Mondays — a Sisyphean Typing Game: The Struggle Itself
Condensed Crit 09: Mondays — a Sisyphean Typing Game
Hello all,
Earlier this year I moved from a stressful startup job into a more traditional corporate role. If I were to name the biggest difference in these two positions, it would be: emails.
Previously, I communicated with coworkers through Slack, and was mostly spared the behaviors — meetings that should have been emails, emails that should have been meetings, et cetera — that are so often the butt of jokes and memes.
But now — now, I spend a lot of time sending and receiving emails.
Sending emails is the also the main purpose in Mondays — a Sisyphean Typing Game, developed by siblings Max and Alex Robins, in which the player logs on and follows the prompts to type as many jargon-filled emails as you can reasonably handle. As you type, Sisyphus pushes his boulder up the hill. Make a mistake, and the boulder rolls down the hill, forcing the player to start over. Finish the message, and the boulder rolls down the hill, prompting the player with a new email.
Don’t get me wrong. I prefer emails, and genuinely enjoy the work I do, but I have realized that there is nothing makes me quite so uniquely aware of my own mortality like sending a barrage of emails.
The stop-and-go rhythm of Mondays perfectly captures the repetition and routine of an office job, down to having a task disrupted by unexpected pop-ups and messages. By earning money, you can buy accessories and, amusingly, more work (longer emails to type). None of the items in the shop impact the gameplay; they simply serve as (often, very funny) distractions before the player returns to the task at hand. As Camus wrote in The Myth of Sisyphus, “One always finds one’s burden again.”
Yet, even though everything about Sisyphean Typing Game is meant to replicate the tedium of an office job, I found the repetitiveness and corporate jargon cathartic, in a way. I overthink things to a fault, worry relentlessly, and think about work for most of my waking weekday hours, but Sisyphean Typing Game’s nonsensical, randomly generated emails were an unexpectedly pleasant reminder to take myself a little less seriously. The absurdity of typing “Thoughts on peer to peer networking?” while watching Sisyphus push a rock with a cowboy hat and anime eyes up a hill made me laugh out loud more than once.
If I had to name the second biggest difference between my previous job and my current one, it would be that I’m better able to appreciate the challenge and meaning of my work, even knowing that I will probably work until I die. Camus concluded similarly: “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
Kind regards,
Madison
Mondays — a Sisyphean Typing Game was developed as part of Briefs, a microgames series focused on the theme of absurdity. It is available through itch.io, and you can check out the other games in the collection here.
