#and moved onto an ikea limbo

[aimseytv]

ikea is too big

[gyeomsweetgyeom]

Donghyuck x Reader

summary: dating Hyuck apparently also kinda means dating Mark

word count: ~2.4k

A/N: Hyuck is a total drama queen here and Mark is oblivious, happy reading! (also do we like the header?? I think it’s kinda cute)

-

Dating Hyuck was everything you dreamed of and then some, he was the perfect boyfriend and best friend all in one. He knew when to have fun and when he could mess around with you, but he also knew when you needed him to be serious and help you. Of course, he was super affectionate and loving, to you and his members, meeting you did not change his habits toward his members in the slightest. He still bothered Doyoung every chance he got, he still loved on Jisung with every fiber of his being, he still fought Renjun any chance he got, and he was still babied by Johnny- that wasn’t surprising to you. But what did surprise you was just how close Hyuck and Mark really were. From the very beginning, you had been under the impression that Hyuck was the one that smothered Mark with affection to the point of being annoying, but now months, nearly a year, into your relationship with Hyuck it was very apparent to you that Mark was almost like a third piece of your two-person puzzle. Mark was just as clingy, if not more clingy than Donghyuck on any given day. These two were practically glued at the hip when they were together, they were inseparable.

Mark would very often join in on your movie nights, squeeze himself to Hyuck’s unoccupied side while you cuddled, joined in on your facetime dates when you were apart, he had even crashed a few dates and Hyuck loved it. He loved spending time with his best friend and his love, his two favorite people at the same time. Now, don’t be confused- you loved Mark but as a friend and when he wasn’t being a major pain on your dates. You loved that Hyuck had a best friend and someone to comfort him when you couldn’t, but sometimes you just wanted some alone time with your boyfriend and lately, Mark had become increasingly needy with Hyuck. It was like every time he saw the both you together he saw it as an open invitation for him to join. He never picked up on the romantic vibes when it was just you and Donghyuck together.

-

You had just woken up, looking at the clock that read something close to 10 am, a bright, early morning for you and Hyuck, you turned, cuddling further into his chest in an attempt to absorb his warmth. 

“You’re up early.” He grumbled, hand gently rubbing your back. 

You pouted, “I think Johnny left the blinds open on purpose.” 

Hyuck let out a sleepy laugh, pressing a peck to your forehead, still in the limbo of being awake but also asleep. “I thought I heard voices, good morning!” Mark exclaimed as his head popped into the room. He made his way to the twin-sized bed and made room for himself on a remaining tiny sliver of the bed. Hyuck smiled widely, ever the cuddly baby when he woke up, he threw an arm around Mark to cuddle the both of you. 

“Did you change your shampoo or something? You smell good.” Mark asked Hyuck, wiggling over a bit to make room for himself. 

“Mark,” you groaned. This bed was not made for three people, heck, it barely fit you and Hyuck comfortably so while Mark was making room for himself you were losing room. 

He simply replied with an oops before he and Hyuck carried on with their soap conversation, “Hold up,” Mark paused, sitting up and making even more room for himself. With a sudden bump of his hip against your boyfriend’s led to Hyuck bumping into you, you fell out of bed, landing on the floor with a soft but sudden thud. 

“Oh my god! I am so sorry!” Mark apologized, trying and failing to hold in his laughter.

“Baby, are you okay?” Hyuck laughed.

You huffed and sent a glare at the two laughing idiots on the bed, standing from the floor to make your way to the kitchen. “I think Mark is trying to steal my boyfriend.” You stated as your eyes landed on an innocent bystander Johnny. 

“Coffee?” He offered simply. 

-

After a busy day of schedules, you took it upon yourself to treat the guys to a nice dinner as a nice relaxing treat for working so hard. The table was filled with conversations and laughs while the food was eaten and the stress was eased away. Hyuck sat beside you, hand on your knee while he spoke to Jaehyun. 

“Thank you for the dinner y/n!” Taeyong smiled, leading to the rest of the guys at the filled table to follow up with their own thank you’s and compliments on your choice of food. Even a few compliments about how sweet and amazing you are, which is always nice to hear.

“Thank you, baby, I love you. My favorite person on the whole planet.” Hyuck smiled, nuzzling his head into the space between your neck and your shoulder. 

“Whoa! Favorite person?” Mark questioned.

“After you of course,” Hyuck corrected himself as he got up to suffocate Mark in a gigantic hug. The two of them carried on laughing and play fighting as if you weren’t sitting a few feet away with your mouth hanging open. The table burst out laughing upon seeing the interaction between the youngest of the group and your reaction. 

“It’s okay y/n, you’re my favorite person tonight.” Taeil laughed, pulling you into a side hug. At least Taeil would give you affection.

“Hyung! Hands off.” Donghyuck glared. There was just no winning with him.

-

A regular movie night ended up in Hyuck laying on your chest and your hand running through his hair. The couple on screen was being cute and lovey-dovey in a cafe, making the man on your chest let out a longing sigh. “I wanna kiss you in a cafe.” He whined. 

“What if I don’t want to kiss you in a cafe?” You replied playfully.

He sat up quickly, caging you underneath him as he leaned in and began to attack you with a million kisses. 

“Okay!” you laughed, “Okay! I’ll kiss you wherever you want, now let me breathe.”

He smirked, “I want to cash in on one of those kisses now.”

Before you could fully catch your breath, his lips were pressed to your lips. Your lips moved in sync, just as they had hundreds of times before. Your hand was running through his hair, pulling and tugging in such a way that drove him crazy. One hand was slipping under your shirt, resting on your waist while the other made its way up to cup your cheek. You were pressed further into the couch as the heated kiss got somehow even steamier, with that you tugged a little more roughly on his hair. He pulled away with a groan, chest heaving while he caught his breath. “That was nice.” He smiled bashfully. 

You smiled, sitting up while continuing to play with his hair more gently now. “I would hope so, you sounded like you really liked it.” 

His forehead met yours, lips brushing gently, just a few more millimeters and you would be kissing again, but of course, “Yo! Dude, you said we were going to watch this together!” You heard Mark exclaim as he plopped himself on the couch. 

“Mark! It’s so good, we can restart it right? We weren’t really paying attention anyway.” Hyuck replied cheerfully as he just about jumped away from you and onto Mark. 

“Hey y/n, you look a little flushed, I’ll take this so you can cool off,” Mark mumbled while he shoveled popcorn into his mouth, pulling the blanket off you to wrap himself and Donghyuck in it. 

You grabbed a pillow from the couch and pressed your face into it to muffle your frustrated groan. “y/n, I know, she seems awful already.” You heard Mark say. This guy…

-

“Baby, are you almost ready?” You asked Donghyuck. The two of you had plans to go shopping at one, but it was already 2:30 and you were getting bored of sitting around just playing on your phone. There was Hyuck sitting on the couch bumping elbows with his best friend while they played a stupid video game. A video game that they seemed to play every waking second when you weren’t around and now apparently when you were around.

“Just a second baby.” He grumbled, now he had taken the lead, just a few points ahead of Mark. 

“You’ve been saying that for like two hours.” You pouted.

“Hey y/n, what are you doing here?” Johnny greeted. 

You explained with a sigh and a glare sent your boyfriend’s way that you had planned on going shopping but someone was preoccupied with their other significant other. Johnny laughed, “I’m going to the mall right now with Yuta if you want to come, we have to go by Ikea.” You jumped up, beating Johnny to the door, ready to be on your way out the door without so much as a glance in your busy boyfriend’s direction to bid him goodbye. 

Shopping with Hyuck was always an adventure, you had fun every time you went out. He would make you try on the ugliest clothes he could find and then pouted when you did the same for him. However, shopping with Johnny and Yuta was a different type of fun. These two were crazy. It was the most fun you had ever had while shopping. After hours of shopping, it was finally time to go home, but Yuta and Johnny had convinced you to go back to the dorms and join them for dinner. Something about it being their turn to treat you to dinner.

The three of you entered the fifth-floor dorm, laughing while Yuta jokingly had a conversation with the stuffed animal Johnny bought you, he and Yuta had bought matching ones to be a little “family.” 

“Food should be here soon, you can set your stuff in our room.” Johnny offered. 

You let yourself into his and Hyuck’s shared room, seeing Mark with his guitar on the gaming chair while Hyuck was on the bed snuggling a pillow. He lit up upon seeing you, “Baby!”

“Hey… you guys finally stopped playing your game.” You noted while you set your shopping bags in the corner.

“Where did you go?” Hyuck asked, to which you replied by pointing at the bags. “Well, why didn’t you wait for me? We were gonna go together.”

“I went with Johnny and Yuta because you were so busy playing with Mark, I was ready and so were they, why not?” You shrugged.

“You went on a date with Johnny hyung and Yuta hyung?! You guys took my lover on a date?” Hyuck yelled angrily.

“You were having your own little day with Mark, so what? Nobody wants to wait around an hour and a half for you.” Johnny replied as he set the food down on the table. 

You managed to squeeze past Donghyuck, taking your seat at the table beside Yuta who was already mocking Hyuck under his breath, resulting in the both of you covering up your laughs as quickly as you could. 

“Baby, don’t laugh at me- hey! What is this? Why do I see three of these things?” Hyuck questioned, waving your brand new stuffed animal around.

“They’re a family!” Yuta smiled before shoveling some food into his mouth.

You thanked them for the dinner before digging into your own food while Hyuck continued to throw a fit in his doorway, “Now, you don’t even love me! You have a family with my hyungs, they stole you from me and you don’t even care. You’re just laughing in my face, I hope you’re happy with them. I hope they make you happier than I made you.” 

“Oh my god baby, it was one afternoon for 3 hours. You were busy with Mark and I had to go shopping. I can hang out with my friends like you do.” 

“Mark, you distracted me! You drove my baby away from me, shouldn’t you have been with Yuta hyung?” He went off again. Mark replied with his own argument, filling the room with loud yelling and complaints from the two of them. One of them yelled something about being clingy and the other one said something along the lines of ‘look who's talking.’ Meanwhile you were purely focused on eating your food. 

You nearly choked on your drink when Donghyuck squeezed himself onto the bench next to you and pressed his cheek against your own, “Take me back! I promise I’ll never choose Mark over you again. I won’t ever even talk to him again if that’s what you want.”

You shook your head quickly, clearing your throat, “Hyuckie, no, calm down. Mark is your best friend, you don’t have to do that.”

“I just realized that Mark has been crashing in on us time, I’m sorry. Forgive me?” He mumbled, still pressing himself to your side. 

“Yo! Have I really? Oh my god… you’re right! Ew! You weren’t warm that time we watched a movie right? He was on top of you and I-I saw your lips touch- gross!” Mark gagged. 

“That was your fault idiot, that was our alone time.” Your boyfriend glared, wrapping a hand around your waist to pull you impossibly closer. It really was more funny now to you that the both of them came to their senses days later and not on the actual night that everything had happened.

“I don’t think I can look at you guys right now, I feel sick.” Mark held an arm over his stomach as he made his way to the door. Hyuck let out a content noise, his face now pressed fully into your neck while his arms were wrapped around you like a snake suffocating their prey all the while mumbling that Mark would never bother the both of you again, he would make sure of it. And that he would never let you out of his sight or his grasp, at least not while you were near him.

Johnny leaned over the table, whispering “I think you got your boyfriend back.” Yeah, looks like you did.

[sylvies-chen]

A few lyric choices for Melendaire

"There's a rumor going 'round and 'round and round. What'd you say we make it true." Rumor by Lee Brice

"We do almost everything that lovers do, and that's why it's hard, just to be friends with you." Why ( are we still friends) by 98 degrees

"say something I'm giving up on you. I'll be the one if you want me to. Anywhere, I would've followed you. Say something I'm giving up on you." Say something by A Great Big World.

// We do almost everything that lovers do and that's why it's hard, just to be friends with you \\

Claire doesn’t mean for the lines to blur. 

It starts when she’s sitting down in the cafe one day. Neil comes up to her and asks her for advice on what to buy for his sister’s birthday. He scrolls through his phone and shows her some options he had found online. 

“Your options are... alright,” she hesitates. 

He sighs and laughs, “I’m not very good at this gift picking thing, am I?” 

“It just takes practice. Gifts have to be about the sentiment behind them, make it something personal.” 

“Well, what if you come with me to shop for a gift? You’re great at this sort of thing.” 

The whole idea seems innocent enough, so she agrees. The trip is fun and uneventful. They spend the afternoon looking around crowded malls, window shopping and getting a feel for what Gabby would want as a present. They even end up getting lunch in the mall cafeteria, with food that isn’t half as gross as she had expected. 

A few weeks later, she’s complaining to Park about what a pain it’s been to replace her dresser and how the dumb IKEA catalogue lied to her and said they’d pay for someone to build it for her. Melendez overhears their conversation and chimes in when she brings up how expensive it’ll be. 

“I could do it for free.” 

“Really?” 

“Yeah. I know how to build a dresser. I’ll come over later and help you set it up.” 

How is Neil Melendez always the knight in shining armor? She swallows hard, hesitant on whether it’s a good idea but accepts the offer, in desperate need of help. Claire tries to ignore the knowing look Park is giving her, and texts Neil her address during her break. 

He comes over to fix her dresser and just. Ok. Claire knows how to be professional. But he’s in her bedroom, and he’s wearing a tight t-shirt while building this literal piece of furniture for her and just. Damn. She doesn’t know how someone can look so good while sweating. It’s... distracting. And it definitely makes her job of staying distant and professional hard, but she doesn’t care. 

“Enjoying the view?” She catches him teasing her when she realizes she’s been staring at him, his eyebrow raised and his tone cocky. 

She blushes, rolls her eyes. “You wish.” 

Friends have flirty banter with each other all the time, right? 

Then, the lines blur even more. They’re all sitting down on the couches outside his office, trying to find the best course of treatment for a patient. They’re sitting on the same couch while Morgan and Shaun sit on the couch adjacent to them. 

She doesn’t remember when, or even how, but at some point she stretches her legs out on the couch which results in her feet landing in his lap. By the time she looks up and realizes what they’re doing, too much time has passed to put her legs down without making it awkward. He doesn’t look up from his papers, doesn’t try and move her legs, doesn’t even seem remotely uncomfortable with it. She watches him concentrating on his papers, his brows scrunched and his lips tight at the corners, and smiles to herself before looking back at her work. 

Then, later in the afternoon, it happens for a fourth time. She’s standing in a circle with her, Melendez, Shaun, and Morgan, discussing their plan. That’s when Claire sees it. Sitting on the shoulder of Neil’s blazer as clear as day, is a piece of lint. 

So Claire picks it off. 

“Sorry, you had a little lint there,” she brushes the shoulder of his blazer off. Apparently though, picking lint is now a crime, because the group falls silent. Neil doesn’t seem to notice, suppresses a smile before continuing to update everyone on the patient. 

As soon as he’s finished, Morgan yanks Claire aside to talk in private. Claire feels like her arm is getting ripped off and knows she’s in trouble for something when she sees that stern, motherly look creep onto Morgan’s face. 

“Browne, is there something you want to tell me?” 

“Uhh, I don’t know, is there?” 

Morgan replies by directing her eyes towards Melendez, waving a finger in between him and Claire. “Lint?” 

“What? He had a piece of lint on his shirt.” 

“Uh, dude. You’re the girlfriend.” 

Claire immediately snorts with laughter. “What? Morgan, stop being ridiculous. I was just being friendly.” She tries to ignore the way her stomach does backflips when the word girlfriend is associated with her and Neil. 

“Nuh-uh. When your friend has a piece of lint on their shirt you go ‘Hey there, bud. You got a piece of lint on your shirt’. When your boyfriend has lint on your shirt, you pick it.” 

“Since when has this rule existed?” 

“Since forever, Browne. It’s like the standard for boundaries. Like, ok, you can drive a friend to the airport, but only boyfriends and girlfriends will walk with you all the way to the terminal.” 

“Morgan, I work with Melendez. Nothing more.” She feels her heart drop a little and that’s when she realizes it. Realizes she wants more with him. 

“Park told me about the dresser. How he built it for you. And then today with the feet? You should have seen the way he looked at you when you first put them on his lap. Practically drooling. As someone who has actively looked for reasons to tear you down in the past, I’m telling you: Neil Melendez is definitely one of them. You’re the girlfriend,” she repeats.

Oh shit. Claire’s the girlfriend. 

“I... Excuse me,” she nods before leaving Morgan. This time, she’s the one yanking an arm as she pulls Neil into his office. He’s struggling, trying to pull away and looking around at the people passing by them, extremely confused. 

When she reaches his office, she’s almost out of breath as he stares at her, bewildered. “If you wanted to speak with me, you could have just asked.”

“I’m the girlfriend,” she huffs, her breathing still heavy. 

“What?” 

“You asked me to shop for your sister with you,” she starts explaining. “And then you come over to my place and build a dresser for me, and then the whole foot thing today. We always do these things. It’s confusing and... I don’t know,” Claire sighs, defeated. “Morgan’s just gotten inside my head.” 

“Oh.” His eyes look hesitant as he takes a moment to think everything over, but there’s something else there. Longing. He wants something and Claire doesn’t know what.  “Well, I’ll admit things have been less than professional for a while now. I don’t know,” he shrugs timidly, his hands in his pockets, “I know there’s a difference between friendships and relationships it’s just... it’s different with us.” 

“Yeah,” she agrees, lets herself smile. “When did these lines get so blurry between us?” 

“I don’t know,” he shakes his head thoughtfully. “We’re just kind of stuck in this limbo.” 

“Yep,” she replies with her lips pursed. “We’re too far gone to go back to being just colleagues and not far enough to be... well, you know. Not that I’m suggesting we do that,” she backtracks after a moment. “Unless you want to.” 

There’s this moment where it’s dead silent and they just look at each other intensely, his eyes melting in her gaze. Claire swears the world stops spinning on its axis for a second. 

Then, the barriers break down. Neil steps forward, cups her face, and kisses her, all in one swift motion. It’s warm and tender, his lips pushing against hers. She’s frozen for a moment, but quickly reacts and lets her lips fall into his.

And just like that, they leave the middle ground. 

“I definitely want to,” Neil answers her, catching her bottom lip as he pulls away. “I have wanted to do that for a long time.”

“Me too,” she realizes as she says it out loud for the first time. It’s actually stupid how much she’s smiling right now. Her cheeks almost hurt. It’s a feeling she doesn’t get often lately but she knows that’s about to change.

“So I was thinking,” he smiles nervously as he takes her hands in his, “that tonight, I take you out to dinner. On a real date, with your real boyfriend. What do you think?” 

The lines are sharp now, clearer than ever. It’s a technicolour rainbow of feelings she had tried hiding. For the first time quite possibly in her whole life, she says three words. “That sounds perfect.”

[youarenotthewalrus]

this article is dumb, i shouldn’t be hate-reading and you shouldn’t either but here we are so let’s do this:

We begin with a description of a platformer doing something clever and metatextual at the end. Followed by;

What this means is that the game stands in stark contrast to an industry whose products, historically speaking, rely on hijacking the reptile brains of hormone-crazed teenaged boys. In short, the history of videogames is the history of the glorification of violence.

Ah yes, who can forget such bloodthirsty products of the military-industrial complex as Pong, Tetris, Pacman or Zork?

We can debate what constitutes the first videogame, and whether it’s fair to attribute the invention of videogames to the military,

Given the contentiousness of that assertion, I should certainly hope so!

but what’s undeniable is that military engineers—ever ready to coopt, conspire with, or commission innovation from the private sector (e.g., the splitting of the atom, the invention of I.Q.)—more or less immediately recognized that videogames could be employed as a cheap substitute for teaching soldiers how to do everything from fly a plane to take out a sniper.

Kinda reductive to reduce the history of video games to FPSes in general and America’s Army in particular, doncha think?

Anyway, then we get some more waffle about how first-person shooters video games are training us to kill, before we get to the real question: given that this platformer he just finished playing did something a little artsy, can video games be art even despite the fact that were originally works of military propaganda intended to inure potential military recruits to violence? And more importantly, given that this guy seems to think the history of video games began with first person shooters, is he really qualified to answer this question?

Then we get some pointless side chatter over the claim that games are good for your brain, followed by the charge that games are addictive--despite the explicit comparison made to gambling (at “your local Native American casino,” no less), there is no discussion of lootboxes or microtransactions whatsoever, suggesting the author is not aware of specific steps which are taken to make games addictive and is just invoking vague notions of all games being addictive. None of this ever comes up again, and we promptly move back to talking about the actual game.

More specifically, Inside is what’s known as a “2D side-scroller”—meaning that you observe your figure mostly in profile in the center of your screen while a background landscape scrolling right-to-left gives the illusion of left-to-right forward motion.

Somehow, the use of the term “2D side-scroller” in quotes does not make me feel that this fellow is sufficiently familiar with video games to assess whether or not they can be art, as does the fact that he reckons that the platformer he is playing hearkens back to a 1981 shoot-em-up he remembers from his teens, which makes his apparent conviction that video games originated as first person shooters all the more baffling.

And while the world of videogames has already become a “spectator sport,” I’m unaware of any instance of the record of a videogame player’s performance becoming intellectual property, as it has in the world of chess, and in a whole array of sports. True, gamers go “professional” by attracting followers on the internet and earning ad revenue, but their play itself is not copyrighted. Games might wind up in museums (worldwide, there are at least seventeen museums dedicated to videogames), but bracketed moments of the play of particular games have not yet become value-able as art.

I invite the author to start selling unauthorized DVDs of clips from popular Twitch streamers and gaming YouTubers and see how long their lawyers allow him to entertain the notion that Let’s Plays do not constitute intellectual property.

the 2D side-scroller and its pitbull of a cousin, the first-person shooter,

???

The rest of the section is pretty unremarkable, so we move onto him complaining about lousy movie critique, then lousy video game critique, then explaining the concept of Easter eggs, then video game puzzles:

The puzzles of Limbo and Inside are more ambitious than the puzzles of most games in that their solutions often require the player to wait, or to exhibit what in psychology and education circles is known as divergent thought—for example, a corpse is a corpse, but it is also potentially a deadweight that can be used to spring a boobytrap.

Making the player wait or use an unusual object as a weight doesn’t strike me as particularly devilishly clever.

Then we get this jewel of a paragraph:

Nevertheless, puzzles themselves stand as an obstacle blocking the path of videogames’ journey from game to art. For while I might willingly suspend my disbelief long enough to accept that a boy has been tasked with jogging exhaustedly through a factory that churns out invincible blob creatures, I will find that willingness strained when I am also confronted with confounding puzzles placed in my path for no good reason. Videogames, in other words, ignore the basic tenets of internal consistency—in order to keep playing, you must suspend your disbelief, and then suspend it again, and again, and again, which means that in order to play and enjoy videogames you must also suspend the kind of critical judgment that is normally associated with art.

You heard it here, folks, accepting weird gameplay conceits means you can’t critically analyze a game.

Similarly, Easter eggs appeal only on the level of geek fetish—which is more or less the opposite of critical appreciation—and it is for this reason that I won’t address the puzzles and Easter eggs in Inside, even though they eventually lead to what some have concluded is the game’s “hidden meaning.” And this is the problem of videogames in a nutshell, because meaning in work of art is no more hidden from its beholder than the summit of a mountain is hidden from the mountain climber.

Sounds to me more like the problem is that he’s ignoring what the game itself is telling him about its plot and themes because it’s doing it in a way he finds aesthetically displeasing. I don’t know much about critical analysis but I feel like that’s not really how you should be doing it.

We then get a description of the plots of Limbo and Inside, including a decent bit of analysis marred by a bit of “murder simulator”-ism.

This is worth noting because prior to this moment the violence the boy has inflicted, either in Limbo or Inside, has been indirect—really an act of self-defense—but now the game is threatening to creep back into the usual videogame mode of affectless murder. You are given a choice: slip backward toward the wantonly horrific likes of Grand Theft Auto (1997) and Postal 2 (2003) [3] , or pause a moment and then continue on in a macabre but not morally bankrupt pursuit narrative. In this way, the player is implicated in a wryly disjointed bit of commentary on the history of gaming itself.

I mean this entirely sincerely: someone should get this guy a copy of Undertale. I think he’d enjoy it, if he could get past the idea of having to accept JRPG conventions.

Sadly, video game still aren’t art because he can list a bunch of movies that had vaguely similar elements:

From there, it’s not hard to find antecedents for Inside in both literature and film—it’s a little bit Soylent Green, a little bit Logan’s Run, a little bit The Island of Dr. Moreau, and more than a little bit Frankenstein. The imagery starts to seem familiar, too, with milieus lifted from E.T., Alien, and The Poseidon Adventure. But all this allusive flotsam becomes a bit of a disappointment, as eventually you become hard pressed to find anything in Inside that you haven’t seen inside something else.

Ezra Pound demanded that artists “make it new,” and Marcel Proust insisted that a writer is someone who invents a voice as unique as his or her fingerprint, but Inside isn’t even really trying to tell a story that hasn’t been told before. That’s a problem. Art cannot be made up wholly of references to other art. Star Wars, for example, does not come close to art because at its core it is nothing more than a pre-fab mash-up of archetypes mail-ordered from the IKEA superstore of Joseph Campbell.

I mean... why can’t art be composed solely of references to other art? Why can the whole not be more than the sum of its parts? If I take a picture of the Mona Lisa and photoshop a photo of a can of soup over her head, the resulting work is distinct from either of the originals, even though I provided no original content except the idea of sticking the two together.

Put another way, Inside could only have been designed by someone who hasn’t read Roland Barthes’s “The Death of the Author,” and hasn’t read Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” and hasn’t read T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent”—someone who hasn’t, in other words, engaged theoretically with what art is. And that, in turn, leads to the simple conclusion that on the level of its plot Inside is not trying to do what art does.

Good god this guy is snobbish.

Second, there’s still the meta-twist to consider: perhaps Inside is a game with both a text and a subtext. And perhaps a subtext can help the videogame industry evolve beyond the hyperviolence that is its womb and its crutch.

“Hyperviolent” is not exactly how I would describe Breakout or Super Mario Bros. Anyway, he then ponders the potential meaning of the evil scientists at the end of the game being stand-ins for the developers, and comes to the conclusion that...

The problem of games today is that their creators have not imagined any purpose for them greater than fun. There are exceptions to this, of course, but for the most part games equate escape with distraction—to be distracted is to be entertained, and it is good to be entertained.

Unlike the rest of popular media, of course.

The obligation of art, as Henry James described it, is to be interesting, and if you’re paying attention, that is to say, if you’re trying for more than distraction, then Inside begins to be interesting with its name, which stands in stark contrast to games like Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.

I too enjoy criticizing games for being superficial based on their titles.

Then we get some final analysis, a quote from a Raymond Carver short story I read in high school and remember mostly as something my friends in English class found homoerotic subtext in, and the claim that the goal of art is a feeling of transcendental bliss:

The much remarked-upon narrator of Raymond Carver’s classic short story, “Cathedral,” experiences such a moment as the story climaxes with a blind man helping him draw a church. “My eyes were still closed,” the narrator says. “I was in my house. I knew that. But I didn’t feel like I was inside anything.”

At its most ambitious, Inside aspires to a similar feeling. Escape in art that is not transcendence is cheap, and if you can climb beyond the foolish puzzles and the Easter eggs and the hidden meanings, you can feel, for a moment, that you are not alone on your sofa with your phone, playing a game; rather, you are somewhere else—somewhere grassy, bathed in warmth by a ray of sunlight falling from above.

And that’s nice and all but it feels like he didn’t really lead up to it.

Anyway, I spent way too much time picking through this but here we go. Final rating: 2/10, the next time you want to know if video games are art yet ask someone who actually plays them.