The long-running Ludum Dare game jam challenges designers to make a game in 48 hours. For the latest round, Minecraft creator Markus “Notch” Persson created a tiny game about your entire life. Drowning in Problems has the mechanics of a simulation game, but there’s no changing the trajectory. You will be born. You will grow up. You will love. You will lose. You will die. You won’t even really enjoy the process very much.
Play ‘Minecraft’ creator Notch’s tiny despair simulator
is a senior tech and policy editor focused on online platforms and free expression. Adi has covered virtual and augmented reality, the history of computing, and more for The Verge since 2011.
If you prolong your childhood indefinitely, you can learn and play forever, instead of working and failing. But ultimately, it’s all just grinding. Sheer boredom will propel you into the indifferent arms of death. Your achievements will be forgotten in a background tab.
If you transfer lines at New York’s Times Square subway stop, you’ll pass an art installation made of sequential white signs:
Overslept
So tired
If late
Get fired
Why bother?
Why the pain?
Just go home
Do it again
This blunt, nihilistic little game is like walking that hallway, again and again. If Minecraft is hope and creativity, Drowning in Problems is pure bottled despair.
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