyway.

Inuko: Do you have a tent?
Ena: Oh, no, no. I asked that girl over there.
Rin: Hey...[2]

Season one has the sort of plot progression you’d expect from a show like this. Rin and Nadeshiko become friends, and Rin eventually learns to enjoy camping with others, even joining the Outdoors Activities Club on their outings. A lot of anime, both cozy and not, tend to focus on the importance and value of spending time with others, and Yuru Camp is no exception. Though, I find it differs in a couple of notable ways, such as the fact that Rin’s tendency to solo camp is never treated as a negative trait by the show. She isn’t someone that needs to abandon her loner ways and learn to embrace the group dynamic. While she grows to enjoy group camping, simultaneously, she still solo camps all the same. And these solo camp scenes are given the same comfy cozy treatment as the rest of the show; the same beautiful landscapes, the same heartwarming soundtrack. Yuru Camp sees just as much value in being alone as it does being in a group. And I don’t think that it’s any more clear than in how Nadeshiko grows in season two.

Nadeshiko[3]: I love going camping with everyone, but I want to try solo camping like Rin-chan, too.

When Rin talks about why she still enjoys solo camping, even though she now enjoys group camping, the idea of “appreciating loneliness” sticks with Nadeshiko. So, she decides to learn from Rin and go on a solo camping trip herself. She really enjoys it, and this scene, where she looks at the night landscape, tucked in a sleeping bag, is honestly one of the coziest of the entire show.

Nadeshiko[4]: From now on, I want to alternate between solo camping and group camping.

Nadeshiko’s arc in many ways can be seen as the reverse of Rin’s arc. While Rin learns to enjoy group camping, Nadeshiko learns to enjoy solo camping. At the same time, however, they both learn the same thing: both group activities and solo activities can and should be appreciated.

I, of course, love to do stuff with my friends. But being an introvert with sometimes subpar social skills often puts me in the position of being alone, something I’ve been subconscious about for as long as I can remember. What both my experiences camping and Yuru Camp remind me is that it’s okay to be alone sometimes, and I find that truly valuable.

---

A few years after my “wilderness night” experience, I was once again at a summer camp, this time working towards the Wilderness Survival merit badge. One of the requirements for the merit badge, and therefore one of the activities we’d partake in for this class, was not unlike the “wilderness night”. Once again, we’d be hiking out to a spot away from the campgrounds and spending the night under the stars. The difference, however, was that we couldn’t bring items like sleeping bags. Instead, we were to build our own shelter out of whatever we can find, and emergency supplies like space blankets, thin sheets of plastic that effectively reflect body heat. We were learning how to survive, of course. One of my friends was taking the class with me, so we decided to work together on a shared shelter. We each had a space blanket, so we decided to use one as a shared blanket, and the other for the roof of our so-called “lean-to”.

Night eventually fell, and we went to sleep. I woke up in the middle of the night, cold. No longer was I covered by the warmth of our shared space blanket. My friend had hogged it all for himself! With the slightest hint of annoyance, I pulled the blanket back and fell asleep again. Again, I woke up in the middle of the night, cold. No longer was I covered by the warmth of our “shared” space blanket…it had happened again! With a bit more annoyance, I re-re-retrieved the blanket back and once again fell asleep. In the middle of the night, I woke up again, still cold. Now a habit, I tugged at the blanket. It didn’t budge. Huh. I tugged a bit harder. Nothing. I peeked over, only to realize that my friend was now lying atop part of the blanket. Oh. Even though I most definitely should’ve, I didn’t want to wake him up and bother him. So, I sulked. Maybe the rage would keep me warm. It didn’t.

Minutes passed. What had started as snappy but survivable soon shifted to a shiver. At some point, I stood up, tore our roof off, and restored its intended use as a blanket. Because space blankets work by reflecting body heat, I didn’t feel immediate warmth. In fact, I didn’t feel any warmth for several minutes. Slowly but eventually, I was finally returning to a comfortable body temperature, and I was finally able to sleep.

The next morning, as I was reluctantly getting up, my friend told me, “I had trouble sleeping last night ‘cause you kept stealing the blanket.” I couldn’t help but laugh.

“Be prepared” is the Scout motto, and it’s one of the most important virtues to learn in Scouting. Things don’t always go to plan—our plan to share a single blanket, for example, absolutely did not work out. The value of preparedness is that it allows for things to go awry. Hypothermia is no joke, but because we each brought space blankets, what I got from the experience is a fun anecdote, not some sort of physical or emotional trauma. In other words, when you’re prepared, it’s okay for things to go off plan.

Going back to Yuru Camp, this theme is prevalent throughout the series. In terms of preparedness, I’ve already mentioned the ways in which Yuru Camp realistically discusses camping gear and instructions, which serve to prepare both the girls and the viewers for outdoor adventures. And it’s pretty frequent for things not to go to plan in Yuru Camp. When Rin is traveling to Mount Takabocchi, her onsen plans are hit with a roadblock when the onsen she visits is closed for the season. And that’s not even to mention the literal roadblock she faced on her trip to Kamiina. Perhaps my favorite instance of foiled plans takes place during a Outdoors Activities Club New Year’s excursion. After watching the first sunrise of the year from Mount Minobu, Aki plans for the group to the village of Takaori, where they can witness Diamond Fuji.

Narrator: Diamond Fuji. So called for its diamond-like appearance, it refers to the sun rising behind the volcanic peak of Mount Fuji. And because of Mount Fuji’s height, the sunrise occurs later than usual.
Aki: Sunrise at Mount Minobu was at seven. Diamond Fuji will be visible from Takaori in Fujikawa City at 7:50.[5]

The group races to the viewpoint, making it just barely by 7:50 and…

Toba-sensei: It’s...way up there already.
Aki: Oh, the Diamond Fuji sunrise was at 7:20. Whoops![5]

The vast majority of mishaps in Yuru Camp are treated in a carefree, often lighthearted way. Part of this is due to the fact that the girls have the requisite gear and knowledge to thrive in the outdoors—they’re generally pretty well prepared. Generally.

When Inuko, Ena, and Aki went winter camping in Omama, their initially chill trip turned unexpectedly chilly. They had neglected to check the weather forecast, so they weren’t properly prepared for a temperature far below freezing, their issues compounding as their phones all die from the cold. What proceeds is one of the only stressful scenes in the whole show.

Inuko[6]: I think we got in a little over our heads once we started getting used to winter camping…

With inadequate gear, no firewood, and no way of contacting home, this scene shows the sort of danger one may subject themselves to if they go camping unprepared. Though the girls are luckily bailed out by some friendly campers nearby, as well as quick action from Rin and Toba-sensei, the message is clear.

Toba-sensei[6]: You need to do your research and be thoroughly prepared. Winter camping can be very dangerous. This could have been an incident. […] I’m so glad you’re all safe.

Preparedness is one of the most important aspects of camping, and being prepared means that mishaps need not sow anxiety. Yuru Camp makes preparedness a core component of its story, further bringing the experience of camping to the page or screen.

---

Perhaps the pinnacle of my Scouting career was the expedition I made to Philmont. Philmont is an area of forest in New Mexico, owned by the Boy Scouts of America, where I was to embark on a backpacking trip with other scouts in my troop. For ten days, we’d live only off what we could carry on our own backs, hiking from campsite to campsite. I was truly excited for the trip—books like Hatchet and My Side of the Mountain, as well as my aforementioned nights under the stars, left me with a romanticized idea of wilderness survival. This excitement continued even through our time at base camp, the Tooth of Time rock formation welcoming us to the forest that would be our home. And though I was thoroughly prepared in all tangible ways, my trip would be off to a rocky emotional start.

In hindsight, it’s kind of obvious that I would get homesick, especially considering the ways in which I had to adjust to my new life in the outdoors. It wasn’t easy work. From tying bear bags to managing our drinkable water to the hiking itself, there was a lot to do, and at first, it was honestly overwhelming. Though, what ultimately broke me was learning how we were to finish our meals.

Guide: You don’t wanna be dumping any chunks of food in the sumps, so before you clean your bowl, pour a bit of water in, swirl it around, and chug! I call it the “human sump”.

This—this is my life now.

For the first few nights, I would cry to myself in my tent, the thought of slurping soaked snacks seared upon my skull. Faster than I realized, though, my mood shifted upward. I’m not even sure why. Maybe it was the sight of the increasingly stunning landscapes I saw as we scaled the mountains. Maybe it was the growing camaraderie among the crew. Or, maybe it was simply my perspective. The homesickness I originally felt turned to a pleasant sense of solitude, as I became enamored by the beautiful silence of the outdoors. The palette of tasks we had to do everyday turned from a source of stress to a source of peace, because if we tie our bear bags and we manage our water, our water will be plentiful and our bear attacks won’t.

Ultimately, Philmont was a trip of adventures and misadventures for all of us. Between sleep-deprived singing, flooding tents, and a surprise attack of sleet, there was no shortage of memorable moments. And when we finally reached the end of our journey, the sense of accomplishment we shared was unforgettable. The expedition was tough, but worth it. On the bus leaving camp, a guide shared a traditional superstition.

Guide: As we drive away from Philmont, they say if you turn your head towards the Tooth of Time, you’ll come back to Philmont, sometime in your life.

I think it’s telling that every single one of us turned our heads.

Rin[7]: This isn’t working so well. I don’t want a campfire, though. They’re a pain to start, and they get so smoky, and the sparks put holes in your clothes.

Yuru Camp may be consistently comfy, but that doesn’t mean that it portrays camping as easy. Camping gear is expensive, so all of the girls work part-time to afford it. Rin’s frequent scooter trips, as vibey as they are, are frequently portrayed as incredibly exhausting for her. All of these are difficulties brought on by camping, but they’re ultimately worth the effort. The comedic tone of some of these scenes really sells it. When you can have a laugh at the situation’s expense, you know that memories are being made.

Aki: It’s more memorable when you have to struggle a little.
Inuko: That’s true, I guess. Camping’s pretty fun when you actually try it out. I want to go again.[8]

On their way to a camping trip along the Oi River, Rin and Nadeshiko’s friend Ayano visit the various suspension bridges along the river. One of the bridges, Lake Hatanagi Ootsuribashi, was painful to visit, requiring a long hike on muddy roads. Not only that, the bridge itself was narrow and wobbly, making it absolutely terrifying to cross. Later that trip, Nadeshiko cooked a dish, fashioned to resemble Lake Hatanagi. The bridge Rin and Ayano carefully crossed was represented by a chili pepper, and it was while enjoying that meal they had a realization.

Rin: Spicy!
Ayano: But so good!
Nadeshiko: Right?
Ayano: I get it. It’s like how it’s scary to cross the bridge, but it’s actually fun when you think back on it.[9]

There’s a concept I learned on another adventure: the idea that there are two types of fun. Type I Fun is fun that you have in the moment. Type II Fun isn’t fun in the moment, but when you eventually look back at those maybe miserable moments, they were fun. You just didn’t know it at the time. This is something I think about a lot. Not every struggle will be Type II Fun, of course, but it gives me hope to know that some will be.

And sometimes, it’s the difficulty itself that makes the reward all the greater. I think there’s no better proof than in how food always tastes better while camping. Because when the day’s done, and you’re exhausted and sore, there’s no better reward for your efforts than a hearty meal, no matter how plain.

Rin[10]: Was this stuff always this good?

Like how both Rin and Nadeshiko fell in love with the outdoors after eating Curry Cup Noodles, when I was at Philmont, even the simplest of stews could scrumptiously satiate my stomach, “human sump” aside.

Camping isn’t always easy, but it rewards you for your efforts, in some ways immediately, and in other ways long after the trip is over. And I think because of that, it has a way of always drawing me back.

Rin[7]: I know my face is going to dry out. I know I’m going to smell like smoke. But nothing beats this warmth.

---

I find it really interesting that the Yuru Camp Movie doesn’t take place in high school. Instead, it timeskips a few years, showing the cast as working adults. Sure, as an anime-original movie, it has to deviate from the source material in some way. But, high school settings are common in cozy anime for a sense of nostalgic escapism. A choice was made to grow the characters up, when they just as easily could’ve made a side story still set in high school. One of the first conflicts of the film has Rin, now a magazine editor in Nagoya, struggling to successfully pitch a story to her superiors. Other lame aspects of adulthood are also depicted.

Rin[11]: Our schedules never really line up anymore.

Why would the cozy camping anime put its viewers face-to-face with the mundane struggles of their own everyday lives? It’s as if the movie’s asking itself, “How do you apply the lessons of the show to adulthood?”

Luckily, the answer is pretty straightforward. You just kind of do. Like in the show, the movie treats both group and alone time with comforting respect.

Rin[11]: It’s been ages since I’ve had a whole weekend off. This is the best.

The movie, like the show, still teaches new recipes and skills, this time the skills learned focused more on manual labor than camping. In fact, a surprising amount of the story is just manual labor, as the girls work together to restore an abandoned patch of land into a new campsite. But even this is treated with a sense of relaxing charm, eventually paying off when the campsite is completed.

Nadeshiko[11]: We get to share the things we enjoy with other people. Then those people share it in turn. And we can make places where things like that happen all the time.

The Yuru Camp Movie takes everything great about the show and nudges you with it, reminding you that you can bring its coziness into your own life.

The best part is that it works, on me, at least.

Winter break was just beginning, and though my roommates had already headed home, I had a few more days before I could see my family and friends again. It was to snow pretty hard that night, which meant I would have to hole up alone in my apartment. Even before night fell, it got lonely pretty quickly. I knew I had to do something to feel less lonely, so I put on an episode or two of Yuru Camp. As the girls enjoyed a helping of shrimp and tomato risotto, I prepped a pot of shabu-shabu. And as Rin, alone, finished her trip home from a campout, I, alone, finished eating a bowl. Eating hotpot and watching TV isn’t anything special, but this brief moment was. Like Rin and Nadeshiko in the show, and like me during my night spent under the stars, I was at last appreciating loneliness.

And when I was taking notes for this very video on a cramped flight, hunched over my notebook as episodes played on my phone, at one point I simply wrote, “This show is making my flight less miserable.”

When I’m feeling alone, or stressed, or otherwise down, I often turn to Yuru Camp. I turn to Yuru Camp because it reminds me of all of the memories I’ve made camping, and the lessons I’ve learned from it. Because not only are its vibes immaculate, Yuru Camp has such an authentic and genuine depiction of camping, transcending escapism. There’s a lot to be stressed about these days, and that makes a series as healing and comforting as Yuru Camp very valuable to me. There truly is a lot to it, as seemingly simple of a show it is. And even if it’s not groundbreaking in the ways it relaxes, its ability to evoke my own experiences is what makes it truly special.

---

Watch on YouTube

Minecraft, to me, is many things. It’s a game, of course, and a fantastic one at that. It’s a world to explore—a platform to engage with. It’s also the only way I was able to connect to my childhood basketball teammates. It’s the source of some of my fondest high school memories. There was always something special about Minecraft—something magical, long before Enchanting Tables were added to the game.

Time and time again, I’d return to Minecraft, hoping to relive some of that magic. I mean, it had worked for Club Penguin, right? Yet, time and time again, I’d close the game feeling just a little empty inside. Something was different. What could it be that’s changed?

---

The first version of Minecraft I ever encountered was Minecraft: Pocket Edition LITE, when I was around nine years old. At the time, Minecraft was still pretty much a one-person project. There were only a couple dozen items in the game, and even though there was a form of survival mode, crafting hadn’t even been added to this release yet. And because it was the lite version, I couldn’t even save my world. It was incredibly barebones, but it was enough to hold my interest, even if a lot of that interest was derived from the simple joy of digging straight down.

Minecraft has always had a very unique charm, one that I think you’re already aware of, one that I think you’ve been aware of since the first time you launched the game. When you first open Minecraft, you’re not given an immediate objective. Some games launch you into a dire threat, drawing you in and forcing you to quickly engage. It’s effective game design, but Minecraft isn’t like this. Minecraft doesn’t need a flashy hook to lure you in; the world it quietly drops you in is already enough. A world ready for you to explore, built of cubes, decorated with low-resolution pixel art. Simple enough to easily comprehend, yet expressive enough to construct landscapes, and buildings, and art. There are many “sandbox games” out there, but I think Minecraft is far and away the best representative of the genre. The sand is literally a box.

I would eventually buy the full version of Minecraft for my iPad. Its $7 price tag was intimidating as a kid, but after a brief stint with Survivalcraft, I realized only Minecraft could satisfy the Minecraft itch.

Something I always loved about Minecraft was its sense of discovery. I don’t know exactly how to describe it, but there was always a sense of wonder exploring a Minecraft world—somewhat of a striking unreality to Minecraft’s world generation. My attention would frequently be caught by the tiny islands of floating blocks that may dot the skyline. Simply walking or flying around a Minecraft world was an engaging activity for a new player, even if the world’s borders were very tightly constrained. Discovering the game’s mechanics was also a core part of the experience for me. If you played on Pocket Edition around the same time I did, you may remember an block known as the “Nether Reactor Core”. To me, the block was the source of a great mystery. I had no idea what this block was for. I mean, it sounded cool, but nothing ever happened when I tried to use it. For months, this thing sat in my inventory, its ultimate purpose unknown. It wasn’t until a friend showed me a contraption of cobblestone and gold that I knew the Core’s true purpose, to summon a chunk of the Nether and its inhabitants to the overworld. The mystery was solved. My mind was blown.

Minecraft would become a game I’d play all the time, whether alone, with my sister, or with friends. I can’t say I was any “good” at it, whatever that’s supposed to mean. In Creative, I’d build minecart coasters and only the tackiest of diamond-block houses. I think one house I built even had five-block-thick walls, filled with layers of wool and lava for “insulation”. In Survival, iron was a rare enough resource for me, let alone diamond. I was, however, very proud of the home I built in a Survival world some friends and I played on. It wasn’t anything special, or big, or nice. Just a tiny underground dwelling with a small entrance made of glass. But I don’t know. I really loved it when I was a kid. I can’t pin down why.

Eventually, I stopped playing Minecraft. Even as I grew apart from Minecraft, Minecraft would continue to grow without me. Today, it’s the best-selling video game of all time, with a community that continues to thrive, even despite the actions of some extremely unsavory actors. It also continues to receive frequent updates, no longer the creation of a single individual, but the product of an entire team of developers at Mojang, now a subsidiary of Microsoft. Maybe that’s why it feels so different…?

---

In 2017, Mojang held the first ever Mob Vote, allowing players to pick a mob, or unplayable creature, that would be added in the next update. The result was the Phantom, a creature that pesters you if you’re too sleep-deprived. Mob Votes have since become an annual event, though off the top of my head, I can’t tell you any of the winners. To some, a lot of the Mob Vote winners haven’t really added much to the game beyond something new to look at. They’re one-trick ponies. This seems to be a recurring theme with recent Minecraft updates. Seeing copper ore catches me by surprise every time I start a new world. I’d ask a friend if copper has a purpose yet. I’d get “not really” as a response.

Updates made to Minecraft are also progressively making the game more complicated to play and learn. Minecraft has never had the most intuitive progression. For example, I’m willing to bet you discovered how to build a Nether portal via a friend or online, as opposed to figuring it out within the game itself. Attempts to rectify this have been made, of course, from advancements to ruined portals, but with the continuously widening scope of the game, it can be hard to keep up with all of the new mechanics.

Minecraft is a constantly evolving game, and it’s basically expected at this point for it to receive regular updates. But when additions aren’t tightly integrated into the game’s design, or when they’re added seemingly simply to ship something new to see, should they be added at all? Sometimes, it appears that Minecraft is losing itself, becoming too complex for the elegant simplicity of the old days, whilst remaining too simple to host any truly meaningful mechanical interactions.

I’m not the only nor the first to notice this. Whitelight, for instance, has discussed modern Minecraft’s game design extensively, highlighting these potential issues. There exist communities focused around Minecraft’s “Golden Age”, playing the game as it was at its supposed best.

All of these thoughts I’ve had on the game’s design were no more than theories—conjecture conjured without confirmation. So, I thought I would test my theories by starting a survival multiplayer world with friends on an old version of Minecraft. We picked Beta 1.8.1, the last version before the End was added, and the version I thought was most similar to what I remembered of Pocket Edition. The lack of the End was something I was particularly excited about. We would be encouraged, I thought, to be creative with the world, instead of merely chasing “the end” of the game. The result I got, however, was quite a bit different than I expected.

---

Logging into our new-old server, the first thing I noticed was just how similar the game felt to its modern incarnations. The game’s textures were refreshed and refined years later, but to me both old and new feel unmistakably Minecraft, cut from the same cloth and exhibiting the same essence. You still start a world by punching a tree. Cows, pigs, and sheep still dot the morning landscape. Honestly, it’s kind of shocking how little impact the older version had on my experience playing Minecraft, for better or for worse. After we finished punching trees, we mined through stone, then spotted and smelted iron. After finding a pool of lava, a friend used speedrun strats to build a Nether portal. We explored the Nether for a few minutes, and—

That’s it. We closed the server. We got bored. In terms of our enjoyment, nothing changed. If anything, we enjoyed this “golden age” version less. Why?

Looking at a game’s incentives, its rewards and punishments, can clue us into how the designers want the game to be played. For example, levels in Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga are filled with hidden collectibles. Many of these are inaccessible during a first playthrough because characters with different abilities are required to reach them. The goal of the designers, then, is to encourage players to experiment and play with different characters to explore the world.

So what are Minecraft’s incentives? Well, we could look in-depth at survival mode, discuss how death is punished, and talk about how systems like experience points reward players for engaging with its underbaked combat. We could talk about Minecraft’s confusing path of progression towards The End, and how that affects the game’s (admittedly awful) learning curve. These are all topics I was initially planning to cover in-depth as part of this video. But the thing is, I don’t think any of it really matters. Because Minecraft, at least by my experiences, isn’t a survival game. It’s a sandbox game.

When I look back at what made Minecraft special to me as a kid, this is clear. What stuck with me wasn’t fighting mobs in the night. It was the house I built—not solely for protection but also simply because I thought an underground base was cool. The Nether Reactor Core, perhaps the definition of a one-trick pony, was one of my favorite parts of the game because it provided a sense of discovery and wonder. Minecraft’s recent updates double down on these aspects of the game. Updated world generation and new mobs make Minecraft worlds feel more dynamic and alive than they ever have—the surreal unreality of floating islands replaced with a different, yet still striking, surreal unreality. New biomes give players more to discover. New blocks give players more to build. Kid me would have loved these new versions of Minecraft, probably way more than he did Pocket Edition.

The parts of Minecraft that I gravitated to weren’t survival or the quest to defeat the Ender Dragon. It was building, creating, exploring, discovering. To me and to many other players, this is the core of Minecraft. This is a fact that I don’t think is lost on the developers at Mojang. I think they only want to enhance and expand this core.

But if Minecraft’s changes aren’t why I don’t enjoy the game, what’s the actual reason? The only factor left is the player. The only factor left is…me.

---

Getting bored from doing nothing, I decide to start a new Minecraft world. I quickly encounter a village. After usurping a villager’s home as my own, I wait for night, then falling asleep in the house. The next morning, I reap the wheat planted outside my house, replant the seeds, turn the wheat into bread, and eat. I stand in the house, waiting for nightfall. I go to bed. The next morning, I reap wheat, plant seeds, make bread, eat, wait, and sleep. Again, I reap wheat, plant seeds, make bread, eat, wait, and sleep. I close Minecraft, getting bored from doing nothing.

When I first built an underground base, I thought it was the coolest thing ever. I would make an almost identical base on nearly every world I played on after that, and slowly, priorities shifted. It was no longer about the cool factor—I’d gladly turn the entrance into a greentop if it meant I didn’t have to work for resources. Instead, it was easy. It was safe. And eventually, it was stagnant. I no longer wandered around the world, instead staying close to my base so I wouldn’t lose my inventory. Yes, that behavior comes from the game’s incentives—dying far from home would mean I’d spend a lot of time getting it back. But that didn’t matter to me as a kid. Why should it matter now? In creative, I no longer built tacky diamond houses…I didn’t build at all. If I did, I worried, it would be bad, or lame, or worst of all, cringe. Both in creative and survival, I was afraid to take risks, and I think that says a lot more about me than it does Minecraft. In my fear, I refused to explore. I refused to create. I didn’t just miss Minecraft—I missed the entire point.

It’s kinda funny how games can reveal a player’s personality. I’ve since realized that my adversity to risk in Minecraft in many ways mirrors my adversity to risk in real life. For years, for instance, I’ve wanted to learn how to draw. I didn’t start, telling myself I was “too busy” for it. I now know that wasn’t true. I just didn’t want to draw diamond houses. I’ve also noticed I very easily fall into mundane rhythms if left unchecked, an unbroken cycle of working, eating, and sleeping, getting bored from doing nothing. I stopped enjoying Minecraft because of these fears. And I thought Minecraft was the problem. I missed the Minecraft that I loved as a kid, a Minecraft that never really left. Now knowing what was missing—what changed—I still long for the days I found Minecraft fun. I miss the wonder of exploration, the joy of creating even if my creations sucked. To me, these things are Minecraft. I miss Minecraft.

You probably came to this video because you, too, yearned for “the old days” of Minecraft—for the days when you had fun playing this game. To that end, maybe this resolution is deeply unsatisfying for you. Maybe you did actually enjoy survival mode’s mechanics and progression. Maybe going back to older versions really does fix all of your problems with the game. Or maybe you found joy in one of countless modpacks and their often more complex systems. Everyone experiences Minecraft differently, of course, whether that’s through advanced redstone builds, theme park recreations, or speedrunning—this variety is one of the things that makes it special. There’s a reason why the Minecraft movie is officially titled “A Minecraft Movie”, a detail that may be the only thing I truly liked about that trailer.

---

After shutting down the Minecraft Beta server, I started a new server, running the latest version, 1.20.6. This time, I resolved, I’d force myself to build something different, even if it sucked. In a way an evolution on my old underground bases, I decided to build a space loosely inspired by a location in Dungeon Meshi. It’s no masterpiece, it’s far from done—and, to be honest, I doubt it’ll ever be completed—but, for the first time in a while in Minecraft, I’ve been enjoying myself. I finally started drawing, too, and even though I’m still a noob who knows next to nothing, I can tell that I’m improving and I’m really, truly proud of that.

When I first considered making a video about Minecraft, I fully expected it would be yet another video tearing apart its game design, highlighting how good it Used To Be, and how feature creep and bloat meant its downfall. But, that’s not the video I ended up making. As much as Minecraft’s changed, everything that previously resonated with me is still there. What’s changed much more is, well, me, and I’ll continue to change for as long as I live. But that doesn’t mean Minecraft will never be fun for me again. Because just as quickly as I can swerve to joyless repetitions and succumb to fear, I can choose to reject all that. I can embrace creativity. I can embrace discovery.

I’m on the adventure I make for myself—we all are. And isn’t that what Minecraft is all about?

Watch on YouTube

When I was 10, I had friends whose school gave them iPads. The iPad had only existed for a couple of years now, so schools were excited to see how they could use this brand-new device for education. Kids, however, were excited to see how they could use this brand-new device for anything other than education.

My friends would always try to find ways to get around their school’s blocks on games and social media. PicCollage became an app that everyone at their school used, because Instagram was blocked and this was basically Instagram. One day, one of them showed me a game they started playing–it wasn’t yet blocked because its name looked like it maybe could have been educational. Its gameplay was simple, yet engaging, merely featuring a block dodging spikes. This game was Geometry Dash, and I don’t think I was ready for what was to come.

Geometry Dash, on its surface, looks like any other mobile game–it costs a mere two dollars (four on Steam), alongside a stripped down “lite” version with ads. Like other games, it features daily rewards and content to keep the player coming back for more. Geometry Dash’s gameplay uses only one button cough, and I wouldn’t blame you if you put it in the same pile as other one-touch games like Stack, Crossy Road, and Flappy Bird. I wouldn’t blame you, but you would be wrong. Hiding on the App Store is a gem of a game with a vibrant community, one that’s constantly pushing the boundaries of both creativity and skill. And I honestly haven’t seen anything like it. Geometry Dash is so much more than it appears on its surface. Geometry Dash is more than a mobile game.

---

Largely inspired by games such as The Impossible Game, Geometry Dash released on August 13, 2013, developed by Robert Topala–RobTop. The game launched to moderate success, largely due to the small userbase Rob grew with his previous mobile games, Boomlings, Boomlings Matchup, and Memory Mastermind.

RobTop[1]: I did add cross promotion between all games though, so there was a base social media following (although small) for when I started with GD.

RobTop[2]: I received a few great reviews from news sites, but not enough to have an impact. Since I had no marketing budget it quickly dropped in rankings after release.

The initial version of Geometry Dash was dead simple. You play as this cube. If you tap the screen, you jump. Your goal is to reach the end of the level without dying, whether from a spike or running into a wall. This is…pretty much the exact same gameplay as The Impossible Game. To differentiate itself, Geometry Dash spiced it up with additional mechanics, such as this pink portal, which introduced a brand new gamemode. If you pass through it, you ride a ship, allowing you to fly in the air by holding the screen.

Updates to the game would continue to increase the variety. Update 1.1 released a month later with a new level and the ability to reverse the screen direction. Yet another month later, update 1.2 introduced the ball gamemode, which flips its gravity on a tap. Other updates would introduce mini portals, the UFO gamemode (functioning similar to Flappy Bird), and speed changing portals (That’s not a portal!), among other features.

It was around this time the game really started to grow in popularity. By June 2014, Geometry Dash had garnered over 20 million downloads across its free and paid versions. Entirely through word of mouth, the game rocketed to the top of the App Store charts, where it remains to this day.

This is where things get interesting. On January 16, 2017, Geometry Dash’s 2.1 update would be released to the world. It was an excruciating wait for the GD community. We were used to updates every few months, so for the game to not be updated for almost a year and a half? That sucked, but at least we wouldn’t have to deal with that again. At-at least…

Geometry Dash would not receive another major update for nearly seven years.

For many games, that would be the end. The game would lose popularity, and even if many players stay, it would mean the game’s community would be much smaller than it was at its peak. The game would stagnate, become boring, and eventually drop off into obscurity. So, over the several years without any updates to the game, how the hell did Geometry Dash steadily gain in popularity?![3] What is up with this game?

Ask anyone that actively plays GD what’s so special about it, and you’ll likely get a question back: “Have you seen the level editor?”

ProChara is Splatoon’s largest and most prolific content creator. (I’m going somewhere with this, I promise.) In a collaboration video with another content creator, Bipedal Squid, the two of them analyzed and redesigned some of the game’s maps.[4] Bipedal Squid made some illustrations to demonstrate the changes. These illustrations, as was later revealed, were entirely made using the Geometry Dash level editor, completely unbeknownst to ProChara, and just…(hahaha)[5]

I’ve been a little misleading with the footage I’ve shown so far of the game. Like, yes, this is Geometry Dash. But so is this. And this. And this. The Geometry Dash level editor is somehow able to bring out its players’ creativity in ways unlike anything I’ve ever seen in other games. (Even if I’m not one of those players.)

This is Sedulous, a level which creator Samifying built over the course of three and a half years. The level is chock-full of detail, and it’s obvious that a ton of care and attention went into it. Everything here is made entirely using in-game objects, the exact same set of objects used in the game’s official levels. And yet, Sedulous looks completely different from them. It also looks completely different from other custom levels, which often showcase a wide set of unique styles. One of my favorite levels, for instance, is Between Worlds by xXLOCOXx, which combines beautifully crafted artwork with fantastic sound design and an original score. All of this is absolutely incredible, and it begs the question: how is Geometry Dash such a potent catalyst for creativity?

The answer for this, I think, is the freedom the editor provides. GD creators are given every object and tool RobTop creates for the game’s official levels. In fact, every single official level, when extracted from the game files, can be opened and edited directly in the level editor. By the way, to grab copies of official levels, they’re all uploaded on the account RobTopArchiverRobsVault. Despite the presence of a grid, objects can be freely moved. They can intersect, overlap, and be rotated freely. I actually think this is the secret to Geometry Dash’s level editor, hidden in plain sight. This openness is what allows creators to make custom objects, designs, and even artwork in-game. These days, the game has a vast array of objects and features, each allowing creators to build more and more impressive levels. My favorite level in the entire game, however, doesn’t use any of these modern features. In fact, many of these features didn’t yet exist.

Built by FunnyGame, under the alias Caustic, Death Moon is perhaps the crown jewel of Geometry Dash 1.9. The level editor was a lot simpler back then–only four color channels were available, compared to the 999 we have today. Objects couldn’t be moved or smoothly animated during a level, and the object selection itself was way, way smaller. Yet, this level is beautiful. To create these rotating triangles, FunnyGame cycles the colors of triangles at different points of rotation. Taking advantage of the editor’s freedom of positioning, FunnyGame created birds, background art, and several complex block designs, all to create a thematically cohesive experience of a level. Even by today’s insanely high creating standards, I think Death Moon is fantastic. And I think a feature as simple as the ability to freely position objects is the reason it can exist. The Geometry Dash level editor is powerful to the point it gives geniuses like FunnyGame a canvas to create.

In a way, this amount of power is a double-edged sword. Because we’re essentially working with RobTop’s own developer tools, the editor can be…less than intuitive. I think many new players are intimidated by the editor these days, and it’s really not hard to see why. What the hell is this menu? Why are there so many objects? If others are building masterpieces, and all I can muster is a bad Stereo Madness remake…why bother creating at all?

Even so, the positives of this editor cannot be overstated. Players can build and enjoy levels that harness the full potential of the game’s mechanics, all without modding, because they are given an absurd amount of power in the editor. This is a feature of the game RobTop himself seems proud of.

Robtop[6]:

I try to foresee the needs and things people will do but I keep getting surprised every update. The creators in GD are insane I am impressed all the time. Thats part of what makes it so much fun to work on :)

Super Mario Maker is perhaps the most popular video game level editor. And y’know what? It’s really good! Nintendo made an editor accessible to pretty much anyone, and watching people push the limits of Mario game mechanics is really exciting. Mario Maker levels are fantastic, and can be truly creative, but its editor definitely has its limits. In Super Mario Maker, and nearly every other level editor, you can create levels that are of the aesthetic and mechanics of its original game. Geometry Dash levels are above such limitations. I’ve already shown that GD levels aren’t constrained to the game’s own aesthetic. What if I told you they aren’t constrained to the game’s own mechanics, either?

Geometry Dash update 2.0 was revolution. I was in seventh grade when it first released in 2015, and I remember completely freaking out with my friends over the addition of moving objects into the game. The ability to move objects wasn’t the only groundbreaking addition. By changing the “z layer” of a block you could now hide the player. Objects could also be turned invisible or outright disabled at will. This was accomplished with “triggers”, which change the position, opacity, color, or plane of existence of an object when passing or touching it. Alongside allowing for increasingly varied visual styles in level creation, especially from creators like Echonox and G4lvatron, update 2.0 allowed creators to build levels that didn’t play like Geometry Dash at all. Serponge was the pioneer of this, especially with his “AlterGame” series. Update 2.1 would add even more features for creators, and with nearly seven years to dwell on this version of the game, the community pushed it to its absolute limits.

This is MasterGame, a top-down adventure game created by Serponge, even featuring an NES-like save password system. It is a Geometry Dash level. This is Karting Dash, a simple racing game by MaxyLAND inspired by Mario Kart Wii. It is a Geometry Dash level. This is Brainfugd, a programming puzzle game by Spu7nix. It is a Geometry Dash level. This is WHAT, a 3D rendered level, built by Spu7nix using a programming language he wrote specifically to generate Geometry Dash levels. And NitenTeria didn’t need any sort of programming language to create a softbody physics engine. They just used the Geometry Dash level editor! These are not the sort of things that are normally possible in a level editor, let alone running in an unmodded game! The closest thing I can think of anywhere near this level in a video game would be what people have accomplished with Minecraft redstone. But redstone’s entire purpose is the construction of logic circuits. Geometry Dash wasn’t meant for this–THIS IS INSANE! Of course, not everyone can build…that. I certainly can’t. But, that didn’t stop me from creating…

Purple_The_Pup: My game freezes when I go to a different application while geometry dash is running. I don’t know what the problem is? It’s annoying
Yoichi Isagi: FG’TY’U
Purple_The_Pup: what?[7]

The Geometry Dash Steam discussions page has always been an interesting part of the community. It’s shockingly active, yet it’s divorced almost entirely from the rest of the community. It’s a weird, independent microcosm of Geometry Dash players. A megacollab is a level built collaboratively between several creators, and it was rather common for people on Steam discussions to try to plan them. Very few of them actually were made, but, at some point during 2.0, thirteen-year-old me thought to join one.

Zandit:
So anyway, im doing a megacolab! I am looking for 15 people to sign up.
To sign up, answer the following.
Your Gd Name
Best level id (Could be tiny, just show what you can do.)
What part you want

Toadtoad:
Toadtoad
Best level: FortFlsk; Level ID: 19397704
Btw, that doen't showcase my true capability. I'm working on a…

Zandit:
You're in[8]

One by one, each of the sixteen slots filled with creators, chosen by the level’s host, Zandit. And soon enough, we were ready to begin. It was a rocky road to completion, and all coordination was accomplished entirely through this single Steam discussion thread, spanning 54 pages.

Toadtoad: Wait is it my turn?
SteR: I think CrispApple is decorating Zandit's part, but I may be wrong about that.
Crispapple: I'm not decorating Zandit's part. I just wanted to look at it
SteR: Well then, who is? :L
WatchPiggy: no one ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)[8]

Normally, in a megacollab, everyone builds their part separately before everything is combined into one level. Unfortunately, we had zero clue what we were doing. We were building the level in sequence, passing it from person to person until it was done. In total, it took over seven months to build, and we lost several creators along the way. This is the list of players assigned to build a part in this level, and this is the list of players that actually built a part. We lost over half of the participants, even including the host, somehow. It was an arduous endeavor to build this level, with an endless amount of time spent wrangling into a finished product, and it’s honestly a miracle it was finished to begin with.

Despite all of the work that went into it, the final result, End of Infinity, is nothing to write home about. While some parts, like SteR’s and Crispapple’s, look pretty good by 2.0 standards, others, like mine, never looked good in the first place. A lot of people in the GD community place emphasis on their level getting “rated”, or approved by RobTop. End of Infinity, looking back, was never going to be rated. And I think that’s okay. I have fond memories of building End of Infinity, despite all of the setbacks. There was something special about the whole process. All of us that remained were focused on a single goal–seeing this level through–and I think there was a shared connection from that. And, even though the level isn’t any good, even if no one liked it, or even saw it, I’m proud of it. End of Infinity never brought us any fame or recognition, but, to me at least, the experience building it was worth it.

There’s little in-game incentive to create. Sure, you get likes, and sure, the game tracks your rated levels, but Geometry Dash surely isn’t anything like Roblox where creations can be monetized. And I love it for this. GD Creators are more often than not fueled by passion for the game and its creative potential. As a result, community-made levels have a certain sense of genuineness that I’ve really come to appreciate, whether it’s top of the featured page, or lost in obscurity.

Geometry Dash level creation is an incredibly artistic outlet. And some people are amazing at it. But for those of us that aren’t, it’s still an incredible way to express yourself, connect with others, or simply have some extra fun in the silly little block game for kids. Or, y’know, make lobotomy levels. (Fire in the hole!)

And besides, there’s an entire other aspect of the game I haven’t even begun to discuss. While creators are pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in the level editor, another subset of players are pushing the boundaries of what’s possible…in general.

---

BadgerGFM[9]: What I’m–okay, first question, first question is–are they, do they have spikes in the dark? Like, how do you–(stunned reaction)

Geometry Dash isn’t an easy game. Your first time playing even level one can potentially take hundreds of attempts, despite its approachability. But, with enough time and effort, all of the game’s official levels can be conquered. With that under your belt, you’re prepared for the majority of user-created levels. But owo what’s this? Extweme demon? (death)

Introduced in update 1.3, the demon difficulty was created to represent the absolute hardest levels the game had to offer. Y’know, like The Nightmare. Okay, so obviously, this and Bloodbath are nowhere near the same difficulty. The community had already taken to calling levels like this “extreme demons” anyway, so in update 2.1, demon levels got five tiers of difficulty, ranging from easy to extreme. It’s hard to put into words just how difficult extreme demons are. Even after hundreds of hours of playing the game, beating an easy extreme demon can take tens of thousands of attempts, demanding absolute mastery of the game’s mechanics, alongside pinpoint precision in one’s inputs. And even then, the skill gap between the easiest and hardest extremes may be just as large as the skill gap between easy and extreme demons. Some even argue that more demon difficulties should be added to the game.

This is all to say, WHAT THE HELL? Silent Clubstep, a level created with the express purpose of being physically impossible, and was subsequently hacked on upload, has been beaten?! And it’s not even the hardest level someone has beaten?!?!

At this point, I’m almost inclined to believe that Geometry Dash’s skill ceiling simply does not exist. Over the years, players have consistently overcome the impossible, from Riot conquering Cataclysm, to paqoe beating Silent Clubstep, to Zoink defeating Tidal Wave. I have been playing this game for over a decade now, and this game’s top players never fail to absolutely amaze me, both in terms of their raw skill and the sheer dedication required for these achievements. At 100% speed, does this look possible to you? These people care so much about the game, and because of that, they constitute a core part of the game’s identity. I, unfortunately, can’t really speak too much on top level play–I simply don’t know enough about it, and I’m not anywhere near that level, of skill or of dedication. What I can talk about, though, is the experience of beating an extreme demon, even if these days it’s considered one of the easiest in the game.

Back in 2015, Cataclysm was a level many thought to be impossible. Built by GBoy, the level was hellish, both in its difficulty and its design. It was truly an incredible test of skill for players at the time. It was also hacked. You see, in order to upload a level to the Geometry Dash servers, you first need to beat the level yourself, verifying that the level is possible. GBoy didn’t do that, instead using a cheat to upload the level without having to verify it. This meant that no one really knew if the level was possible in the first place. For months, Cataclysm was left undefeated. But, against all odds, it was conquered, first (but not really) by Cyclic, then by GironDavid, then Sandstorm, and then Riot.

I still remember when Cataclysm was one of the absolute hardest levels in the game. I remember looking up to players like Riot, in awe of their accomplishments in the game. And I remember thinking that I would never be able to do the kinds of things they did. I mean, I was worse at the game than any of my friends that actively played it at the time. While my friends were beating Windy Landscape and 8o, I was sitting struggling with Reanimation. Something like Cataclysm was utterly impossible for me.

I started playing the game less and less as time progressed. I never stopped entirely–Geometry Dash would sit on my phone for whenever I was bored–but I surely wasn’t as active as I was once. Obviously, my skill at the game stagnated, at least until 2.2. The release of update 2.2 completely reinvigorated my motivation to play GD, and this was when my skill actually started to improve. I began playing harder and harder levels, finally beating levels I had struggled on, like Nine Circles. I even beat my first insane demon, Horntail Cave. The entire time I was improving, I had one goal: somehow become good enough to beat Cataclysm.

One day, kinda just for fun, I did a practice run of the level. I noticed that the second half of the level, besides the infamous ship part, wasn’t actually that hard. So I practiced the ship, played from the ball part, and that day completed a 51-100 run of the level.

Wait, could I actually do this?

Over the next few days, I grinded the first half of the level. It was very difficult for me, but as I continued to practice, I got more and more consistent at the level. And as I got more and more consistent, achieving my goal became more and more in reach. For days I obsessed over Cataclysm. For days I spent hours and hours, putting in attempt after attempt, solely trying to beat this one level. Slowly, I inched forward, reaching further into the level as every day passed. Soon enough, though, I hit a wall.

This graph shows the entire level of Cataclysm, and these are my own estimates for the difficulty of each part. The second half is considerably easier than the first, and the parts before and after this ship part are honestly pretty hard to mess up. But man, this ship part was brutal. It’s already very hard to get this far into the level–I would only reach halfway every few hundred attempts–but this ship part would kill me over and over again. I knew I could do it–I did this part before! It was just going to take a while. There are also these silly little spikes right at the end of the level–one last skill check before you succeed. Especially considering how hard the level is as a whole, I was terrified I’d stumble at the finish line. Though, of course, I had to get there first.

I was over an hour and a half into my current play session, and I hadn’t reached the ship part a single time. Overall, I wasn’t playing as well as I had been, and it was already past midnight. I had work the next day, and it would’ve been smart for me to stop now and rest, but I instead told myself I’d stop once I finally reached the ship part. I continued. Another death to the first wave. Another death to the mini ship. Yet another death to the first wave. I, at one point, started playing physics explainer videos in the background to help me stay focused. A death to the 44% cube. Yet another death to the first wave. It was my 439th attempt that session, and I, at last, passed the first half of the level. I just had to do an easy ball part, and then I’d stop for the day. I just had to focus a little bit more.

I cleared it. Finally, I got to attempt this goddamn ship part a single time today. I passed the first obstacle. Then the second. Then the third. 68%. 69%. My heart beat faster and faster as I wrestled my way through the level. 72%. 73%. I was up against the final trial of this ship part, a trial that had crushed me multiple times prior. If I could just pass it, I might beat the level right now. If I could just pass it…

At this point, my hands went numb.

I had…done it? I beat the part of the level that was giving me so much trouble. All I had left were the easiest sections of the level. They were easy, so I could do it. They were easy, so I couldn’t. Screw. Up. My heart and mind were racing at the speed of light. My hands were trembling, unable to keep up with the inputs I needed to hit. A near miss. In an instant my heart dropped, picked itself back up, and began sprinting. Another near miss. Yet another, each and every one doubling my panic. Internal screaming. At the end of the wave part, the wave part that I better not fail on, I nearly grazed the wall. The nearest miss of them all. The success closest to death.

This was it. This was the attempt. I was about to beat Cataclysm. All that was left was this final set of spikes. All I had to do was not screw up.

Me[10]: HO…HAHA…HAHAHAHAHA!! OH MY GOD….YES! NO WAY… HAHAHA-HAHA

There’s a review, written by Kieron Gillen about the game VVVVVV. It describes the challenge Veni, Vidi, Vici, and its dastardly difficulty. He writes, “I completed the level and was reduced to disturbingly orgasmic cries. I haven’t felt as good with a videogame, in that direct physical way, for quite a while.”[11] Now, I love VVVVVV. But nothing in the game, even Veni, Vidi, Vici, made me feel like that. But, Geometry Dash? Yeah…

Geometry Dash reactions are very frequently memed–you may have seen npesta’s reaction to verifying Kenos, for example, maybe without even knowing it came from this game. And I get why these spread so virally. These are intense reactions, almost comically so. Well, at least most of them are.

Colorbolt[12]:
Yes, dude. Let’s f**king go. Okay, well that’s gonna complicate things a lot. Oh, dude. Oh that’s gonna complicate things so much… Okay… Oh f**k, that was attempt one, too? Oh god, no. Oh god… Oh f**k… Okay, lemme grab my phone *unholy microphone noises* [...] I’m not actually very happy about that, I’m not gonna lie

In general, though, major accomplishments come alongside intensely joyful reactions. And I totally get where this comes from. Geometry Dash gives you a taste of what it’s like to defy the impossible, in a way I haven’t experienced in any other game. Cataclysm is now something that probably thousands of people can beat, but it was something I didn’t think was possible for myself to accomplish. So actually pulling it off felt incredible. My friends will not shut up about my Cataclysm reaction, and it “only” took me ten thousand attempts to beat. Players often spend hundreds of thousands of attempts over the span of months, all to complete a level that doesn’t even last two minutes. I can’t even begin to imagine what it feels like to succeed after putting in that much effort.

Riot[13]:
Holy f**k! [...] Oh my god! I can't believe it. Oh my god. Dude, I feel like I'm gonna be sick. [...] Dude, is this real life? Oh my god, am I living in the real world right now? Is this a f**king simulation? [...] Dude, I'm shaking, I'm shaking. [...] Oh my god, you guys don't even know what this means to me. You guys don't even know what this means to me. I want to give my victory speech, okay? I want to give my victory speech. [...] You guys don't even know what this means to me, seriously. Like… Guys. Dude, it's been four years. Four years. Four years. The 96, four years ago. [...] I lost the race to beat the level. I had the worst mental block ever. And I came back and I didn't think there was any way I could ever beat this. But I held to my promise I made on Twitter. If my channel got unbanned, I would do it. I f**king did it. People thought I was washed up. I thought I was washed up. But I just proved everybody wrong. I proved myself wrong. I f**king did it. [...] After I stopped playing this game, and I finally did… The thing I thought I could never do. Oh my god, dude.

---

Players’ accomplishments in Geometry Dash bring to light yet another remarkable thing about it. This game has both an insanely high skill ceiling and incredibly low skill floor. The fact that such complex and difficult maneuvers are possible in such a simple and understandable game is a huge testament to the game’s design. I’d love to talk about what makes Geometry Dash such a well-designed game, but first we need to talk about the game’s designer, RobTop.

Robert Topala is an interesting man. He is someone who, as far as my research goes, spends his time doing only two things: working on Geometry Dash and lifting weights. (I have found zero evidence that he does anything else in his life, besides also owning a horse.) RobTop is a self-taught gamedev, who began by posting his creations on Newgrounds. In 2010, when he released his first project, “Bounce ball thingy”, he wrote in the description:

RobTop/Zhenmuron[14]: My first attempt at a flash game so be gentle =) Ty

The game is really short, only about five minutes long, and rather awkward to play. But it received a generally positive reception, especially considering it was his first game. One comment, left by masterjiji, reads:

masterjiji[14]: VERY entertaining. You say youre a noob, but youre a noob with taste.

I think this comment perfectly encapsulates who Rob is as a developer.

Geometry Dash’s development is often frustrating to watch, both as a player of the game and as a programmer myself. On September 20, 2021, iOS 15 was released to iPhone users, introducing many new features like Focus, Live Text, and the inability to run Geometry Dash whatsoever.[15] This was eventually fixed by Apple with the release of iOS 16…an entire year later. This was something that could have been fixed earlier–something that RobTop had the fix for. So why wasn’t the game patched? Rumors began to spread that RobTop literally lost the source code for the game, having to rebuild the game from the ground up. RobTop responded:

RobTop[16]: No of course not. What I said earlier is that I dont have a separate 2.11 version that I can quickly patch and upload with an iOS fix, since all the code is 2.2 now. So I have to fix all the broken 2.2 stuff before being able to update the game.

If you’re a programmer, you’re probably looking at this comment with the same amount of horror that I had reading it. If you’re not a programmer, let me explain the problem. In software development, most of us use a free program known as git. Git, alongside other similar programs, saves a record of changes for a codebase. With git, you can switch to any previously saved version of your code and make changes, all without losing the current version of the codebase. In other words, if Rob used git, like most other developers, he probably would’ve been able to fix the iOS bug easily. This is what I mean when I say that watching Geometry Dash’s development can get frustrating. This isn’t to say that RobTop is a bad developer, or a lazy one. I repeat, I do not think Rob is bad or lazy as a developer. But sometimes, his “noobishness” can show a little.

Updates 2.0, 2.1, and 2.2 have all had significant changes to the physics of the game, and I can confirm that both 2.1[17] and 2.2[18] unintentionally broke levels, making them impossible, or at the very least much, much harder. These changes were never reverted, probably because Rob couldn’t refer back to an older version of his code, and this meant that each time, individual levels had to be patched. These unintentional breaking changes should not happen, and if they do manage to slip through the cracks, there should be mechanisms to revert them. These unintentional breaking changes are a symptom of RobTop as somewhat of a noob. (There have been intentional changes, too, with their own set of controversies, but that’s a whole ‘nother story.)

And heck, Rob has even forgotten to remove the level editor from two of the four free versions of the game, giving the community access to an old, buggy version of the 2.2 editor years before the update actually released. Oh right, did I mention that Geometry Dash has four separate free versions?

Anyway, as I mentioned earlier (…much earlier), Geometry Dash update 2.2 took almost seven years to develop. This is despite the fact that 2.2 was initially intended to be a smaller update to the game.[19] From Rob’s Reddit AMA responses, what happened is that he would have an idea for a new feature, build most of it, and then have another idea for a new feature.[20][21] And, yes, it sucked that the update took as long as it did. But 2.2’s release, as you’ll soon see, demonstrates why I actually love Rob’s “noobishness”.

I don’t know how to begin talking about 2.2. Like, I cannot properly convey the massive scale of this update and what it means for the game. Ignoring the hundreds of icons, thousands of objects, and even more songs and sound effects added in this update, one of the earliest teased features was the ability for creators to freely control the camera in their levels. And…what? This represents a massive shift in how the game is played. Because GD is almost always played from left to right, most players are used to locking their eyes to a single place on the screen. The simple addition of camera controls completely changes that, requiring players to repeatedly adjust their focus to read the gameplay. The gradient trigger and custom particle object have both revolutionized level creation, each of them allowing complex art and effects to be greatly simplified, and the former additionally allowing 3D renderers to be…easier to create in the game. All this is alongside a vast number of powerful editor features I don’t have time to talk about.

So, I mentioned earlier that camera controls completely change how the game is played. But what I failed to mention was 2.2’s biggest new feature: platformer mode. Platformer mode allows the player to freely move left and right, similarly to traditional platformer games. And, I’m not crazy, right? This is a fundamentally different game. Any other developer would sell this as a new game…because it is one. But not RobTop. Instead, this brand new game was added as a free update to an already dirt-cheap game. And…just…what?! Why is there a wavetable synthesizer made entirely within the Geometry Dash level editor? Why is there a full recreation of Five Nights At Freddy’s made entirely within the editor?!

I don’t think a sane developer would allow this. I don’t think a sane developer would allow any of this. For this reason, I think the brilliant insanity of 2.2 is a result of RobTop’s “noob with taste” way of developing, and I am so happy for it. I am in awe of update 2.2. I am in awe of Robert Topala.

From all this, I hope you understand what I mean when I say that RobTop is a “noob with taste”. The way RobTop develops Geometry Dash is simultaneously frustrating and fantastic, and he’s unlike any other gamedev I’m aware of. I do think there’s even more to it, though, than Rob’s idiosyncrasies as a developer. I previously mentioned that Geometry Dash was incredibly well-designed, and now that we understand RobTop as a “noob with taste”, we can talk about just how tasteful he is with the game’s design, and why that’s important.

Game-feel is incredibly hard to get right. If you’ve played a Flappy Bird clone, for instance, you may have noticed something felt “off” about the controls. If you’ve played the Mario Bros. arcade game, or most other platformers from the same era, you may not have felt truly in control of your character. And if you’ve tried to make your own platformer, you’ve probably spent hours tweaking every possible parameter of a character’s jump, pulling your hair out over the fact that it still feels jank. Oftentimes, it’s hard to pin down why exactly certain physics feel better than others. I can tell you that Celeste is a game that feels fantastic to control, and that Lep’s World isn’t, but I would have trouble telling you why. Creating good platformer physics is something that often requires a lot of practice to develop a feel for, and RobTop nails it in Geometry Dash. Every gamemode, from the cube to the ship to the wave to the spider feels intuitive and satisfying to control. And I think this speaks very highly of RobTop’s taste in game design.

An aspect of the design that’s a bit easier to evaluate is hitboxes. Geometry Dash’s hitboxes can be…kinda silly sometimes. But, I think this is a good thing! Making an obstacle’s hitbox smaller than the obstacle itself makes the game feel more fair. When you just barely graze an obstacle and die, it’s easy to think, “What? I shouldn’t have died there! I didn’t even touch the spike!” before getting frustrated at the game for being bad and cringe. But if the death occurs because your character is very clearly overlapping the obstacle, you admit that it’s your own fault you died, diminishing your frustration. And besides, small hitboxes lead to the occasional extremely close call, adding a satisfying sense of tension and thrill. Geometry Dash’s hitboxes are, in my opinion, quite well configured, which also contributes to the game’s overall great design. Though, I do wish the player’s hitbox rotated with the visible icon.

Combining Geometry Dash’s precisely tuned physics with its forgiving hitboxes, you get a set of gamemode mechanics that simultaneously have a very low skill floor and a very high skill ceiling. For some gamemodes, this range is pretty obvious. Take the spider, for instance, which teleports to the ceiling on a tap. Because it’s purely timing-based, you can simply make the timings tighter to increase the difficulty. But Geometry Dash’s mechanics go deeper than this, and even gamemodes like the ship have this attribute. The ship is introduced as early as the first level of the game, Stereo Madness. And even though there’s no tutorial that teaches the gamemode (okay, well, technically there is, but I highly doubt anyone actually uses it), most are able to figure out how it works the first time they see it, and feel in control of it. And yet, people are able to push the skill ceiling so high with this simple mechanic. Straightflying, for instance, is an advanced application of the ship’s physics, and it feels great to pull off. It’s extremely difficult–despite having played for years, I’m still not very consistent at it–but it demonstrates just how far the limits of this game go, while also adding variety to how the gamemode is played. Combining straightfly parts with vertical movements can make a ship part more exciting and fun. And this works because of RobTop’s tastefully tuned physics. This range applies even to the cube, perhaps the conceptually simplest mode in the game. Every End by Mindcap, for instance, represents a psychotic level of difficult cube gameplay, and it uses a wide variety of timing gimmicks for its difficulty. The various mechanics in Geometry Dash are very simple to learn, but they all are shockingly deep when you look a bit further.

Most Geometry Dash levels, though, aren’t defined by a single gamemode or mechanic. And I think this is where its design really shines. Each of Geometry Dash’s mechanics works in tandem with every other mechanic, creating a ton of depth and variety in gameplay. Let’s look at this structure, which is incredibly common in custom levels, and break it down into its individual components. This portal turns the player into a spider, and as mentioned earlier, the spider teleports to the ceiling, and flips their gravity, on a click. If the player is in the air and holds their finger down on the button, the spider teleports as soon as it touches the ground. The pads here and here boost the player into the air. This black orb launches the player towards the ground. Orbs in this game are designed so the player can tap and hold early, buffering the click and making the act of hitting the orb much easier. Finally, these arrows change the player’s speed. Putting it all together, we get this moment of gameplay. In a single click, the player launches towards the ground, teleports, and launches back into the air. All of these mechanics smoothly synergize to create a single satisfying second, and this is just one of many structures that combine to construct Geometry Dash’s gameplay. Levels in Geometry Dash have an insane amount of variety in how they feel to play–the gameplay of Nine Circles feels very different than that of red dart, despite both being centered around the wave gamemode (and both being red). This variety is owed to the fact that Geometry Dash’s mechanics work really well both individually and as a whole, making GD deceptively deep as a game.

I think RobTop’s own official levels for Geometry Dash are some of the best levels in the entire game, with gameplay that I genuinely believe surpasses even some of the greatest custom creations. This is because they take full advantage of the game’s more complex interactions. This manifests in many ways, some more subtle than others. This thread from HJfod, GD creator and developer of the BetterEdit mod, explains this perfectly.

HJfod[22]:
RobTop levels, especially older ones really lean into GD's incredibly well fine-tuned base physics. Even if you are late to an orb timing or a portal, you still almost never die due to unintendedly buggy gameplay. Like one thing that has always amazed me about Clubstep is how no matter how early or late you hit this orb, you will always reach the portals and make it to the ship. A custom level would usually just make you die or resort to invisible teleport portals.

This isn’t the only example of clever use of the game’s physics. The ball part of Deadlocked, for instance, combines a teleport portal and a gravity portal to create this bit of gameplay. Not only is it a really satisfying motion, you can hit it early or late without bugging out the level and dying, just like the orb HJfod mentioned. RobTop has a deep understanding of the mechanics he developed for the game. As a result, he is able to compose carefully crafted levels that utilize the game’s mechanics really well.

RobTop’s levels are additionally extremely fair, something that HJfod also noticed. In his thread, he compares Geometry Dash’s physics with those of The Impossible Game, noting that the latter’s are “just so much worse” than the former’s. I want to take this a step further and compare the level design between the two games.

The Impossible Game’s first level, Fire Aura, and Geometry Dash’s first level, Stereo Madness, share a lot of superficial similarities. They both start with one spike, followed by two spikes, followed by a jump onto a block. They both include a section in which the player is required to hold to keep jumping, releasing so they don’t encounter a spike on the next platform. And they both introduce triple spike jumps late into the level. But, I find that there are some massive differences in how the two levels are built, even ignoring the ship section in Stereo Madness.

Let’s look back at the first few jumps. Fire Aura requires the player to time their jump such that they land on this block. This is deceptively difficult–if you jump too late, you will miss the block entirely and die. This jump requires the player to hold an understanding of their jump’s trajectory, something they probably won’t have within the first five seconds of gameplay. I would even go as far to say that putting such a jump this early in the first level is unfair game design. Stereo Madness doesn’t have this problem, despite also including a block jump. This is because, adjacent to the block, are two spikes that prevent the player from moving too far forward. These spikes make jumping over the block pretty much impossible, and besides, it’s a lot easier to time a jump over an obstacle than on top of it. Stereo Madness, as early as the third jump, is much more fair in its design than The Impossible Game, which I think lends itself to a more fun experience overall. This manifests in many ways, such as the fact that Stereo Madness’s triple spike jumps are actually easier than regular triple spike jumps, but I find this the most apparent with Fire Aura’s use of blind jumps. Blind jumps are jumps that are basically impossible to react to because they appear on screen before you have time to react. This gameplay element is actively hostile to the player, and just isn’t very fun to play. Even worse, on the original version of this level, this jump is buggy and broken.

Stereo Madness doesn’t have any blind jumps (or any stupidly game-breaking bugs). It’s much more fair, which lends itself to be more enjoyable to experience. What’s crazy is even without mean gameplay gimmicks, Stereo Madness is simply much more engaging than Fire Aura. I think this is for a couple of reasons. For one, Stereo Madness simply has much more varied gameplay when compared to Fire Aura. So much of Fire Aura is just holding down the button, something Stereo Madness only has the player do for a couple of jumps at a time. In lieu of this, Stereo Madness includes combinations of spike jumps, gap jumps, and drops that keep the player on their toes while still remaining fair. And this isn’t even considering the ship parts that completely change the gameplay for a sizable chunk of the level.

The other reason I find Stereo Madness more engaging than Fire Aura is how it uses tension in a dynamic way. Fire Aura feels rather static. The gameplay doesn’t have a smooth ramp up in difficulty, leading to a level that doesn’t feel like it has much of a progression. Stereo Madness, however, has a sense of tension that ebbs and flows as the level progresses. The level starts off easy, building in challenge until the ship part, at which point it gives the player time to breathe before the level’s largest hurdles. As the music builds in intensity, the background turns red and the player is faced with the most fast-paced, difficult gameplay in the level. After overcoming these obstacles, the music reaches its climax, and the difficulty suddenly drops, leaving the player to hold their breath in anticipation as they attempt to surpass the final moments of the level. Stereo Madness wonderfully demonstrates RobTop’s incredible knack for good game design, driven by his impeccable taste.

I only talked about the first level here, but the general ideas for fair and engaging gameplay apply to all of RobTop’s levels, even as they become increasingly complex. (Ahem, with one notable exception.) Dash spider aside, I hope you understand what I mean when I say that RobTop’s levels are phenomenal, because they truly are. And if you want a more in depth look at GD’s level design, I highly recommend checking out GD Colon’s video on how Geometry Dash teaches its mechanics–it’s very good.

Why is Geometry Dash’s game design so important (beyond the fact that I personally find it really really interesting)? Everything I just talked about is, in my opinion, crucial to Geometry Dash as a whole, because it serves as a foundation on which everything else is built. I genuinely don’t think we would’ve seen any of the community’s accomplishments, whether it’s achievements like beating Tidal Wave or incredible levels like Between Worlds, without RobTop and his unique sense of design. Geometry Dash has a set of gameplay mechanics that are extremely enjoyable and well-tuned, and this fact is entirely owed to Rob. If this wasn’t the case, not nearly as many people would play the game to such a high level, and the top player community as we know it wouldn’t exist. Geometry Dash has an insane level editor, with so many advanced features it’s basically a game engine, and this fact is entirely owed to Rob. If this wasn’t the case, we wouldn’t see fantastic creations from people like FunnyGame and Serponge, or newer creators like pocke and bli. Geometry Dash has an extremely well-designed set of levels to introduce new players to the game, and this fact is entirely owed to Rob. If this wasn’t the case, I don’t think anyone would play this game in the first place. Understanding Geometry Dash’s game design is crucial to understanding why it’s so special, because this design is what allows everything special about the game to happen.

---

Geometry Dash is weird. What I mean is that, underneath its mobile game veneer, Geometry Dash is an incredibly deep game that gloriously defies its own image. And it just might be my favorite game of all time. I have put more hours into Geometry Dash than any other video game, and it’s not even close. When 2.2 released and I began playing again, I was struck by the realization that I had missed the game a lot before my return. I know several people that can pour hundreds to thousands of hours into multiple games across different genres. I am not one of those people, because I tend to lose interest in games rather quickly. Except Geometry Dash. And this makes the game truly special to me. I have so many memories of this game, whether I discussed them in this video or not. Coordinating End of Infinity, popping off as my friends beat Duelo Maestro (in class), watching my friend try to start a creator team, and beating Cataclysm are all memories I hold very close to my heart. And all of this is because of a two dollar mobile game. As the game industry grows, as game prices continue to rise, as microtransactions and subscriptions make their way to more and more titles, and as more and more titles disappoint their fanbases, it’s easy to feel suffocated by the market. In a way, it’s nice to know that you don’t need to look at the greater games industry to find a game that thrills, that amazes, that engages. One with a vibrant community with seemingly no end to its creativity. It’s nice to know that all that can be found in Geometry Dash, tucked away on the App Store, masquerading as a mobile game.

---

Watch on YouTube

where were u wen club penguin die
i was at house eating dorito when phone ring
“Club penguin is kil”
“no”
~ SERGEANT ARCH DORNAN, YouTube commenter

Club Penguin was my childhood. Nearly every day, I’d log in. I’d play some minigames, ranging from simple Connect Four to Card-Jitsu Snow, a turn-based co-op strategy game. I’d care for my puff-ball pets, known as puffles, taking the little guys on walks around the island. I’d gather with friends and strangers alike to form a jack-hammering horde on the iceberg, on the off-chance that maybe, just maybe, the rumors were true and it would tip. My little sister and I would play together with our penguin and puffle plushies. Our copy of “The Awesome Official Guide To Club Penguin” is well-loved. Club Penguin wasn’t just a Flash game. It was a virtual world. It was a real community. And on January 30, 2017, the developers of Club Penguin announced that in just two months, Club Penguin would be shut down forever.

With over 330 million users across its decade of operation, many mourned the loss of this platform they held so deeply. Or, in the words of USA Today, “Club Penguin is shutting down and everyone is sad”.[1] On March 30, 2017, Club Penguin shut down as warned.

Where was I when Club Penguin die? Well, I was there. Right there, that’s me, on the “Abominable” server, on the phone with a friend, as we bonded with total strangers over our mutual loss. Until, inevitably, time stopped, and the connection was severed.

It was over. Club Penguin was kil.

But it was okay. This wasn’t the death of Club Penguin, for Club Penguin would be birthed anew. Originally teased as “Project Super Secret”, Club Penguin Island would be the next iteration of the playful penguin platform. Everything would be okay, because Club Penguin Island was shining against the horizon. And after two years of building hype, surely it would live up to expectations…right?

Club Penguin Island’s launch was…rough, to say the least. And, not even two years later, it was silently shut down. Few mourned Club Penguin Island. Many didn’t even notice it was gone.

What went wrong?

To understand that, we first need to look at the history of Club Penguin–the original Club Penguin–and why it succeeded in the first place.

Lance Priebe[1]:

Back in 2004, there were a ton of news articles about how the Internet wasn’t safe for children. Kids were starting to use MSN, talking to strangers online, and I remember I was sitting watching a news broadcast about all this and thought how can I design a solution?

So I sat and wrote a four-page document on how I could keep kids safe online. [...] I spoke to my colleagues Lane Merrifield and Dave Krysko about creating a spin-off company where we could fully focus on building this new idea, a virtual world that was genuinely safe for kids to hang out with each other in.

Club Penguin launched on October 24, 2005, though it wasn’t the team’s first attempt at an online world. It was the successor to Penguin Chat 3, which, as the name implies, means it succeeded Penguin Chat 2 and Experimental Penguins. Club Penguin had a core mission: to provide a safe social space for children online. As such, many early design decisions were oriented around this goal. How was this accomplished? I guess the best way to see is by looking at what it was like to play Club Penguin.

---

At last, I had finished my schoolwork, just in time to call my friend over the phone, as we had scheduled earlier that day. We were eight years old and didn’t have cell phones, so I called his house using the landline, simultaneously booting up the family computer. We’d then pick a server. Vanilla was a common pick for us. It wasn’t very crowded, so we could both run it on our painfully slow computers without lagging. We started at the Town Square. Waddling past the coffee shop, dance club, clothing shop, and snow forts, we entered the pizza shop, so that we could hold a pizza-making competition. I…lost. We’d then hiked up the Ski Hill to go sled racing. While we could do a 1v1 race, the most fun maps were only for three or more players. Luckily for us, another penguin was on the hill, as if waiting for an opportunity to sled. We invited them to join us, and we raced down the hill together. This time, I won. I won the rematch race, too. We became friends in game, exchanged a postcard or two, then parted ways. Back at the Town Square, we were greeted with a common saying on Club Penguin: “PARTY AT MY IGGY!” We decided to check it out.

Um, jumping forward in time, I recall hopping on an unauthorized reboot of Club Penguin with one of my friends. We were invited to someone’s igloo here, too, but instead of a party, it was for, uh, group therapy. Just thought I’d mention.

After admiring the chaotic deco of the host penguin’s igloo, we exchanged friend requests and logged off for the day. For the most part, we’d never interact with our newfound friends again. Occasionally, though, we’d collide by coincidence. Maybe we’d do a round of sled racing for old time’s sake. That was always nice.

This sort of experience is really only possible because of a number of design decisions at the core of Club Penguin. The intention of creating a social space is deeply ingrained in each of these decisions.

Lance Priebe[2]:

If you want to form a community, one of the ingredients of all communities is a space to gather. Space creates context and gives the impression that we are facing something together.

You need a venue. This was part of Club Penguin’s success. There was the ice rink or the ski village, these social places where people could live chat with each other, something our team called colliding. We wanted to create collisions; otherwise, you’ve got this feeling of everybody running past you. Collisions meant that users met each other, made a friend, played a game with someone different.

[...]

There was somewhere to move through, somewhere to socialize, and somewhere to play a game. [...] It is how Disneyland is designed and how towns are planned. Disneyland has these hubs, Tomorrowland, Fantasyland, Frontierland [...] and so forth…

How do you create a social space? You provide opportunities for socialization. Club Penguin accomplished this in a number of ways. Areas like the Town Square became prime spots for people to gather and socialize, even if no actual activities were available in the space. This is by design. The easiest way to get to several in-game activities is through passing through the Town Square. Before you can focus on an activity, you’re thrust into social environments. Maybe, instead of heading to play Bean Counters, you’d go to an igloo party. Collisions are also encouraged through Club Penguin’s minigames. While some minigames were played alone, many could only be played with or against fellow penguins, providing opportunities for social collision. When we went sled racing with a new friend, or joined an igloo party, it was because of Club Penguin’s design that those interactions occurred. When I would run into penguins I’d previously met, it was also because Club Penguin was built specifically to foster social interaction.

Lance Priebe[2]:

Kids made their Club Penguin groups in real life in the school yard or at the school computer lab, then they would go home and meet up in Club Penguin to play together. 

[...]

We’d hear stories about church and youth groups that would meet in Club Penguin. If one kid got sick or was in hospital, the entire classroom would meet up in Club Penguin and play altogether. Kids would share their penguin names at summer camp and connect again in the game.

Club Penguin was a social activity. Alongside providing opportunities to meet others for the first time, it also enhanced and extended existing friendships. Club Penguin was fun to play with friends, because…of course it was. Between minigames like Card-Jitsu, and simply having spaces, both public and private, to hang out and chat, everything about Club Penguin made it the perfect way to interact with your real friends online. That’s how I often played, scheduling times with friends to play Club Penguin, just like Priebe mentioned.

Of course, this is all only possible if Club Penguin was something kids wanted to play, and could afford to play.

Lance Priebe[2]:

Club Penguin operated solely on the revenue from its paid monthly subscribers, which was less than 5% of users. Over 95% of users played the free version, which had so much content that kids still thought it was the greatest game in the world.

The fact that some content, such as most clothing items, was locked off to paid members wasn’t accepted by everyone. And a case can absolutely be made that the monetization scheme glamorized consumerism to unsuspecting children. But, Club Penguin still offered a completely adequate experience to free players, allowing more people to interact on the platform. Club Penguin was fun, even for free members. Most of my time on Club Penguin was as a free member, alongside the vast majority of penguins. Social activities like sled racing weren’t locked behind a paywall. If they were, I and so many others would be locked out of the social situations Club Penguin worked so hard to create.

All of these elements came together with the goal of creating a social space. Was it effective?

---

While working on this script, I ended up texting one of my close friends a bunch about Club Penguin, the same friend I was with when Club Penguin shut down. While we were reminiscing, he texted me:

Friend: f**k i wanna play club penguin now
Me: bet
Me: rn?
Me: im down

After Club Penguin shut down, many fans took it upon themselves to, against Disney’s wishes, run unauthorized reboots of Club Penguin. These are known as Club Penguin Private Servers, and a truly remarkable amount of effort has gone into preserving the Club Penguin experience for the current day. That night, we hopped onto one of these private servers for a little dose of nostalgia. And that night, we played Club Penguin together for over five hours straight. It wasn’t until 3:30 in the morning that I finally logged off.

Because Club Penguin has been dead for…almost seven years (what the hell), everyone on this server is, like, in their twenties. So, things happen. But this was a really special time for me. You see, the anecdote I narrated earlier was written as a fictional account. It was rooted in my own memories of playing the game, of course, but I haven’t played Club Penguin in ages. That anecdote represents my idealized, rose-tinted recollection of Club Penguin, and what it meant to me. But, when my friend and I returned to it that night, we, by complete accident, hit every single point mentioned in that anecdote.

Club Penguin is just as special as I remembered it to be.

Chris Hendricks[3]:

About four months-ish after Club Penguin launched, maybe three, I don't remember exactly, but we received an email through Club Penguin's support system, as crude as it was at the time. We received an email from a parent of an autistic child, and I don't remember the email exactly, but it said along the lines of, "Thank you for making Club Penguin. My child is autistic. He is 12 years old. He has always had trouble making friends at school, and yet through your site, through this virtual world, my son is making friends left and right, and he is finding ways to socialize that he's never been able to do in real life because of difficulty verbalizing. And not only that, but Club Penguin's ability for him to socialize online has made him more confident to socialize with real people, and so thank you for doing that." And when we received that email, I remember that being the moment of, "Oh wow, this world is going to affect people personally. This is a really, really big and cool thing that I'm working on."

What I keep thinking back to, after that five-hour night of Club Penguin, is a couple of simple conversations I held with some of the penguins online at the time. It was sometimes a bit of a struggle to get through the game’s chat filter, but it was just a normal conversation. We talked about movies, music, games, and stuff we’ve been up to. This stands out to me for one simple reason. This, holding a conversation with someone I’ve never met, is something I kinda struggle with. Even though I (think) I can make myself appear normal in conversation, it isn’t easy or natural for me. Being in unfamiliar social situations is honestly quite scary for me, and I know I lock myself out of a ton of opportunities because of it. I know some people like me turn to social media, turn to Discord, and are able to more easily communicate there. But, honestly, talking over the Internet like that is even scarier for me. So, for Club Penguin to be able to make conversation easy and natural for me, and for other people that struggle socializing? For Club Penguin to give the kid in the email the social confidence to make friends in real life? If Club Penguin’s goal is to be a good social environment, I can’t think of any better praise than that.

---

When Disney acquired Club Penguin in 2007, the Club Penguin team had access to many more resources, and were able to realize their vision to a far greater extent. After founding members left the project, the original vision of Club Penguin as a social engine began to blur. This is when Club Penguin began to see a declining population, especially as kids moved on to other virtual worlds and online social environments. Yet, due to how deeply ingrained the original vision is in its design, Club Penguin remained Club Penguin at its core.

Which leads us back to 2017. Throughout this video, I’ve explained how Club Penguin’s design funneled into what it was at its core – a deeply social environment. But, this video is (ostensibly) about Club Penguin Island. (The, uh, title says it right there.) So what was Club Penguin Island?

Club Penguin Island was not Club Penguin. (At least at launch.)

And, really, I think that’s the best way to sum up the Club Penguin Island 1.0 experience. At its core, the original Club Penguin was a social space. Club Penguin Island didn’t have that core.

Club Penguin Island’s gameplay was centered around “adventures”, or “quests”. In a quest, an NPC, either Rockhopper, Aunt Arctic, Cadence, or Rookie, has you travel around the island to complete tasks. It also featured daily challenges, which awarded coins and experience points for completion. Some challenges were completed solo, while others required multiple penguins to work together to finish. While Club Penguin had somewhat of a progression system in the form of stamps, and some in-game events had forms of solo quests, it was far from the core game loop, which was more freeform in nature.

Let’s return, for a moment, to the factors that led to the original Club Penguin’s success. Club Penguin worked because it provided opportunities for social collision. It was something that was fun to play with existing friends. And it provided ample fun content for free players. Club Penguin Island’s quest-centric design, unfortunately, worked in opposition to these factors.

Quests in Club Penguin Island were completed solo. Not only did this mean that the primary game loop was pretty much single-player, but it degraded the value of the social spaces present in the game. If I’m working on a quest, even if I enter a social hub, it’s probably for the sole purpose of getting the quest done. I’m less likely to stop and socialize if I have a very direct goal I’m trying to achieve. This reduces the chances for collision in social spaces–players are more likely to walk past each other instead.

Community daily challenges, the ones that required multiple penguins to complete, seems like a great solution to this problem. Giving penguins an incentive to do stuff together will create social collisions. Unfortunately, priority wasn’t placed on this aspect of the game. In March 2017, Club Penguin Island had 116 challenges in the draw pool. Of these, only 31 of these challenges were for multiple players. The rest were solo.[4] Club Penguin Island prioritized solo play over building a social environment.

This isn’t helped by the fact that, at launch, Club Penguin Island had no multiplayer minigames. So many of my interactions on Club Penguin started because of multiplayer minigames, and they just…weren’t on Club Penguin Island.

This meant that there wasn’t really too much to do with your friends, either. You could do the daily challenges, walk around, and…that was pretty much it? Maybe you could do quests at the same time, but there was just one problem…

tamago2474[5]:

I downloaded Club Penguin Island, started it up, and was promptly informed about how I could purchase their membership subscriptions. Literally the first thing I see upon opening the app. Already a fantastic start.

[...]

I approved my account, logged into the game, membership.

[...]

Of course, they all have padlocks, indicating that I can't actually use them as a non-member.

[...]

He then gave me a jackhammer, and I was quickly informed that only members can use jackhammers.

[...]

And even if you make clothes using the starter pack accessories they give you for free, you still have to be a member in order to wear them. So what is actually the point of making me spend my coins on an item that I can't even use?

Nearly all of the game’s content was locked behind a monthly subscription. Nearly ALL of it. Clothing was always pretty locked off from free players in Club Penguin, but this seems to have been even worse in Club Penguin Island. Almost all of the quests, the main source of in-game content, were member only. Over a third of daily challenges were member only as well. There was honestly very little for free players to do on Club Penguin Island, and this further diminished its capacity as a social space.Clothing was always pretty locked off from free players in Club Penguin, but this seems to have been even worse in Club Penguin Island. Almost all of the quests, the main source of in-game content, were member only. Over a third of daily challenges were member only as well. There was honestly very little for free players to do on Club Penguin Island, and this further diminished its capacity as a social space.

What makes me sad about all this, alongside the loss of Club Penguin itself, is the fact that the Club Penguin Island team, at least as far as I can tell, really tried their best to make the game work, despite the rocky release. Problems such as a lack of multiplayer activities was something actively addressed with later updates, for instance. In general, the team appears to consist of a group of people that genuinely loved Club Penguin and its community. The sort of heavy-handed monetization employed by Club Penguin Island is simply not what a team like that would implement if they had their way. Information on Club Penguin Island development is really sparse, so I can only speculate as to what happened behind the scenes. It really seems like a Disney exec, with little understanding of Club Penguin, attempted to milk it for cash, forcing it to fit into the framework of a manipulative mobile game. And in the end, that is what led Club Penguin Island to its failure. The design decisions made in Club Penguin Island serve a completely different purpose than that of Club Penguin, and it shows. Those in charge failed to understand why Club Penguin worked, and so they were unable to make Club Penguin Island a success. That’s the tragedy of Club Penguin Island.

---

Club Penguin Island was made using the Unity game engine, and that’s honestly pretty funny, because in September 2023, Unity made a very similar mistake. A game engine is a framework that games can be built on, and Unity is particularly of note for its accessibility. As written on Ars Technica, “Since it was introduced in 2005, Unity has tried to make creating video games possible for everyone regardless of technical know-how or budget.”[6] Unity’s accessibility has allowed a vast ecosystem of tutorials and resources for new developers, which funneled further into Unity’s success. These days, Unity is used for projects as large as Genshin Impact, and as indie as Rhythm Doctor (play Rhythm Doctor). In September 2023, however, pricing changes were announced that would force developers to pay for every install of their game. For some developers, this meant as much as 108% of gross revenue.[7] It would cost them more money merely to pay for Unity than they received from the game itself. When you think about what Unity’s core goal was up until that point, it’s not surprising at all that it backfired entirely. This single decision put thousands of developers’ livelihoods at risk. Such an effect should not be taken lightly. Even after reversing the decision, Unity is still feeling the effects of its misstep. Like Club Penguin Island, Unity’s execs completely missed the point of the product they were selling. And like with Club Penguin Island, this lack of understanding is what led to failure.

More and more companies are “missing the point”. Reddit recently threatened to remove itself from search engines like Google. “Reddit can survive without search,” a representative of the company stated.[8] Of course, this is despite the fact that over half of its web traffic comes from search engines[9], and adding “reddit” to searches is practically a meme at this point.

savannahXYZ[10]:

I have to add the word “Reddit”
To every goddamn search to read
Content made by humans

Google doesn’t work
Anymore…

And Twitter–I mean X–I mean Twitter–Twitter’s just doing its own thing, I don’t know anymore…

Even when there are people behind the scenes that truly understand the goals of a project like Club Penguin, or Unity, or Reddit, and even when they have the skills to realize these goals, it’s not a guarantee that they will be the ones making the decisions. Club Penguin Island took Club Penguin–a truly remarkable social platform–and tore out its core, the social experience that made Club Penguin, Club Penguin. Its failure is representative of a greater pattern in which corporate leadership, lacking an understanding of the original goals of a project, makes decisions that eventually lead to its downfall. The effects of these decisions can be massive, even to the point of putting thousands of livelihoods at risk. In the case of Club Penguin, it simply led to the loss of the most potent social platform I’ve ever seen.

---