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“I often say that my computer raised me.”
It’s almost like my town, my neighborhood, the street where I grew up."
“I had this fully-developed vision of this game come into my head.
While we are probably right about that, Ryan sees it differently.
“Dark web is a personal reference for me,” she says.
I really, genuinely feel that the 90s web era was the real dark web, beforeGooglecame in.
Things weren’t really indexed in the same way that the Tor connection isn’t really indexed.
So you had to really dig around.”
The clock hits 1am, and you know what?
I’m inclined to believe her.
In short, not only has Ryan visited the dark web herself, she’s played around with it.
“I love to seed mysteries across the world.”
“Demons…are metaphors in a way,” she muses.
“I always describe [darkwebSTREAMER] as a psychological horror game.
“I’ve always been fascinated by AI.
I’ve always been really enamored with things that talk back.”
Basically, the dark web you experience in-game is listening and responding to choices that you make.
“It’s all ethical,” Ryan says.
“It’s all handmade datasets, and the only hallucination is our intended hallucination.
So it’s very video game-functioning and appropriate.”
Much as in a roguelike, “the internet is the dungeon,” explains Ryan.
Did you find a doctor?
Did you find a therapist?
Did you find a demonologist?
Did you find this weird-ass marketplace?
“I had some presumptions.
I was like, this game probably won’t sell very well, it’s very reading heavy.”
But then, something happened that got her “anthropologist brain turning”.
I watched people queue for an hour to play, and people were bringing their friends back.
And thentheirfriends were bringing back friends.
It was bizarre.”
Not only did everyone want to play darkwebSTREAMER, but a lot of them were happy to merely watch.
In some ways, that’s even weirder.
Fear itself
I always feel most alive when I’m in that environment of suspended animation.
I feel deeply alive when I know that there’s the possibility of death.
This voyeuristic element of watching others in positions of fear and discomfort is interesting in itself.
Personal, yes, but it’s also topical.
“People enjoy watching what kind of violence other people are going to experience.
Maybe I’m very biased because like I’m really into that shit,” she laughs.
That’s still my favorite way for people to play it."
Fight-or-flight triggers a unique response in all of us, toeing the precipice of life and death.
Maybe existential horror is its only true form?
That seems to be the case for Ryan, anyway.
“I am the most immune horror person ever.
I love horror because I seek that feeling of fear.
“There’s a feeling of safety in statistics,” she jokes.
I feel deeply alive when I know that there’s the possibility of death.
Yes, that’s scary, but also very invigorating and exhilarating. "
It’s a perfect allegory for what she witnessed at PAX 2022.
It’s two very different kinds of people.
The ones I get sad about are the people who won’t engage with it at all.
It’s almost not being a good neighbor, to turn a blind eye from our mortality.”
