Get with the programme
Developer Nerial
Publisher Devolver Digital
Format PC
Origin Release US TBA
Nicole He has been struck by the conversations surrounding the announcement of her first commercial game. Discussions about the types of people who watch reality TV shows – and a certain reticence among those viewers to admit as much – remind her of how people talk about videogames, or at least used to. “There’s this idea of a type of person who enjoys this type of thing,” she says. “But the truth is that most people play videogames – it’s just that what ‘videogames’ actually means could be very different. Call Of Duty versus, say, Candy Crush.” Just as we once had an image in our minds of an archetypal ‘gamer’, she adds, that image is still true for fans of reality TV: “We still think of it, first of all, as a thing women like, or something that’s vapid and shallow and superficial and sort of a waste of time – I guess like videogames for men.” While at Google, He worked on experimental tech, the topic of how technology mediates our relationships with one another becoming “a broad theme” of her work. She describes The Crush House, while not necessarily being explicitly – or not only – about that, as “a continuation of those older ideas”, particularly the way reality TV contestants present themselves, and the parasocial relationships viewers form with them. The game’s story, meanwhile, seeks to prod at reality TV’s shadowy underbelly, as an “underpaid network employee” becomes embroiled in a behind-the-scenes conspiracy that threatens to expose the dark mysteries beneath the show’s gaudy exterior.
A conspiracy threatens to expose the dark mysteries beneath the show’s exterior
At first it’s hard to square all this away with what you’re ask
