Super Hexagon is a Simulation of God
A meaningless theological essay celebrating the 5th anniversary of my favorite videogame
“For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”
Matthew 18:20
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I. Point
THIS ESSAY IS A FUTILE ATTEMPT to discriminate Super Hexagon’s essence. Futile, for it cannot be done. I’m gonna try it anyway and let’s see where it’ll take us.
Why write about a videogame that’s been out for 5 years? Honestly, I don’t know.
But there’s this one idea that has been bothering me for years. And this is not a hyperbole. I have spent many, many nights, playing with this concept in my head, poking it and stretching it, trying to make some sense out of it, only to wake up the next day and forget all about it. And then, weeks later, sometimes months, this same thought would occur me again — while, say, I was walking down the street — and that would be enough to turn my stomach around and fill my body with a short burst of anxiety. I’d breath, try to relax. And keep on walking.
Some things are just hard to understand.
It all began on November 2014, almost 3 years ago.
On my first half-assed attempt at videogame criticism, I wrote a zine… on Super Hexagon. I printed 10 copies and kept one, but later I found out they were missing an important page (my first and last zine, I must say). At that point I had lost all the original files and what was done was done. It was really sophomoric stuff: I talked about how hard Super Hexagon was (and is), about the feeling of not being in control of yourself, about the psychological concept of flow… aaaand I quoted the philosopher Slavoj Žižek, in his documentary The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology:
“I think Kafka was right when he said that for a modern secular non-religious man, bureaucracy, state bureaucracy, is the only remaining contact with the dimension of the divine. […] What the impenetrable omnipotence of bureaucracy harbors, is divine enjoyment. The intense rush of bureaucratic engagement serves none. It is the performance of its very purposelessness that generates an intense enjoyment ready to reproduce itself forever.”
I didn’t quite understand what he meant by that, and I’m not sure I do now, 3 years later.
On that same year, I sent an obsessive four-line fan-mail to Terry Cavanagh and asked, among other ramblings, if someone had ever described Super Hexagon to him as “sort of Kafkian”. He told me that was new to him, so I’ll take it.
Super Hexagon came out 5 years ago, and I haven’t stopped playing it yet. I’m still a bit obsessed, but at least I had much more time to think about it. (and terry if you ever read this sry about that man haha you were very polite tho)
II. Line
I HAVE TRIED TO DESCRIBE SUPER HEXAGON MANY TIMES, and I have failed them all. It’s an abstract game in the sense that it doesn’t employ any representational techniques that you would recognize from other medium, which makes it really hard to talk about what Super Hexagon is. With videogames we have become used to abstractions, but sometimes I wonder if anything beats Super Hexagon on that field (not even Tetris).
In this video we can watch Super Hexagon being beat from start to finish, courtesy of JTexted, who hasn’t been the same since. If you haven’t played, watch it. There’s no risk of spoilers because there’s nothing to be spoiled. What you see is what you get.
Super Hexagon, more than any videogame I can remember right now, looks like an interest rate graph you would get from your bank in a nice plastic folder when applying for a loan. A visual representation of something that doesn’t really exist.
But sure it exists. If interest rates weren’t a real thing, bank loans would be called allowances, or pocket money. What I mean is: it doesn’t have a material existence. No matter how homeless it can make you, interest rates only exist when participating in a definite, specific, system. No matter how stupid or cruel it may be, it only exists and makes sense in the mind of the believers: like “ethics in games journalism”, or morals, or God.
In the same way, Super Hexagon’s value is a matter of belief. To an external observer, the game may be seen as a futile distraction. In the same way, any religious practice can be read as futile: one could even say that this lack of apparent purpose is necessary to define an act as religious. If we don’t see it as useless, we may concede that it is representative of something else: one would pray for rain, for a good harvest, or to keep bad things from happening. But even then we are instilling some kind of motivation to ground the religious act. Either the act has a definite purpose, or it’s futile. Apparently, none of our definitions escape that duality.
The problem is: definitions don’t capture meaning. And meaning is what it is all about.
Super Hexagon exists as a software, codified information to be interpreted through a machine. It may believe itself to be a videogame — and this claim might even be true, if you believe it to be true; if you think videogames are a well-rounded enough category to include Super Hexagon, The Stanley Parable, and Super Mario World. But there’s a good practical reason to do it, too: without these definitions, we could never point out the similarities, if any, between the three games. Maybe we need a way to connect them somehow, and that’s cool.
I have higher plans for Super Hexagon, though.
I don’t want to say that Super Hexagon is not a videogame, but I will, kind of. You shouldn’t take this seriously. I don’t really mean that, but this distinction will be useful if I want to articulate how Super Hexagon is different from other videogames.
Ok, sure, it applies many of the conventions of a regular videogame: a score, an arbitrary objective, a fail-state, it feels really good to press its buttons, even the Super in the name feels like a wink, etc. Super Hexagon looks like and sounds like and feels like a conventional videogame.
But there’s something lacking… or in excess. Something that makes me believe that if I had to choose a cultural artifact to send to space, like they did with that Beatles song, I would choose Super Hexagon. Something that makes me imagine what aliens would think of it, because I really think that Super Hexagon explains humanity better than that pop song. Something that gives me hyperbolic tendencies.
Something that is hard to define, except in a roundabout way; that I will try my best to conjure even if it will surely slip through my fingers. I hope you may catch a glimpse before it fades away completely.
III. Triangle
OK, SO, every videogame is a 3-part relationship: the videogame itself, the creator(s), and the player.
There’s usually a fine balance between the three: the videogame/software is created according to the creator’s will and limitations, and in its turn the software limits our (the player’s) possibilities in a virtual space, making sure we stay within the boundaries of the program, guaranteeing we obey its rules. And in-between the software and the creator, in the space that emerges through this dichotomy, we play.
It wouldn’t be much fun if this play space had rules that were too strict (because then it would be called reading, not playing) or obvious. As players, we also want to explore, bend, maybe even break the rules. It’s in the rhythm between creator and player, mediated through software, that the pleasure of videogame lives.
That means that the creator, while codifying his will and limitations into the software, is also aware of that 3-part relationship. And here lies the crux of the question.
Videogames have this tendency to be charitable towards its players. Actually, I would argue that any creative person is deeply concerned about how people will react, experience, and relate to their own work (even if just to say “fuck the critics”). So videogames aren’t alone: every work wants to be read, seen, touched by someone. That is the whole point of creating something, isn’t it? Others.
Which sometimes can translate into too much concern, which upsets that delicate balance we’ve talked about. Videogames can place a bunch of makers in your mini map, give you a ton of useless directions, but they really struggle to give you a good enough reason to follow them. Even something as simple as “move from point A to point B” can become absolute boredom if the game doesn’t answer the fundamental question of “why?”.
The last decade has seen a resurgence of difficult games, in an attempt to escape all that hand-helding; maybe even as a response to that player-centric philosophy. Sometimes it’s for the nostalgia of retro games — a something that older games had that people can’t quite describe; sometimes simply because a mechanic like permadeath generates too much meaning to be forgotten by history. But to escape a player-centric philosophy does not mean to forget all about the player. If that was the case, videogames would be unintelligible. Even the modern day roguelike, classically inspired as it may be, opens concessions to modern videogames (less obscure commands, better inventory management, etc), hoping that their attention to the players will reward them down the line.
If a videogame really didn’t care about its players, that videogame would be Super Hexagon.
IV. Square
BUT EVEN THAT IS HYPERBOLIC. Super Hexagon can be played by any human with the ability to press two buttons: one to spin right, another to spin left. It makes sense, it’s simple: spin to the left or to the right to avoid the walls, survive for as long as you can.
Super Hexagon wasn’t conceived with a complete disregard for the player’s perspective, you see. I wouldn’t say that it wants to be played, but it certainly doesn’t mind being played. It simply… does not mind you.
On your first attempt maybe you’ll survive ten seconds, if you’re good. With time and practice, you’ll start to improve. Your reaction time will become faster, you’ll learn the intricate patterns of walls and will be able to almost predict where you have to move to, and when.
If you can survive for at least 60 seconds, there’s another level. A more difficult one. And if you can survive that one, there’s another. And another. There are six levels in total. Each one harder, way harder, than the one before it. If you die, you can restart in a blink of a second. And the ending is… well, you can watch Cavanagh himself:
Did you see that? It took me 4 years to get to the last stage, and 1 more year to beat it. That’s the span of an academic degree (which is not an entirely random association, as I have watched (or missed!) many many classes while playing Super Hexagon). And in the end, there you have it: two minutes or so of flashing lights, that amazing soundtrack, and ‘Congratulations’. That’s it.
No plot twist. No grand revelation.
After all the time I have spent, the stupid question here is: “was it worth it?”. Stupid not because the answer is obvious, but because the question is meaningless. Because Super Hexagon, as life itself, is meaningless.
V. Pentagon
THERE’S ONE SMART QUESTION, THOUGH: if Super Hexagon is meaningless and doesn’t care about us, why should we care about it? Why play it?
And there is only one good answer, only one good reason: for no reason at all.
From Leigh Alexander’s piece on Gamasutra ‘Terry Cavanagh and the heart of Super Hexagon’:
“For Cavanagh, the idea of incredibly difficult gameplay isn’t about cruelty at all, but in the satisfying intellectual experience of engaging with a system that doesn’t care if you can defeat it.”
To say that Super Hexagon is cruel, or difficult, is to imply that Super Hexagon cares. And it doesn’t. There’s no reward, but more importantly: there’s no real punishment; if you lose, you can restart almost immediately. Again and again, until it entrances you. Until there’s nothing to interrupt the flow between you, the machine, and the mind (long gone) that took imagined rules and wrote them into Law. Theoretically, one could play Super Hexagon forever, without it ever losing its innermost significance: the fact that it has none.
And as you learn that the system “doesn’t care if you can defeat it”, you also learn not to take it personally. Terry Cavanagh didn’t want to screw with you, or me. Super Hexagon is not sadistic. The 60 second objective, the bait that hooked us in, starts to lose its value real quickly after a couple of hours — and we start to see the world through super hexagonal eyes: an endless repetition of human behaviors, struggling and engaging with machines that are much larger than us; systems that do not contain us, but that we cannot control — we got put into a situation in which the only meaningful choice we have is the option to not play at all.
And if we do decide to play, it becomes clear soon enough that we will be forever searching for meaning inside of it (or maybe just until we die).
In the absence of meaning, we will discover that Super Hexagon simply exists, because it never truly ends: it is always “in becoming”, to use an expression popularized by the Christian philosopher Kierkegaard. Super Hexagon is infinite, for its true reality is never grasped; it is always unfinished, open, possible, endless.
But unfinished leaves a sour taste on our mouths. We like resolution, catharsis — it’s a human thing. We like things to be done, and to be done with things. And also, to even be able to say that something is unfinished, mustn't we suppose there is something else that is finished out there? Something real, true, complete?
VI. Super Hexagon
THIS IS KIERKEGAARD’S GOD:
“God himself is this: how one involves himself with Him. As far as physical and external objects are concerned, the object is something else than the mode: there are many modes. In respect to God, the how is the what. He who does not involve himself with God in the mode of absolute devotion does not become involved with God.”
God is not a thing, as it does not exist in the material sense. Rather, God is a mode of being, a mode of relating with yourself and the world. He happens in a relationship. Or we could understand God as an institution, like the State, or Family: not exactly a thing, but a situation that prescribes you a role in the world, or a way of being. And we enact these roles in the world through ritual.
For Kierkegaard, the form of the ritual matters more than the individuals particular beliefs. If people are participating voluntarily and the ritual is being properly performed, the Holy Ghost, and therefore God, is there. What else is a ritual? Can we find God in football? Or in cooking? In books? Can we find God in Super Hexagon?
“We do not relate to Him, He is this relating”, to quote Žižek again (his book The Parallax View was the main source for this essay). We still don’t have the answers we want, but as we unravel this idea something starts to take form: if God exists in a mode of relationship, in a particular way of experiencing things… then how different, how separate we must stand in relation to Him; there’s no hope for true knowledge: we are far from it. There’s nothing with which to measure ourselves against God, and so we are suddenly confronted with the “insurmountable abyss between the Finite and the Infinite” (Žižek). Between us, humans, and a higher order of existence.
To accept this as the limit of human reason is humbling, but there are also modes of acceptance. We can accept that there’s no fundamental Truth, that we lack any point of reference whatsoever, and even see that as the fundamental human feature: our ability to take a look inside the abyss, have a hearty laugh, and forget the whole thing without feeling too disenfranchised. If God is impossible to understand, there’s nothing we can do… try to laugh about how utterly alone we are in the universe.
But there is another mode, one that brings a strange resignation: the surrender to the abyss. The surrender to meaninglessness itself.
God doesn’t promise us any reward, argues Kierkegaard, and still asks us to sacrifice our whole lives for Him; for nothing. Never quite sure if there is or not a greater reason to it all, if there is or not a bottom to this abyss. God asks Isaac to sacrifice his son, and Isaac promptly abides, without ever fully understanding. He asks for Job’s devotion even while Job’s going through a lot of suffering and misfortune. Job remains loyal. He asks us to surrender, and we jump. Asks me to spin, and I spin.
Why?
Super Hexagon also asks for a sacrifice: my dedication and my time, if I am to understand It. This may not look like a lot, but attention is arguably the most valuable currency in Internet Age. Any movie or game asks for such a sacrifice, really. But they make us various promises: carefully constructed narratives, beautifully designed alien worlds, the ability to fulfill your fantasies.
Super Hexagon is different, because it promises nothing and delivers nothing. And by doing that, Super Hexagon asks for everything: not only for our time, but also that we strip away our preconceptions of what a videogame might mean and be. It asks for naivete, a certain innocence and a lack of expectations, the hardest of tasks in a world turned cynical.
As God for Kierkegaard and Bureaucracy for Kafka, Super Hexagon does this: It turns the concept of Meaning on its head. It asks us to leave our desire for meaning at the door, to surrender ourselves to the machine and its impossible requests, and forget about any kind of resolution, reward, or end. To sacrifice what we have for no purpose at all… and just then, after we strip away every mirror, representation and proxy for meaning, we can feel through the debris and see if there’s anything left behind.
It’s an insane gamble. There’s never a way to know if our efforts will be worthwhile.
When we are talking about religion, we tend to think, in a logical manner, that practice follows belief. First I have to believe in a higher order of being, so this belief can justify my religious practices. In what other way could it be?
Kierkegaard, Kafka, and Super Hexagon points us to the inverted order: first we do, we play, we act: then we try to find meaning in and through our relationship to people and things around us (if there’s any to be found).
It’s the practice that justify our beliefs. It’s through play that we generate meaning: this is the modern secular experience of God.
And how else could I justify the feeling of bliss I get when I hear Jenn Frank’s voice stating “Super Hexagon”, very calmly, at the main menu? How could I justify the feeling I get on my good days, when I’m playing to the peak of my ability, and time itself seems slows down — when my mind reacts fast, sometimes too fast? When my body doesn't feel completely in my control, but a vessel for something else? When my avatar is spinning on the center of the screen, avoiding and hitting walls, forever in doubt: am I trying to escape or am I trying to get in?
It’s in this moment, when trying to explain the unexplainable, that we must recur to last resorts. And Kierkegaard again: “in the last resort there is no theory”. The concept of God is useful because it deflects all reasoning, it’s an attack upon reason itself… but at the same time, it gives us a common ground on which we can build our relationships to things, and to others. It tells us that no matter how different we might think, or be, there’s always another mode of understanding, one that transforms the simple but elusive act of communication a pleasurable possibility: something that bridges the gap between you and me. Like a videogame. Or this essay.
Super Hexagon is simulated divinity: a strange and aggressive paradox that is able to break you free from the illusions of the videogame form, while at the same time thrusting you deeper into the most essential representation of videogames. It highlights the limits and the endless possibilities of videogames, ourselves.
Humanity is made in the image of God, but is also opposed to God in every way. Likewise, Super Hexagon is made in the image of Videogames, but it also stands in opposition to what videogames are. It is too much of a videogame to be a videogame. Super Hexagon recognizes and emphasizes that videogame itself is a mode of relationship, a ritual. That it shapes our ideas and behaviors in relation to something that exists on a higher plane than us: the machine, the last remaining contact with the dimension of the divine. Back to Žižek on Kafka:
“What can be more “divine” than the traumatic encounter with the bureaucracy at its craziest — when, say, a bureaucrat tells me that, legally, I don’t exist? It is in such encounters that we get a glimpse of another order beyond mere earthly everyday reality. Like God, bureaucracy is simultaneously all-powerful and impenetrable, capricious, omnipresent and invisible.”
The ultimate truth we can encounter here is this: God is not there to be found; but human beings, by our nature, will search for it all the same; we still require an “Absolute Other”, a transcendental framework through which to understand reality, to measure ourselves; a gigantic codex of information that contains our names, our deeds, our lives; anything that assigns meaning to our pointless existence. Scoreboards, achievements.
On that Leigh Alexander piece, Cavanagh is quoted:
“I can’t speak of what an abstract game can do in terms of talking about subjects like death and love, but I think games can absolutely be personal, can be about the person who made it,” he adds. “This game… this is me.”
But if we still lack meaning, if we still don’t understand the purpose, we must take a leap of faith, an insane plunge into the abyss to find it. At this time, our infinite resignation and therefore our ultimate sacrifice is required: we must give up ourselves, for absolute nothing. To understand God, and Super Hexagon, surrender is necessary: there’s no guarantee that your time will be worthwhile. If there’s a reward, a promise to restore meaning, this is already a sign that we failed.
If the answer was in plain sight, if an answer existed, there would be no faith, and there would be no leap: the act of play would be robbed of its intense pleasure and enjoyment, robbed of its purposelessness; that touch of divinity that answers a final, impossible question: why participate, if you have everything to lose?
Just because.
That may seem irrational, and it is.
Some things are just hard to understand.
