But, then again, no one was forcing Diogenes the Cynic either. No one is forcing the player to continue tackling its difficult challenge. Ironic, considering Getting Over It is yet another imaginary mountain by that definition. In this same vein, societal expectations become the imaginary mountain Foddy speaks of: self-imposed, but becoming real in our repeated attempts to succeed within their confines. He reportedly often traveled through the Athens city square with a lantern in broad daylight, shining it in people’s faces in the pursuit of “a real human being,” he said. “And it’s our repeated attempts to reach the summit that turns those mountains into something real.” This parallels another piece of Diophenes’ philosophy: that the constant pursuit of satisfying superficial, societal needs distorted people’s realities.
“Imaginary mountains build themselves from our efforts to climb them,” Foddy narrates. Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy is the most recent game from who else Bennett Foddy, an on-again-off-again game designer most famously known as the man behind QWOP. Though they may be useless in and of themselves, the challenge they pose is very real since any one could be your literal downfall, sending you cursing and screaming back to the start of the game. The objects comprising the mountain, purposefully made to look like repurposed B game assets, further illustrate this point. In this way, we can view Getting Over It as an extension of Diogenes’ quest to live a wholesome life according to his philosophy. Playgrounds and boxes defy gravity, living room furniture extends skyward in an impossibly balanced stack, stairs spiral into infinity. From there, everything begins to look like an M.C. As you pass rocks and trees, a construction zone begins to take shape, materials laid out haphazardly in ways that aid your ascent. The mountain you climb in Getting Over It is built from these replicable B game assets in short, it’s something out of Diogenes’ nightmares, its recycled nature becoming increasingly apparent the farther you climb. And when a game is created from what the public perceives as trash, the game itself is then seen as, well, trash. Just like food and water, media is consumable, so rapid-fire creation of it only results in an equally rapid-fire mounting of cultural trash as we burn through our endless feeds. But this argument doesn’t account for context. Many have speculated, Foddy continues, that all video games will eventually be constructed through this assembly line process, with prefabricated objects reused over and over to populate our virtual playgrounds.
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