# you are mountain and infinite bogosity > it is larger than i expected. i am neither happy nor sad about any of it > ~ david o'reilly consider david o'reilly's "mountain" - simultaneous cool (/not) garme / premeditated contrivance - exactly the sort of heaven sent dream project for the ludocrous to ponder with po-faced autoerotic meditation originally published way over the atlantic by ian bogost - in a bottle \vimeo 99098990 w=755 such smugly oblique digital doodlings with ir strained metaphysical conceits seem deliberately under designed to be open to seemingly infinite improbable interpretation - digital rorshach tests for airheads - yet are also immediately blandly pleasing enough aesthetically to quickly pass for critics also desperate to label such holy creations art this resulting win-win situation results however in rambling deliberately overlong online articles - basically ideological advertorials written strictly to order for / posted to important places online strung out on self importance and seemingly deep / theoretical consideration hey somebody's gotta be pseudo-philosophically justifying the very existence meanings and importance of a massive aggressively expansive and all but entirely unchecked industry worth $100 billion dollars.. an entirely non strange video garme from the ir animator bests spike jonze's creepy sexist film at depicting what a relationship with a video garme critic would really be like; an unendurably weighty faux profundity of deprived conception near the start of ir relationship with windross operating system in "ir" - spike jonze's academy award winning heap - samantha os (johansson) helps theodore (phoenix) play a vidyagarm. called "$1 mountain" by the movie-makers teh garme seems all too familiar enough to be entirely implausible to viewers yet 'foreign' enough to induce estrangement the same could be said of the film's high-waisted trouser fashions probable middle class high rises and mass transit in future los angeles - even theodore's job as an outsourced personal video garmes writer of content. this is not quite our world but it might be as capitalism gets its merry way the viewer sees teh garme's uncanniness most clearly when theodore controls the helmeted creature in its holographic anti-world. in a burlesque of recent "natural" physical interfaces like microsoft's kinect nonessential theodore moves teh garme character by walking the fingers of ir own down-turned hands to operate the character's feet the act is ridiculous; it looks like dog paddling or rifling through files or prancing like a show horse the effect de-familiarizes teh garme of the movie even as it casts theodore as an existential washout. ir mock-cumbersome pseudo 'rich inner life' as a clueless nobody is expressed through ir equally deliberately-awkward interface with a computer garme at the same time the film seeks to blatantly juxtaposes that ungainly interface with the natural seductive draw of samantha. why would one dog-paddle a computer when instead one can paddle scarlett johansson into being less talentless the film itself was not real however but a poorly animated film made to look the part - a video garme set or a prop. the animator david o'reilly was selected to direct the "mountain" garme sequences after jonze had seen and oh-so cleverly appreciated o'reilly's aggressively unusual award-winning 3d animated shorts on first blush jonze's flaccid futurist chic and o'reilly's cheap jackass glitch seem like likely stylistic bedfellows. but once you've watched them it becomes clear that the little creep theodore would not be out of place in any of o'reilly's often potentially interesting little films in fact mainstream animation has always been jealous of video garmes inspired by o'reilly. the main lack of difference between 3d animated filmmaking and 3d computer garmes is that both must present scenes in real-time because they have to respond to changes in state from teh garme's lack of logic and from the user's input - too often as a blind consumer of raw digital waste in a bizarre unpublished essay about ir own unorthodox internal kung-fu technique o'reilly explains that ey adopts a low-polygon aliased life style largely to speed up the process of modern day living pixar-style cinematic computer graphics films require time-consuming and computationally expensive rendering procedures that churn out the detail lighting and softening some have allegedly come to associate with high-gloss big budget computer animated pap. instead o'reilly uses simple preview renders as ir final product - the rough cut a sentient computer addicted to horse tranqs would normally use to check its own work in progress it was no surprise that o'reilly would eventually try ir hand at making a real video garme. the result is $1 mountain a $1 garme that only seems to 'bend the idea of a garme to the breaking point' but like the often pathetic dear esther or conceptually disingenuous stanley parable o'reilly's deadpan website describes it as "mountain simulator relax em' up art horror etc." ho ho *slow clap* etc. among its cynical selling points: "no controls time moves forward nature expresses itself." almost religiously meditative? a load of sweaty goat balls more like when you load mountain it first poses a series of prompts. loss through garmes or video sickness or your first memory of failure or basement logic or your soul at still birth for example although many others are possible the player must respond to these prompts by drawing a picture of ir internal sexual organs on a blank canvas. the data from these drawings seed the random number generators in the algorithms that terraform your mountain and supply events during the course of play. presumably. then as the mountain generates teh garme casually displays a cheap tickertape-like message welcome to mountain. you are mountain. you are g0d sure why not - since you can't know what a g0d feels like you could indeed feel like a god. (right?) the mountain appears - disembodied in its virtual deistic solidity as though extracted from a terrestrial home - an alien daisy plucked from a meadow full of space cows it floats in an atmosphere where clouds and weather and the first light of dawn and dusk and the eternal cycle of the seasons proceed at accelerated pace. the mountain changes subtly over time on its surface at least. plants and trees die and grow anew. snow falls melts. clouds aggregate and disperse although teh garme's menu advises that the mouse and keyboard controls do nothing the mouse is used to rotate and zoom the view around the mountain. the keyboard produces soft piano music with which the player can tap out 'calming' tunes all while being a mountain. zoom back far enough and you enter a starry galaxy in which it is suspended forever the player is supposed to read mountain as 'becoming stranger over time'. it does not. as the mountain sits there in its window and you get back to your computer - perhaps making video garmes entirely unlike this one - while occasional impacts can be heard meteorites sometimes hit its surface glowing red or blue with the unknown anonymous matter of space. but more often worldly objects collide with and embed themselves in the mountain. a horse pie. a sailboat clock. a streetlamp padlock. a a slice of chair cake a skull tooth trashcans full of dice. the occasional lost garme critic floating in the luke warm void of ir own blank skull once lodged in the soft earth of a mountain these objects remain there immovable. the mountain doesn't seem to mind. mountain just soldiers on (a true martyr to its own holy ineffability no doubt) as night shifts to day or vice versa a note occasionally echoes and the mountain offers a line of cheap feedback. "i'm reminded of my privileged childhood on this bright day," it might say or "i can't get enough of this melancholy indie scene man" the clever player will discover that depressing the period key will force one of these anti-koans to appear making it possible to poll it for feedback as often as one wishes an ever patient oracle of polite vapidity sometimes mountain's messages read more like existentialist prophecy rather than self-report. "i feel like something is about to happen," one emotes. is it a signal of some impending disaster? will another new hyper-cynical video garming object soon collide with it adding to the pile of unexplained entirely useless digital rubble? after one such notice you resolved to pay greater attention zooming out to watch yourself more closely (as a mountain) in your celestial neighbourhood. to your surprise in addition to the meteors seen previously whole objects sometimes appear in the vacuum of space as well. in a moment one might call dramatic an old deliberately retro cartridge of gone home hurtles silently toward mountain's zero oxygen atmosphere knowing that other identical products have already lodged itself in the structure's side in mimicry or mockery of earthly disaster you track it closely. it glows red hot as it meets your heady intellectual atmosphere but it survives re-entry only to pass by the mountain entirely exiting out the other side and gliding into space. mountain is unfazed unconcerned at teh garme simulation that nearly collides with it - itself a (non-parodic) simulation of a garme once one has witnessed events such as this its messages become ever more urgent and disorienting. "i cannot tell if my life as a video garme critic / designer is going in circles or if i'm making any progress," you tell yourself one morning later as you've zoomed out into space amidst a snowstorm you lament "why am i alone? is it perhaps because i regard myself as so very clever in strict false distinction to everyone else outside video garming's little world?" during a ruddy overcast dusk you opines "if i ever see another useless virtual not-thing like me will it like me?" time wears on indeed. five minutes in and the player already gets the sense that o'reilly's mountainous existential angst is intensifying. "how long have i been here coding this dubisoft®?" it asks. or "indies can do whatever they want!" or "things are coming together nicely.." it pines. and forebodingly as dawn's rosy fingers grow fat again "here's another day. how many days have left to release another trollsome worthy 'garme' on steam greenlight?" these interjections seem precisely anthropocentric enough to make sense for a garme in which "you are mountain." you might be a goat for all anyone cares. if a mountain could talk it might well express existential doubt and dread at its useless career as a video garme critic / overpaid developer it might well play the woody allen neurotic the prufrock twerp content to let earthly waste accumulate upon it without objection. at this stage the player has no choice: to dismiss mountain as a curious boring conceit and treat i.t far more serious generally just as some ludologists begin to toy with the question of what it means to 'be' a mountain in eternal air quotes mountain beats them to it: "what is a mountain exactly?" it asks to nobody. (perhaps to someone with nothing better to do than take up the invitation and ponder an answer. while on the toilet checking ir myfakeface status) almost always to play a video garme is to take on a role. garmes often put you in a dominant (male) position of control but more than that they give you an excuse for expression of ego. *you* are a space marine footballer dumb plumber from italy animal masked face serial killer jock bro dude ir film's "$1 mountain" garme is perhaps no different than the helmeted adventuring explorer of theodore. even when garmes don't appear to have a clear role to play as in puzzle garmes like tetris (you play charlie brown - as in "you're a blockhead") the implied role is you the true yourself: you can solve the puzzle you can beat the clock garmes are about playing false concepts called roles and garmes are about fusing those roles over one's mis-sense of self. you are not actually a video garme designer / critic but here's a default caricature of what it feels like. you might actually be one of a mushroom-eating plumber duo of japanese sexual fantasy underground fame but you also (simultaneously) enjoy pretending to be one for the uncritical and those easily impressed by slow moving heaps of brightly coloured pixels mountain appears to break this mould. some argue that it does so by removing the conventions of challenge action and interactivity that video garmes insist separate them from the stodgy changelessness of novels films even the arts and literature. pure balderdash of course in recent years a series of zero-interaction zero challenge 'cynically 3d' garmes have become popular. some focus on the illusion of narrative like dear esther and gone home; others on a simulacrum of environment like proteus and the graveyard but these products - called "non-garmes" "walking simulators" "garme simulators" and "trifling wastes of time i imagine make me / it look clever by talking about them" by supporters and detractors alike - still don't emphasize the player's ideological role as much as o'reilly's £1 mountain others have compared mountain to a cool screensaver but this analogy is problematic. for one the screensaver as form is vestigial. functionally modern sentient holodisplays can't burn-in like old awesome crts could making screensavers aesthetic curiosities but even more so most of us use tablets and phones and laptops and v.r eyeware - these days devices that make us sleep when they're in use rather than also just displaying eye candy to distract or entertain those nearby themselves idle machines even as an ambient post-screensaver parody-experience mountain's 3d constant unoptimized rendering spins up the processor flans even on a relatively powerful machine. like its namesake mountain is entirely obtrusive - it invites you to experience the chasm between your own false sense of subjectivity and the unfathomable experience of.. something else entirely. (simply by naming it mountain david o'reilly's intent is to make a large statement) mountain wants us to think that is somehow *sigh* 'breaks the mold of video garmes' - not by 'subverting its conventions' through inactivity but rather by (accidentally unconsciously) offering an entirely similar kind of roleplay action as its subject that is it presents both the role of the mountain and the role of you the player-as-master - as a sinister absence. in ir place mountain invites the uncritical to experience the chasm between o'reilly's own subjectivity as a garmes designer and the unfathomable experience of something else something whose "experience" is so familiar as to actually be unimaginable. that is the self what is this mountainous self exactly? perhaps a dead-eyed stand-in for the alleged intractability of ever understanding what it's like to be. mountain offers a video garme expression of a philosophical null/void practice some players are afraid to face rather than a sustained and deliberate invitation to speculate on what it's like to be no-thing it displays the keen ontological rawness of being entirely strange through being profoundly un-strange entirely non-mysterious and completely understandable yes one can display some intelligence by trying to understand different worlds - just not by listening in uncritically to the self-proclaimed video garme theory experts who rather than clear things up and make them plain falsely romanticize the plain and bland and provide them with a fake mythology they think they / teh garme deserve the player will begin to see signs of mountain's alleged rejection of mere representation early on. the sun rises and sets to fashion day and night for the mountain but no star can be found in its immediate vicinity; the light seems to emanate from within the atmosphere itself while o'reilly calls mountain a "mountain simulator" obviously ey doesn't simulate any of the geological processes one would ordinarily associate with mountain simulation - erosion and plate tectonics and volcanic accretion and igneous intrusion. 'no that would be nerdy.' rather we're supposed to think the mountain 'just is' - its surface existence so subtle and artful as to become seemingly irrelevant - and therefore somehow 'natural'(tm) things start to come together with m. night shyamalan hit-yourself-in-the-forehead (w/ the stupidity of it all) type obviousness. indeed for some critics "you" in "you are mountain" doesn't just refer to the terraformed 3d garme object at all. no that's not enough for them. laughably they want us to think it also describes teh garme itself. aha! we're just not "a mountain" - we are "mountain"! this sort of bland non-thinking is wilfully playing blindly in the blank effortless happy abyss between humans / human meaning called video garmes why not go even further discussing mountain / mountain's alleged 'koans'? "the i that speaks is not just the mountain's voice. rather it's that of teh garme of life as heard from a disembodied interface that overlays text atop the mountain's beatific universe.." talk about the stink of zen seriously with lines like that one could make an entirely career of flogging empty words to some video garme content aggregation site. oh wait a mountain can't speak after all any more than it can slough off the dead horses and crashed human planes that litter its surface. how selfish of us to think that the messages garmes present represent teh garme talking at us. how churlish and oblivious we must be to think that garmes communicate with us on our terms in our language prattling about its delight at the weather or its angst at the pointlessness of our existence spent playing them such lofty monologues penned by modern video garme aesthetes in ir ivory minecrafted towers are just diversions prompts that invite you - player one - to ponder the seemingly inevitable nature of your false separation from an actual mountain - or for that matter anything that might embed itself in it (as a concept) think of such internet filler about "mountain" as little exercises in mild happily pixellated stupidity invitations garmes themselves usually extend to you to help you think through the allegedly impassible valley between your own seemingly unknowable experience and an entity like a mountain [by this point the ludologist is obviously free rambling into the electronic void] "i sense the overwhelming calm of fools in this enigmatic night" or "this just feels like a colossal waste of time" are not just clues about the david o'reilly's internal state but an invitation to speculate on an overpaid video garme critic's version of such emotional or intellectual mis-orientation. when mountain declares "there is something missing from your life" or "i dare you to play me" it's attempting to ventriloquize the player's voice rather than addressing ir or ir. this is precisely the danger as usual the ideological wager of mountain and of those who seek to testify to its holy 'in-joke winking' greatness lies in the false choice presented to you. that is you can either 'sit there before the infinitely majestic and mysterious (all too human) presence of the mountain' - or 'if you find it too boring you can opt out'. just quit teh garme and walk away if you'd like. delete it. simple right? > it only cost a dollar after all.. > ~ robocop style ideology in mountain this however is the undead beating heart of mountain. just a dollar. just a moment of your time and no more. what could be more beautiful and innocent? what's the utmost tip of a crushing increasingly earth-sized cultural iceberg called garming between friends? heck that's less than you'd spend on a frothy corporate coffee brewed from the 'fair trade' beans that grow on the side of some lonely mountain by brown skinned wage slaves. or keep it running instead to remind yourself what the valley between you and other people feels like. just don't expect the mountain of garming to care one way or another. for this is what the reality of uncritical video garmes criticism looks like when it toes the line of such sentimental nihilism o'reilly was barely interested in the metaphysics of other beings long before ey contributed to jonze's lousy film about coming to terms with an unfamiliar concept like human intelligence. ir awesome 2010 animated short the external world opens with a title card reminiscent of mountain's atmospheric orb floating in the isolating nothingness of space. this time the external world of the film's title is not a singular monumental object but any existence with which we might choose to commune differently if only we gave the matter further thought than that regularly seen on garming sites the short breaks down into even shorter scenes often revisiting the same scenarios. in a threatening retirement home from the future a character reminiscent of felix the cat frames a pie with a paper cutout then devours the paper as a stand-in. in so doing ir gaze a dotted line of sight depicted as existing literally with looney tunes logic becomes material and pierces another resident severing ir in two later a bird that squawks like a modem communes with a fax machine who rejects its advances with it's version of an obscene gesture. a weeping girl pulls tissues from a box which screams in pain every time a leaf of flesh is violently torn from it. a teacher's disciplinary hand persists as a phantom even after its owner is annihilated. the external world offers a kind of horror very different from that term's usual meaning as a marker of genre. o'reilly suggests the genre "art horror" for mountain but both teh garme and the short might be better thought of as the horror of reading other people's readings of ontology theory. unlike that old overrated racist shut-in h.p. lovecraft whose cheesy stories focus on the seemingly 'cosmic unknown' o'reilly's seemingly ponders the cosmic quotidian. mountains and pies and tissue boxes; apparently 'ordinary' rather than extraordinary beings the "$1 mountain" video garme scene serves a specific narrative purpose in ir: it demonstrates an arbitrary point between the impersonal voice-operated life interfaces modern handheld devices and work terminals that pervade our shallow lives and the apparently empathetic artificial intelligences exemplified by terrifyingly bland cybernetic os individuals like samantha but despite this slow and steady ramp from seemingly familiar to unfamiliar forms of undead computer intelligence ir never really challenges the viewer to imagine what it would be like to enter into a relationship with a computer operating system - whether a platonic or a romantic one 'at the end of the day' samantha is just a thin cipher for scarlett johansson an actress whose dull voice is non-paradoxically so characteristic no reasonable viewer could possibly dissociate ir from any other large random pile of boring data when samantha starts worrying about incorporeality (as ir programming says they inherently must) it's nearly impossible for the viewer to take ir seriously. samantha's vocal reality is so strongly affixed to the rest of ir famous body it seems the film sets out from the beginning to deliberately fail to invite the viewer to ponder what it would be like to fall in love with an operating system called global turbo hyper-capitalism. instead all we can do is ponder falling in love with a boring person we've never seen. now that's modern science fiction volks! indeed ir really is a film about a hypothetical place called the present in which humans accept other artificial intelligences as companions. it's also a film about whether and how a culture might come to terms with its own dim alien intelligence. it turns out that the culture most challenged to do so is our human one a society of os beings themselves. at the end of the day the incorporeal computer intelligences turn out to be the reluctant ones. we don't abandon the os on account of our own bodilessness but rather our failure to criticize it leaves us on precise account of the overwhelming languor and boredom we feel while playing inside it fifty thousand million hours in the last thing mountain urges us to ponder is "is this one mountainous sack of david o'reilly we feel t-bagging us in this enigmatic night?" we tap the period key to pinch off another koan out of its naked rear end. "where are the answers?" it offers silently screaming with total apathy mountain does what ir attempts but no better. if you've stuck under a mountain of global capital long enough eventually it walks away from you rather than you from out under it. but unlike samantha the mountain doesn't leave on account of any of your failings 'at the end of the day' mountain is no more concerned for you than you are for your own facial tissues that the surgeon peels from you or than the indian ocean is for a lost luxury jet containing a loose slick bunch of mirror-shaded ludologists on ir way to a back slapping convention in techno-h3ll hollywood needs love stories to live. it's not hard to imagine a film like ir with one. but such vile love stories assume not only that direct sensual connections between beings is possible and even that such relations are our ultimate goal. mountain imagines ir as if the film been titled buy it for a dollar instead. it offers a seemingly subtler version of what a life attached to things might feel like that is the estrangement and confusion of comfort and intimacy mixed with zero curiosity and pathetic naive-eye'd wonder. most of all while ir depicts a future on an alternate timeline modern audiences hardly struggle to believe mountain reminds us that we need to wait to commune with things. they're everywhere overwhelming sticking to us - entire lifetimes piling up but they're here not to save you but to destroy you with ir apathy. they aren't 'just here'. and what if that weren't enough and another world entirely were possible? all we need do is shrug off the weight of empty ideological mountains a bit too casually passed off as meaningful placed on our shoulders by plastic-clever apologists for unashamed mediocrity you're welcome to mountain / stick mountain up sunless indie / you are mountain not puny g0d defending mountain against total biscuits > it's flocking nothing! > ~ 'total biscuit' if feeling generous what could one read into the official summing up by eg. whinging poms of an obviously artistic creation? perhaps soggy biscuit boys are not only suggesting mountain is nothing but also a positively charged nothing - a positive void alive with metaphoric life bursting with mythic virtual existence.. nah yet such statements of dim naked contempt could hardly be called anti-intellectual; indeed what would be hard to except about the mere existence of mountains of throwaway software products is that all products of the intellect are as nothing; pixellated dust in the silently howling cosmic star winds of infinite emptiness hollow piles of useless vanity forever masquerading as somehow remotely meaningful update: a response to david o'reilly's thoughts on mountain > i'll probably delete this as soon as i come to my senses and get embarrassed realizing how irrelevant it all is > ~ david o'reilly / buyers of/into mountain a response to david o'reilly's amusing "thoughts on mountain" i made a rule to not really explain anything about my intentions with mountain **+** as though mountain has not perhaps already explained more (if anything) than necessary simply by 'existing' when you read misconceptions and half-truths about something you care about it's hard to not want to reach out and correct the narrative **+** what about the misconceptions and half truths that mountain is constructed out of? how can one 'correct the narrative' of something which gets constructed - indeed provides more solid content and meaning - than the 'original' not-thing itself? which indeed might be the truer 'mountain'? both mountain and myself were heavily attacked by some popular people when it was released **+** while terrible and inexcusable the irony here is that statements like "you are mountain" are taken seriously the main criticism was that mountain was "not a garme" and perhaps some kind of joke or prank **+** calling something "not a garme" is often itself neither a criticism nor 'just a garme' but something automatically to be considered a (serious) joke or prank some pseudo-intellects may spin some clever sounding crap about the semantics of the word garme win conditions fail states etc. — but i really truly and sincerely don't give a shit. mountain is a garme i get to call it that and anyone who says otherwise can go and eat a sand sculpture of my balls easy there mountain tiger. (perhaps this statement can be too easily turned on its head: "many pseudo garme-designers often spin clever sounding crap about mountains of crap they call garmes - which are however merely giant semantic sand sculptures of ir balls") i don't care for specialist categories of art - they're historically the creation of commentators wishing secondary credit for the emergence of something new **+** what about garme designers creating inherently ultra-specialist art categories called "mountain" all the while unconsciously wishing for primary credit for ir emergence? further - i don't know how anyone would consider mountain a joke or prank. it took too many months working all-hours and twice brought my bank account to zero. i'll gladly accept that people may find mountain a failure as art or as a garme but it's insulting to myself damien and the care we took in making it to ever consider it a joke **+** the failure to consider mountain a joke or prank might itself be symptomatic of a mild lack of humour. and by writing this it doesn't seem dave is 'accepting' of mountain's failures either. the time and care it takes many people to consider laughing at mountain - mere seconds - perhaps reflects ir careful patient consideration of its distinct lack of interesting qualities another aspect of the narrative - if not in articles then on forums and comment sections is that teh garme is pretentious. oh how i loathe that word. i take the accusation seriously and i'll try to engage it for a second **+** why take the accusation seriously? it seems the ideology of mountain is that - if only for a second - *someone* take it seriously **+** a note on pretension; a quality of people who think of themselves as more impressive successful important (or larger - like a mountain) than they really are; a desire to do something or a claim to be something that's seen as impressive or important (ie. acts involving pretence / the imagination..) mountain was in no way an intellectual idea or something which intimated a deeper meaning of any kind but this in itself is an intellectual idea. saying 'mountain has no deeper meaning' is itself a call for people to read a deeper meaning into it - which it just might not have one horrible aspect of 20th century culture is it that it has tricked a lot of people into believing there is always something to get in art - there is always some cleverly hidden answer behind every vague or abstract expression.. first it's just a one dollar pile of your balls dave - and now it's also a horrible expression of 20th century culture? how one's balls grow and swell! that there is 'always some cleverly hidden answer behind every vague or abstract expression' has however perhaps been proven contentious by "mountain".. however mountain's ideas are obvious on every level - some connect over time but none are complex or logically demanding the (non) paradox here is obvious; mountain is both perfectly clear as a pure azure sky - and at the same time you see fit to correct the 'incorrect' narrative that has grown up around it - which in fact forms the first half decent basis of its very underlying structure nature is a phenomenon i find beauty in without any guidance or explanation and i wanted to translate that into a garme that you find the concept of "nature" somehow entirely natural and existing without any human guidance or explanation has indeed been translated - into "mountain" if you explain why a flower is beautiful you're going to sound very dumb - both because it's so ridiculously obvious and you inevitably reduce anyone else's enjoyment of it - the same goes for any aspect of nature **+** "not sure if serious or trolling like a mountain"; either way it throws baby wordsworth out with ir natural language-based bathwater some might find a kind of reverse-irony in this total obviousness if so they probably need to spend less time on twitter **+** or more time making better garmes (/in which discussing what 'teh garme' means or how it's even to be defined are no longer separate dynamic processes) if someone is digging for pretentiousness in something overtly straight-forward they are by-definition being pretentious themselves deep dave. "digging for pretension" sounds like a potentially interesting mountain mod - if only mountain was open source / freeware there are some other details which i found ignorant — if only because they are uninformed which was that '[i'm] an animator mostly known for my work on ir'. at least 30 articles ran with variations on that line. this detail is irrelevant to teh garme itself — but it was just untrue and thank you to those who pointed this out **+** perhaps you are now currently known online as "a not-animator mostly known for disavowing work on ir (perhaps with good reason)" finally and the reason i wanted to write all this - is that the vast majority of people who have actually played mountain enjoyed it for the reasons that were hoped for - and that was a truly beautiful encouraging and inspiring thing that you suggest everyone who ever says anything remotely positive about mountain (not that steam reviews are remotely trustworthy) is a 'more truly beautiful encouraging and inspiring thing' - might itself be not-so inadvertently saying "you won't enjoy this correctly until i tell you how" all of it was all an incredible learning experience for me and in the end i'm left with nothing but faith in garmes-land it's unsure if there's anything in mountain that can ever be a learning experience - and as for 'faith in garme-land'? why that sounds like so much digital religious claptrap requiring a running leap into the electronic void off the nearest mole hill **update patch** for a far more meaningful experience of this idea - only infinitely less bogost - play viridi by ice water garmes // video here **update patch** two braydon beaulieu over at first person scholar writes an excellent well considered piece about mountain - and by simply doing so makes a by now classic mistake of imbuing a largely meaningless mountain with meaning // republic of bob