In Little Inferno, we could never really “fail” the expectations of the game. There is nothing we could not set on fire, and if we could not come up with the correct combo, we still get money from burning things. We are rather well-rewarded in the game —— the game pays us so lavishly that we never worry about running out of coins.
The game mechanic was impossible to fail with, and the only way to fail the expectations of the game is to burn down your house, since fire hazard was the only thing we were warned about. But on the other hand, only after we burn down the house do we realize that the snowy apocalypse is escapable, and we could have not curled up in a small house and stare into the fireplace all day. Looking back on the town covered by heavy smoke and snow, hearing from Sugar Plump that a sunny beach still exists in the world, and meeting the mailman who delivers to my house every time but I was too occupied to notice, I felt mocked by the game of actually believing that it was an unescapable snowy hell and burning things is our last resort to survive. I was deprived of my social life, my right to enjoy the sunny part of the planet, and my hope for the future. And it’s not just me, but thousands of people curling up in thousands of houses, burning things, still convinced that it is their only way to survive. It is the failure of the bigger system, and I was lucky to see it because I had one big “failure”.
Anable argued in Games to Fail With that repeated failure, i.e. “fail with failure” might help us “reverse the individualization of failure and deflect it back onto the failing of larger systems”, while Little Inferno could have taken it a bit further —— could we realize the failure of the bigger system if we keep “succeeding”? Would we ever have a doubt about the system? The questions that Little Inferno raised reflect on the real world, addressing people that “succeed” in real life, who don’t need to worry about coins and tickets. Would “the successful” ever be able to uncover the doom of the structure? Or would it take burning down their houses for them to realize?
What’s more, The Nuclear Winter Hypothesis implies more about the heavy snowstorm. By the Wiki of Nuclear Winter Hypothesis, the wildfire after a nuclear war can inject soot into the stratosphere, which could block some direct sunlight from reaching the Earth, and possibly cause “catastrophic” regional climatic cooling for years. Reading this, I couldn’t help recalling the nuclear bombs I set on fire back in my Little Inferno —— could the snow be caused by the smoke from our burning? If it was what the game implies, the snowy hell could be a self-fulfilling prophecy of the system after all.
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