Happy, Monday, folks, and welcome to the Weekly Video Games Thread! It started snowing again last night, but don’t worry; we’re here to keep you warm and comfy in this bad old world.

Anyway, since last week I’ve been adoring Hypnospace Outlaw, one of the craziest dang games I’ve ever played in my life. It’s about patrolling a 1990’s online server as a moderator, a user, and a detective. You’re given requests for something to find or some aberrant behavior to ban. Completing it demands all sorts of tools, like using tags, finding secret pages, going on deep dives, and just a lot of investigation. Very much a mystery game, it uses tools that are fairly pedestrian in ways that are exciting, funny, and compelling. Perhaps this is because it’s very close to what I do in my actual job, but I love how it works.

But what interests me about Hypnospace Outlaw is the thing that makes this work, the fake internet. It’s a pitch perfect recreation of online culture, especially that of the Nineties. Every page is like an artifact (and after a point you actually need to start thinking of them that way) of strange conspiracy theories, advertisements, scams, terrible online speak, proto-creepypasta, and an overwhelming sense of humanity. Each page is essentially an audio diary, with the more prolific users becoming NPCs in their own right. This creates a fascinating space for storytelling, writing, and narrative in gaming. So, for today’s prompt, I want to talk about these in-game websites, chatrooms, documentary evidence, and other spaces to see how people talked. You could, if you’d like, expand the definition to look at the wealth of documents in a game like Gone Home or a text-heavy RPG. Or you could go inward and talk about the depiction of the actual internet. Either way, this game has become both fun and a font of inspiration, so I’m interested to see discourse on it.

Of course, that’s just a prompt. Obviously, I’d love to hear about what you played this weekend and your gaming plans for February.