The shockingly brief Elation for the WonderBox 6000 demo really speaks to me

It’s tough being someone who, in the search for some sort of meaning in life, has arrived on video games as their foundation. I could have chosen a much worse passion, but I also could have probably picked one that would pass in normal conversation. Instead, no one I meet understands me. It’s lonely being better than everyone.

Elation for the WonderBox 6000 gets me. Unfortunately. It’s a bizarre game about loving one thing so much that it becomes the central source of your alienation.

I think. That’s as much as I could glean from the less-than-10-minutes of demo.

Elation for the WonderBox 6000 comes from Digital Tchotchkes, the creator of Go Fly a Kite, which I should probably play. They describe the demo as, “it’s a costco free sample style demo.”

It starts off with a Doom-style text crawl telling you about the eponymous Elation for the WonderBox 6000, a game so transcendental that the protagonist suggests that it is the apogee of video games as an art. That if only more people played and understood it, then art wouldn’t have died. It is the protagonist’s goal to acquire this lost relic.

This opening exposition turns out to be something the protagonist is posting on the internet. The outpouring of distilled, potent opinions leads to them getting death threats, followed by a permanent ban from their chosen forum. We’ve all been there.

You’re then left to explore the wreckage of the protagonist’s life. You mouse around to see what’s interactive and then click on what you find to hear about it. Through this, you discover that society has continued its course toward refining the endorphin supply, which is part of why nobody remembers something as artful as Elation for the WonderBox 6000. Easier access to simpler stimulation has caused the masses to lose their way.

It’s difficult to tell if Elation for the WonderBox 6000 is making fun of, or trying to explain, the perpetually repeating discourse of how things were better in the before times. Or both. Why not take the high ground over every other perspective?

It represents a part of myself I’m unable to take too seriously. Some people have to travel abroad or get lost in the desert to “find themselves.” I’ve always known myself. I like video games. I might enjoy video games to an extent that other people find annoying. The whole reason I’m here (on this site, I mean) is that I want to support and spread the things I’m passionate about. It keeps me occupied until a bus finally decides to hit me.

But also, and I can’t stress this enough, the Elation for the WonderBox 6000 demo could be finished in less than 10 minutes. In that time, you look at stuff, talk to a person, and then walk to a place. That’s it. It could maybe be defined as the prologue. The game part of the game is beyond that demo wall.

It doesn’t really get me more excited to play Elation for the WonderBox 6000, but it also doesn’t make me less excited. I was just so disoriented when it ended.

On the other hand, it refers to the protagonist’s computer as “My portal to philistines,” which is what I will now call mine.