Video game concept
︎︎︎ Philip Traylen
︎ July 7, 2026
Your character is thrust into all sorts of situations, your job is to maintain a balance between the amount of time they spend crying and the amount of time they spend laughing, if your character begins to laugh or cry to excess the other characters mob and kill you out of annoyance, a health bar in the top right tracks the ‘ambient community annoyance,’ green means you’re currently perceived to be laughing and crying more or less the right amount, if the bar goes amber, mild acts of violence begin seeping through, someone trips you in the street or spits in your face, to get back to green you need to really rack your brain, come up with something either extremely funny or extremely sad, or at least somehow conjure contextual parameters that unambiguously justify how much you have, recently, been seen laughing or crying, if you’re in the red it’s practically over, they come at you from everywhere, sometimes with weapons, but more often than not they just beat you to death with their bare hands, your only hope is to run, hide, wait until they begin to forget exactly how much you’ve been laughing or crying recently, but even if you find a safe space you’re not out of danger, on account of your isolation you may find yourself in the so-called dark brown zone, indicating that the game considers you to be ‘at risk of taking your own life’ on account of what is referred to in the manual as ‘vicarious ambient community annoyance’—