This is what I've left behind.

After finding an article on it on Boing Boing, I found myself playing Molleindustria’s Every Day The Same Dream, a monochromatic peek into white-collar wage slavery. The controls are simple enough: Arrow keys to move left and right, space bar to interact with objects.

You wake up, turn off your alarm, get dressed, give your wife a perfunctory greeting, ride the elevator, endure traffic on the way to work, get dressed down by your boss for being late, and settle down in your cubicle.

And then the day repeats. And repeats.

And yet the lady in the elevator said something strange: “5 more steps and you will be a new person.”

What did she mean? Was there a way out of this dream?

I tried to do things differently. Before I realized it, I had discovered a way to subvert the routine. And then the elevator lady told me, “4 more steps.”

As I found those other four steps, I realized that this is what I did with my life, summed up in a Flash game made in six days. And as I watched the end of the game, I realized what I had escaped from. It’s right in the title: Every day, the same dream.

I woke up.

Like

Unlike