{"id":4135,"date":"2019-03-02T19:49:57","date_gmt":"2019-03-03T02:49:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nathalielawhead.com\/candybox\/?p=4135"},"modified":"2019-03-02T19:56:11","modified_gmt":"2019-03-03T02:56:11","slug":"runonce-remember_me-a-new-existential-project-about-loss-and-friendship-and-some-artist-commentary-about-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nathalielawhead.com\/candybox\/runonce-remember_me-a-new-existential-project-about-loss-and-friendship-and-some-artist-commentary-about-it","title":{"rendered":"RUNONCE (remember_me): A new existential project about loss and friendship&#8230; and some artist commentary about it."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>RUNONCE (remember_me) is an existential desktop pet that you can only run once, and then never again.<\/p>\n<p>You can download it here: <a href=\"https:\/\/alienmelon.itch.io\/runonce\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">https:\/\/alienmelon.itch.io\/runonce<\/a><\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/nathalielawhead.com\/noodles\/DELETEGDC\/ARTWORK\/remember_me\/savedDeleteGDC\/0.png\" alt=\"\" \/><\/p>\n<p>What I think is interesting about this is that it presents you with a warning at the beginning explaining that running it will &#8220;break them&#8221; and if you do then the damage is permanent.<br \/>\nI think this is an interesting commentary on death, and how we view death.<br \/>\nAside from the impending permanence of something we will all be, you&#8217;re very likely to say &#8220;OK! RUN IT!&#8221; and as you interact with it the friendship grows, and then you don&#8217;t want it to die.<br \/>\nYou caused this death. At first it was an easy thing to do, but as you understand exactly what you have killed, you feel really bad.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s kind of working with the same range of emotions that happen when you are told that someone you don&#8217;t know died&#8230; Paging through an obituary might not evoke a lot of emotion. When you&#8217;re told that a certain number of people died, you might feel bad, but you won&#8217;t necessarily be devastated. Death doesn&#8217;t mean much if it&#8217;s not affecting you personally. If you know the people that died in a disaster, or personally knew the people in an obituary, it will hurt.<br \/>\nSo you don&#8217;t know what you are about to kill. You don&#8217;t know the personality, the sense of agency, the friendship doesn&#8217;t exist&#8230; as soon as you get to know it, the consequences of your actions dawn on you. Now it&#8217;s your friend, and you want to keep it.<br \/>\nI was hoping it would inspire people to generally value life more&#8230; It&#8217;s also a challenge to question how responsible we are about our relationships, or friendships, and if we realize how damaging irresponsibility can be to a friend&#8230; You choose to be responsible when entering a relationship.<br \/>\nIf your motives are selfish, is it wise to even start? Why are we doing it?<br \/>\nIt&#8217;s a good train of thought&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Closing it will kill it. After it&#8217;s closed, and if you re-open it, you get a gravestone with the time and date that you decided to run it. As soon as you ran it, you killed it&#8230; so was it dead all along?<br \/>\nThere&#8217;s an urgency to make your friend comfortable as it walks across the computer screen, talking to you. It has your undivided attention because of what&#8217;s going to happen.<\/p>\n<p>Overall, RUNONCE is about allowing yourself to love, hold onto friendship, despite none of it lasting.<br \/>\nIt&#8217;s about confronting death, and even embracing the inevitable.<\/p>\n<p>Conversation, and memories of your exchange, are saved to a folder on your desktop called &#8220;remember_me&#8221;.<br \/>\nYou get to keep these moments. The friend might be gone, but you still have what you shared.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s the gist of it&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/nathalielawhead.com\/noodles\/DELETEGDC\/ARTWORK\/remember_me\/deleteGDC_39006.30312861968.png\" alt=\"\" \/><\/p>\n<p>I was told that I could monetize this by selling a &#8220;resurrection kit&#8221; where you pay to buy a program that will resurrect it. I love the idea. It&#8217;s a proper level of cruel, but I like the permanence of death, so this isn&#8217;t going to happen.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/nathalielawhead.com\/noodles\/RUNONCE_WALKCYCLE_1.gif\" alt=\"\" \/><\/p>\n<p>RUNONCE (remember_me) was made for an event at GDC. I talked about it, and what I wanted to do with it <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nathalielawhead.com\/candybox\/my-deletegdc-entry-its-progress-and-saving-a-memory-of-it-here\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">here.<\/a><\/p>\n<p>I decided to <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/alienmelon\/status\/1100225990905622528\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">pull out of the event<\/a>, and not have the game be part of it, because people shared some really sad experiences and unsettling things about the organizer. This extended beyond rumors, mistakes, or misunderstandings&#8230; eventually I questioned my participation.<br \/>\nI&#8217;m really tired of hearing these accounts and largely nothing being done.<br \/>\nIt was fairly heartbreaking to listen to&#8230; fear of repercussions and the word &#8220;dangerous&#8221; was used too often, so not participating was the right decision to make. I extensively talked about <a href=\"https:\/\/alienmelon.itch.io\/runonce\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">why on the game&#8217;s page<\/a>. That would be my official stance on a problem that&#8217;s abundant in games.<br \/>\nI think it&#8217;s important to believe victims. This made me think that we might have a better game industry if the people that got chased out because of abusive men actually stayed, and the abusers had to go&#8230; or where given plenty of criticism for what they did. I don&#8217;t like how true the opposite is&#8230; The silent loss of good people that deserved opportunities too.<\/p>\n<p>As I <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/alienmelon\/status\/1101629039087763457\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">mentioned here<\/a>, now is a good time to remind people that &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Gaslighting\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">gaslighting<\/a>&#8221; is a thing and it&#8217;s not the first thing you should default to.<br \/>\nI strongly feel that I made the right decision, and am moving on now. I can&#8217;t answer questions about this.<br \/>\nGoing forward I suppose it would be a good idea to always ask who the organizer is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>RUNONCE (remember_me) is an existential desktop pet that you can only run once, and then never again. You can download it here: https:\/\/alienmelon.itch.io\/runonce What I think is interesting about this is that it presents you with a warning at the beginning explaining that running it will &#8220;break them&#8221; and if you do then the damage is permanent. I think this is an interesting commentary on death, and how we view death. Aside from the impending permanence of something we will all be, you&#8217;re very likely to say &#8220;OK! RUN IT!&#8221; and as you interact with it the friendship grows, and&#46;&#46;&#46;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4522,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4135","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-games"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nathalielawhead.com\/candybox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nathalielawhead.com\/candybox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nathalielawhead.com\/candybox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nathalielawhead.com\/candybox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nathalielawhead.com\/candybox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4135"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.nathalielawhead.com\/candybox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4135\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4138,"href":"https:\/\/www.nathalielawhead.com\/candybox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4135\/revisions\/4138"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nathalielawhead.com\/candybox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4522"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nathalielawhead.com\/candybox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nathalielawhead.com\/candybox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nathalielawhead.com\/candybox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}