Crepuscle

During my time as a graduate student at UCLA, I experimented with games and hypertext as a way to spatialize scattered stories and ephemera about my family. Things that didn’t fit into easy narratives, which I wanted to spread out, arrange or bury. Over time the project grew larger and more ungainly as I started to care less about my immediate family and more about imagined identities.

Throughout the project, an advisor persistently challenged me to find what would draw players who didn’t already know me into my game. I often defensively answered that I didn’t know—or that I didn’t care, despite my belief that the game was a space that should be public and multiplayer.

During the early days of the pandemic, with an expanding awareness of multiple global crises, it felt unnatural to be concerned with what might draw tourists into my shameful crypt, or with whether the game was “fun”. In time though, I began to realize that what I had done was create a ruin. And there was a certain aspect of a ruin that seemed important to me— that it was a private space that had become public.

In the first year after I made the game, interest quickly faded. Candles and incense burned down. Monsters once killed or banished crept back into the darkened rooms. Each week I tended to the chambers representing relatives I had known, sometimes venturing farther into the halls of more distant ancestors.

I programmed bots to control characters that would in turn sweep rooms and gather scattered relics, but by 2025 their hosting platform, Glitch.com, was bought out and liquidated. Once again, I alone maintained the space. I began to think more about the infrastructure that sustained the crypt. The code lived on GitLab, the files on Amazon’s cloud. In my daily life I had joined a boycott of Amazon’s marketplace and delivery services, yet the game still relied on its servers.

I started to think about an archival version of the game. The large print-on-demand book I had made for my thesis show was only able to represent about 500 rooms out of a maze that contained over a thousand. I decided that one day I would archive the space as microfilm, like the Mormons had done with their genealogies. Devotions would continue to be carried out on a kneeling pad I created, which ticked a mechanical counter with each prostration. The microfilm would be sealed in a time capsule and lost.