The Long Game

Progress reports on the games we just can’t quit, featuring the new grassroots in Hypnospace Outlaw

Of all the Long Games that could possibly be played, we expected this one least. Hypnospace Outlaw, in which you play a banhammer-wielding Enforcer on an alternate-reality version of the late-’90s Internet, wrapped up its ending tightly. It told an all-too-familiar tale with unnerving accuracy: how grassroots scenes are very often warped into unrecognisable shapes by money-motivated industries.

And yet, we find ourselves logging back onto HypnoOS within the year of its release. The reason? A free modding update. Not a fictional, in-game representation of modding, but something with real functionality: supported by mod.io, it allows players to code their own additions to the ‘sleeptime social network’. Webpages, the ‘zones’ the pages are organised in, emails, soundscapes, stickers, new characters and storylines, secrets, viruses, custom scripts and applications – almost anything you can find in vanilla Hypnospace Outlaw can now also be made by players.

It’s early days yet, so the devs have kicked things off with a few mods of their own. Seepage Xperience comes with a new song, music video and skins to promote Hypnospace’s angstiest band, while Kidz Casino adds a new page to Teentopia that, randomly doubling or halving your Hypnocoin with the click of a button, riffs on the kiddie-gambling culture that Neopets notably helped popularise. They’re clearly

meant as starting points – Kidz Casino’s mod.io description suggests users take a look at the code for an explanation of how script variables work. Player mods so far are few, but promising. One player has made a desktop version of noughts and crosses; another is spinning a yarn about an underground socialist movement using custom character pages – one of which is dedicated wholly to bees – found through searching tags. Inexplicably, we find ourselves weeping with laughter at deathless virtual pet Michael The Cockroach, who scat-sings, dances and multiplies while bouncing across our desktop. (Look, it’s been a long year.)

In other words, Hypnospace Outlaw’s Internet has never felt more like the real thing: people-powered, entertaining for reasons we can’t quite put our finger on, and entirely genuine. There’s a chance a small art scene will develop here, with players continuing to flesh out Tendershoot’s lore and build on each others’. How long before someone makes a mod strong enough to stand on its own, and one of the game industry’s giants makes their own version, we wonder? Perhaps this is one update we should have seen coming. And that, in itself, is heartening. This is a hopeful addition to Hypnospace’s not-quite-alternate-reality story: one that proves that, no matter how often The Man tries to muscle in, the artists will fight for their space.