They reuse and recombine pre-existing materials instead of creating вЂoriginalвЂ™ ones, and they are made for the sake of making rather than for aesthetic value or facilitating a вЂsmoothвЂ™ experience for their audiences. вЂњWhen everything around us is cultural trash,вЂќ he says, вЂњtrash becomes the new medium, the lingua franca of the digital age.вЂќ Interestingly, he equates this вЂcultural trashвЂ™ with low culture: вЂњYou can build culture out of trash, but only trash culture: B-games, B-movies, B-music, B-philosophy,вЂќ by which he means those cultural objects that forego polish and (user-)friendliness (Foddy, 2017). In Getting Over It, as the player ascends and almost inevitably suffers the occasional dramatic plummet down to the foot of the mountain, Foddy delivers a witty voice-over monologue about a range of subjects like perseverance in the face of failure, the underestimated value of frustration, and the trash-like nature of digital culture. His near-impossible task is to climb a mountain created from a great variety of reusable digital assets: boxes, umbrellas, row boats, front doors, oranges, radio towers, staircases, et cetera. Bennett FoddyвЂ™s Getting Over It (2017) takes the metaphor to its utter extreme, as the player controls the unfortunate Diogenes, doomed to spend eternity with his legs stuck in a large kettle and nothing but a large hammer in his hands. Sundae MonthвЂ™s Diaries of a Space Janitor (2016) offers the perspective of a janitor in an alien city who spends their time picking up litter to survive intergalactic capitalism. David OвЂ™ReillyвЂ™s Mountain (2014), for example, features a mountain floating somewhere in outer space that is occasionally bombarded by seemingly random objects. We might take this statement very literally, and some videogames indeed do.

More specifically, among the many things videogames supposedly are-interactive digital environments, simulations of (un)realities, ideal post-Fordist commodities, paradigmatic media of Empire, and so forth-they are also mountains of trash. Grand, infinite, and unsorted.вЂќ вЂ“ Bennett Foddy, Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy (2017) A landfill with everything we ever thought of in it. A monstrous mountain of trash, the ash-heap of creativityвЂ™s fountain. Dennis is managing editor at Junctions, a graduate journal for the Humanities. His current research interests include the materiality of videogames and digital culture, critical theory in game studies, and fan-made archives for The Elder Scrolls. Dennis Jansen is a second-year RMA student of Media Studies at Utrecht University.

Getting over it with bennett foddy meme