Can you count to 21? as Cooper once asked. Somehow this is our 21st dive! Welcome aboard as ever. In our main essay Chris has returned from Greece where he had thoughts about getting stuck in games and why it can be great, and he also read a book about bathyspheres and had some other things to bang on about. Meanwhile, Florence played with liminal spaces and single-celled life, and Keith discovered a magazine ad for an almost forgotten 3D space sim by one of the original superstar game coders…

As ever, please consider taking out a paid annual or monthly subscription which gives you access to the essay and Keith’s retro section, as well as an archive of all previous essays. Running the Bathysphere is not cheap: there are a lot of pipes to maintain and we’re not entirely sure what they all do.

The Bathysphere crew
Christian Donlan
Florence Smith Nicholls
Keith Stuart

Contact us at bathyspherecrew@gmail.com

Delightful games

A Dream about Parking Lots stood out for me because I love liminal spaces like parking lots and we need more games about them. Also it sounds like it could have been on the B-side to Low or a mid-life Roxy Music record.

Anyway, in the game itself you’re wandering through a parking lot trying to find your car, while also having a conversation with a therapist about why you keep having this dream. It’s meant to be one of those shapeless dreams that takes a piece of mundane life and extends it in all directions, I think, but since I can’t drive, looking for my car actually felt kind of novel.

When I have these recurring dreams I’m always trying to dial a very long phone number or type a URL. What A Dream about Parking Lots really nails, though, is the parking lot vibe - this was essential I think - and the experience of a kind of dream where you wake up feeling more tired than when you went to sleep. I mean this in a good way. I do wonder whether the whole thing would be more satisfying without the narrative doing some of the work for you. CD

I’ve been thinking a lot about tamagotchis recently, how they both create and reinforce daily rituals. Nick Murray’s Tamagotchi Seance takes this even further, facilitating a ritual for speaking with a virtual pet that has passed through the veil. I can still distinctly remember the oval plastic shell and small coral-coloured buttons of my own childhood virtual friend. I hope they’re doing well, wherever they are. FSN

I was recently recommended the zero player role-playing game The Tragedy of GJ237b (thanks Matthew Guzdial!). An intelligent single-celled life form has thrived on the planet GJ237b, but unfortunately when humans arrived it caused environmental collapse. The game is played by re-enacting this process. You allocate that a room in your house or building represents GJ237b - if the room is entered at any point the game ends, humans have arrived and all life there is destroyed.

Have fun! FSN

Interesting things

Brad Fox’s luminously good book, The Bathysphere Book is all I can think about at the moment. It tells the story of a bathysphere and the people who used it to explore under the sea. As the bathysphere travels deeper and deeper the book fragments, a bit like Moby Dick or the second half of Gravity’s Rainbow. You get lots of short journeys and character snapshots and all sorts of beautiful, wayward, somehow crucial ephemera. All the while the notes taken over the radio from the dives themselves break through like T.S. Eliot poems.

I read this and thought, inevitably, about how I wanted this structure in a game. Going deeper and deeper and deeper and just…witnessing, and working out what to do with what I’d witnessed. Something a bit like Spelunky and a bit like Ridiculous Fishing perhaps, but also a bit like nothing. I would love a text adventure about bathyspheres, and now I’ve said that I bet a couple at least exist. Read this astonishing book. CD

Essay: Getting stuck in games and why it’s sometimes brilliant

I’ve been on holiday in the Aegean, which means I spent most of the last few weeks wandering around a beautiful Greek island trying to think of rodents. This is because whenever I go on holiday I have a lot more time to ponder the Guardian Cryptic, and 23 Across on Monday the 28th was: Rodent is shy, backing up (5).