8th Day of The Week (Part 1)

Babe please come back to bed. The Germans are coming

8th day of the Week is a game by Amir|Nada Alami and published by Plus One Exp. Content is reproduced and referenced here for review purposes, and is owned by its owners.

1. Every Individual Component Is The Best

In our analysis, we consider every individual artistic element of a game the best; we don’t find bad or good useful. So, the Split/Party framework assumes it is the best art, best layout, best writing, best design. This is an acknowledgment that nobody makes “bad” art on purpose; any given element is the best art that could have been produced at that point, restricted by its material conditions and constraints of time and effort. This is also because saying something is good/bad art is the most useless criticism that can be given. In practical terms, this section is for things we will not touch on the review but merit acknowledgment.

Lhuzie

A small solo/journaling game (a zine-sized zine), 8th Day of The Week (8DTW) takes a minimalistic approach, making every graphic element and design choice speak loud and clear. The cover does a lot of work to establish what the game is about and makes it an excellent example of how one or two illustrations can sometimes serve a game better than one every other page. 8DTW is a small game of simple mechanics, but a lot of labor is contained within. What is there is there because it is needed; what is there creates the proper atmosphere to play the game.

Brad

How much can you pack into 32 pages? A tight design, interesting graphics, a handful of fascinating illustrations, and some tight design. No vast monolith with a thousand prompts, a tightly written journaling game that touts itself as being completable in three hours.

2. Meet The Game At The Level It Is At

Each game comes with certain expectations and tone. To properly break it down, we have to meet the game at the level it is: not lament its choice of premise and wish it was something else, nor resent for not conforming with our politics, not letting “missed opportunities” stand in our way of applying the critical framework relentlessly. It also includes not working with the game as marketed or how it exists in our desires, but as it is.

Lhuzie

It is a self-contained solo game, and as usual with games of this size and complexity in the genre, it does most of its work through what the player brings with them.

This limits them in what they can/from what they assume. 8DTW has an easier time than most games of this type as it only needs to assume two things from you: having had trouble sleeping ever in your life and being pressured by some kind of material or spiritual debt.

Being built around what may be as close to a universal experience as it can be, it is also universal in its terrors and dangers. It is, ultimately, a game that evokes the experience of self-harm and reflects the consequences of going seven days without sleep without turning away. It makes clear what the game is about — what will happen for sure if you play this game — and makes sure this experience will be as comfortable and safe as possible.

Brad

8th Day of The Week is clearly written by someone who appreciates the struggle of not being able to fall asleep, and I will tip my hat in that they accurately warn about the experience of even fantasizing about it. The frank discussion of debt, harm and concise opening text carries a lot of solid weight for me. I like that there is even a second introduction section partway in.

3. Identify What The Game Says It Is About

Games are about things. Usually. Mostly. That is often the same thing they market themselves as. This often means to establish the relationship of the game with systems, mechanical frameworks, genre, etc. This is how games establish exceptions about the nature of play and establish a common space for creation.

Lhuzie  

8DTW is a game about forcing yourself awake for seven days until you unlock a secret eighth-day. It is about self-hate, self-harm, and how harm to ourselves is somehow justified because we don’t harm anyone else. It is the toll that debts places on ourselves, and the extremes they push us to.

Brad

8DTW is about remaining awake for seven days in a desperate attempt to unlock an eighth; it is about the fact that you are doing this to escape the debt you are so burdened with.

4. Uncover What The Game Is REALLY About

What the game says it is about is not always what the game is about. This is where we look at all the weird interactions, examining the system that game creates, how the way mechanics interact with the text and art, how it exists in a given context, how well parts flow together or get in the way. This creates a much richer environment that the original design could ever imagine once a game hits the table.

Lhuzie 

8DTW has a pretty complex message that tries to communicate and create a synthesis with you/through you, using only what you bring with you.

8DTW is about infinite love, about loving yourself, and about the dire consequences of failing to honor the infinite love we receive from others (and owe to ourselves).

Two philosophers struggle through the game: Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Two visions of debt: a spiritual, infinite one; another an exponential, material one. What you have been given versus what can be taken from you.

In Works of Love, Kierkegaard presents love as infinite, as a debt that can never be paid. One debt that you can never hope to repay, and in fact debts, should not be repaid. Repaying a debt is the ultimate antisocial act, a rejection of all the love you have received. This means that you must accept debt as part of existing. This is far from ignoring; just because a debt can never be paid, that does not mean you get to ignore it. Only infinite love — and the associated infinite debt — is comparable with with infinite love. Even the ability to forgive guilt, to clear a debt, is a necessary act of love — not forgiving, or lording over someone guilty or indebted to the potential of forgiveness — is an unloving act, increasing how much one owes to the infinite love.

The denial of sleep is self-harm, seven days in which you draw upon the infinite love given to you by denying it to yourself. The true lender, the true monstrous debtor, is you: when you refuse to forgive yourself, you draw more on the debt of infinite love; when you fail to love yourself by denying the simplest act of love — sleep — you draw more from the well of boundless love. These ideas wrap around yourself as you play 8DTW. What you already knew was a bad idea to do, you realize how much more harmful it actually is.

Now, I have never been a big fan of Kierkegaard, so my knowledge of it was lackluster at the best of time. Even so, one of the final remarks of the game did not sit quite right with me.

Soren Kierkaagard’s philosophies on debt is that lenders primarily gain access to a debtor’s anguish over their own poverty. Unpayable debt still extracts guilt from the debtor, which in turn magnifies what is owed.

I could not recall or find what this may be a reference to, and there is no exact phrasing or direct citation. It seems to contradict what I got from Kierkegaard: yes, while Kierkegaard sees paying debts and demanding/trying to repay them as harmful and unloving, there does not seem to be value on guilt and extracting it. And the onus of quenching love is pinned on the lender demanding repayment/lording over with their ability to forgive debt rather than the debtor.

This is, however, something that the other philosophy the game is arguing with/for voiced often — and one with which Kierkegaard stance on infinite love clashed often. In Genealogy of Mortals, Nietzsche argues that repaying debts is the source of debts. Every society is one of creditors and debtors, drawing these conclusions about fundamental human nature because… German has the same word for debt and guilt. To be in debt is to give permission to be taken apart; repayment will happen, one way or another. You can try to exert your will and morals by repaying your debts; otherwise, it will be taken from your suffering. That Nietzsche was full of shit on this is irrelevant — but make no mistake, he was full for shit, for you you cannot take these conclusions from the quirks of Germanic languages (and the supposed “blood debt” rituals of mutilation he uses to support these claims are an invention from Early Modern dramaturges rather than anthropological or archaeological scientific facts). It is an argument meeting bourgeoisie assumptions of the world, and it makes sense in a world created by the bourgeoisie. When Nietzsche speaks, it is about the Modern Man, not about any other people.

This is why the ritual of the eight-days of sleep deprivation makes sense. It is absurd, harmful, destructive, impossible. And yet, for the twisted mockery Nietzsche paints of the bourgeois society, nothing else can make sense, fully building on its inherent moral puritanism and fascism. Yes, I will sigma-grindset myself an eight-day. Out of sheer will to power. Why not? I hurt only myself if I fail.

Through play of the game these two titanic ideas cleverly form a synthesis in you. Through 8DTW you can get it in ways no amount of German philosophy can convey.

Brad

“There is nothing on earth I have ever bought with money, only things I have bought with hours of my life.”

You trade away the precious moments you have on this earth. Sure, you trade them away for the necessary resources you need to survive on them, but sometimes you end up in a cycle; you are trading away these hours to buy nebulous things, to pay off medical debts, to have a little treat so you don’t go crazy. At the end of the cycle, you still have traded them.

There are people today, organized into online communities, who are rallied around the idea that you should work as much and as hard as possible for as long as you can, until you earn the mythical amount of money that will enable you to enjoy the rest of your life in comfort, that you should spend only what you absolutely need to survive now, and then get to live later.

8DTW is about that urge. The idea is that you can suffer a lot now and then get ahead and even out later. That if you work hard enough, you will be lucky enough that you can square every debt you’ve ever made… But you can’t; a bad run of luck, and you pay off your debt and end up a sucking void for the rest of your life… Wouldn’t it have just been easier to live slow?

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