The Irreverence, Liminal Atmosphere and Catharsis of MyHouse

The Irreverence, Liminal Atmosphere and Catharsis of MyHouse

CW: Spoilers for MyHouse

MyHouse is a DOOM WAD that has gained a lot of popularity over the past few months, mainly because of its inventiveness and the fact that it seems so bewildering, strange and unusually complex when you begin to explore the map more and more. Supposedly it's modelled after a friend's house and the map was meant to pay tribute to his dead friend who worked on the map, and then it wound up expanding and taking such a massive toll on the guy's life who worked on it and then worked on it and produced such a cursed version of the level, documenting and unloading all of these terrifying feelings onto it and what not.

That doesn't really make that much sense honestly. Really, I played through the DOOM WAD and it was just very standard, kind of a neat recreation of a house, but then like nothing special really came from it. Just weird that there's so many things attached to it.

Okay, okay, I get it. MyHouse the PK3 file. An entirely different beast! That's where all the cursed stuff pops up.

Anyway, so the PK3 file of MyHouse has been something which many people consider to just be "strange and unnerving" and something where you just can't describe what's going on. Ostensibly you're playing this small map of this guy's house and you collect all these keys and finish (which you can) but if you go back to the house, things begin to change, different layouts begin to pop up, reality itself begins to change in strange and subtle ways, and more and more of the house begins to open up. Secret areas abound, complex and enigmatic puzzles begin to take hold and the whole thing just kind of plays off of Doom's level design in a unique and unusual way where it actually begins to tell a strange story that kicks off in the background, simultaneously enigmatic but then at the same time also deeply emotional in a way that just strikes at your subconscious more than anything else.

Weirdly, I thought the level was surprisingly humourous at certain points. I dunno but it definitely is playing a lot off of Internet nostalgia and I can't quite take something too seriously when one of the bosses turns out to be a crayon drawing of Shrek, obscured in shadows in a desolated playing park. A lot of things like that. If you noclip into areas you don't belong then you get taken to the Backrooms, which literally is just a creepypasta ripped from 4chan. Absurdist elements definitely would become prevalent here, but I weirdly found that it didn't really detract from the atmosphere that much. But then there's also nostalgia of, say, parking in front of a gas station at night, swimming baths, places that seem familiar to you but then become abstracted and dream like. It's like when you have one of those dreams where you're back at school and you can remember this one room very well, but then everything else just becomes surreal and unfamiliar to you.

wwhy shrek is piss. why shrek is piss #italiano

The impossible geometry of this level definitely sticks out, like with how aspects of the house begin to disappear and reappear and so forth, but also the ambient music which I think feels very noisy and adds to a sort of dreamlike quality to it. Sometimes the clues in this game also just seem to be screamingly obvious in retrospect, notably with one instance where you just can not see what your character looks like in a mirror. Why is that? But then it's also the type of thing where you can seemingly go into a closet and then there's an entire room that's totally distinct in terms of its style compared to the rest of the house, or where you exit somewhere and suddenly you're at an airport or in these towering apartment blocks with these two dogs roaming about the place, one cuddly and the other this Cerberus like dog creature that attacks you. Although I'd say that a lot of the atmosphere really does consist of like this dream like state, sounds that overwhelm you, unfeasible geometry that just seems to follow its own logic, alternate universes and all of these things. Something just distinctive about walking down endless corridors, trying to escape and trying to find something and how enigmatic it all is. It's strange.

Something about this map is just weird because I think that I'm not really sure how much of this is sincere and how much of it seems to satirise and pay tribute to Internet creepypastas and urban legends and I think what's unique about this is just how it seems to bleed the two together and creates some very interesting feelings with how they juxtapose each other. After all, you collect various objects in this map and one of them is called... get this... Pumpkin Rick! Agh. But the whole thing is just kind of strange and I think it really does kind of expand like feelings of sincerity and what exactly it's trying to do and I guess it really just works. People suggest that MyHouse is creepy but it's also just something that I feel works at digging at underlying feelings you can't quite describe, how confusing and befuddling so much of it seems, and just that whole process of trying to seek out some sort of esoteric solution to your problems that begins to make more and more sense. Retrospectively what appeared enigmatic is now more and more unmistakable.

Lots of isolated, desolated locations but also something where it very much does make extensive use of the GZDoom Engine with regards to the lighting detail.

It's strange though but then truthfully I think there's something really personal that at least is coming across with how it becomes increasingly more intricated, absurd and horrific and all these sorts of things, yet I think the whole thing really does feel like that sort of thing where you begin to think about something only for it to consume your headspace. But the whole scope of the map is fascinating and I think it really does reflect this sort of headspace of like weird feelings, stuff that you can't quite articulate and is just poured out no matter how weird or absurd or surrealistic it all seems. Surreal is the right word to describe MyHouse for sure, but I definitely think that it's conveying something related to feelings of something being gone and a sort of transitional state in life, and how problems just manifest themselves like this noise in the background. Maybe that's it. Life events that are "real" but which uproot your entire reality just have this unreal quality to them, or this sense of reconciliation of trying to accept the actuality of it that can either be retraumatising or therapeutic depending on how precisely you come to terms with it. Maybe it's a mesh of both?

The background of the WAD is especially strange because it's something where a lot of the backstory is something where I can't really prove or disprove it, but more of it just is this sort of thing of "supposedly" or "reportedly." That this reportedly was a map from 1999 that was worked on and then some, but I think the whole point of it really comes from the esoteric ways in which people try to come to terms with something inexplicable, and anxieties about how said feelings can spiral off into something obsessive and all-consuming the more you explore them, and the sort of draw with "catharsis" where so much of it can feel inundating in terms of things you're trying to come to terms with. Underlying things that you never really thought of before, and I guess the closest comparison I could draw is that it reminded me of something like Silent Hill where it plays with subliminal messages, plays with themes of the familiar becoming shrouded in darkness. Paradoxically it's cathartic to me because it feels like a showcase of someone dwelling on anxieties and that pervasive sense of it becoming bigger and bigger and feeling as though you're being consumed by anxieties the more you explore them.

At an airport, totally abandoned except from.... uh...

To me though, I think this whole level really feels like a process of reconciliation of sorts and just showing all of these feelings front and centre. Weirdly I find the whole concept of "reconciliation" often times to be more harrowing than whenever something is presented in very bleak and unreconcilable terms, for whatever reason. Bleak conclusions can kind of dampen emotional intensity in my view, because then like what's the point of it all? Placing people in an uneasy state in between the two often feels way more intense to me. Strangely I didn't really find this to be actually that disturbing but way more interesting and actually weirdly therapeutic in terms of how it sums up these underlying feelings for me. I know these feelings, I've been through them before, in a way it felt creepy but it wasn't really truly scary for me. To me, it made me feel closure over something.

[And uh, of course you'd expect this from me. After all, if you've seen my avi then you know what's up.]

"I think you should kill yourself, Dilbert!"

Something that I feel attached to is the CBoyardee's Dilbert series which is just so strange but I honestly do think it holds up with this liminal sort of atmosphere, basically just taking the drudgery of work and the little frustrations expressed in the Dilbert series and expanding it so like it's this all-consuming alienation that hurtles itself towards violence. Definitely way more irreverent and darkly comic than MyHouse, but I think there's definitely something here that, more or less, carries a similar sort of impact. It's really strange but I think the low quality nature of it, the MS paint style artwork, clearly inspired by GHXYK2's Bart the General series, and a lot of elements like it where it just is someone making this entire shitpost - yet strangely the entire thing just plays like this personal piece of work and weirdly meshes into a story that kind of just attaches itself to your subconscious. What starts off just as a silly cartoon of Dilbert working a computer in the real world evolves into something much more, just adding more and more weird elements into the mixture.

"Where'd Dilbert Go?"

I've watched these cartoons over and over and over again, and I don't really know what the appeal of it is, but I think it's just whenever I feel a bit dejected and noisy in the head, that's when I find myself becoming attached to them. They just have a particular mood to me that satisfies that sort of feeling whenever I'm in a state like that. But then it's also hard to really articulate but I think there's something about them that's like whenever you're attached to a song and you feel like it resonates with you, yet at the same time you can't quite consciously describe what it is about the song that really does it for you. To me I think that's just kind of what's fascinating about these cartoons, and like it's more just that there are these elements there. It's funny, disturbing, lacerating, and just takes the Dilbert cartoons and makes them even weirder.

"I find it disturbing that Dilbert's shirt pocket is on the wrong side. Otherwise, art is art." - Scott Adams on this series.

To be honest, I think there definitely are more underlying points they are getting at other than just existing as being weird and for the sake of shock value, but I dunno, it's a challenge to describe what it's really about without just coming across as extremely dull. It's about feelings of longing, ennui and just a lot of stuff going on in the background, and I think the droning music really adds to the whole atmosphere of the thing. Something about it just appeals to you in a way you can't quite consciously describe, but I think it's weird because underlyingly these cartoons are shitposts but then inevitably they wind up articulating weirdly sincere points about alienation, just in this irreverent sort of way. Hey, sometimes I think irreverence is all we really have to express feelings and sometimes it's sincere, other times it's mocking and lacerating but you know.

Also, also, I think there's also something to be said about how there also definitely appears to be a stylistic influence with the Zelda CDi games, which I honestly think reminds me a bit of Ralph Bakshi cartoons such as Wizards (1977) - namely with how there's action that goes on in the foreground, yet there's also a background which remains stock stiff and translates into blocking that, if you think about it logistically, would be physically impossible. "Ranch or Cool Ranch" has it so that there's two actions which happen 180 degrees from each other yet the background literally remains the same, but for some reason it does just kind of stick out as its own stylistic decision rather than just laziness. It looks so cool and strange but then like the office environment really just feels sterile and indistinct and strange. Mainly I think the irreverence does work because it feels like a showcase of intrusive thoughts just painted in such an amazingly absurd light.

"Ranch or Cool Ranch?" - Note the never changing background.

I think the Dilbert series is sort of like the one thing that really sticks out with CBoyardee's work, despite himself being quite a prolific cartoonist and creator online. I love the JRPG inspired Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden that he worked on, and I think there's something about that where it just kind of takes a shitpost idea and then become very ambitious and just runs with it, and the result is a surprisingly enjoyable and quite satisfying RPG game. Like the amount of effort and scope put into the game is genuinely quite staggering, and really it goes above and beyond what you'd expect from the concept. Bunch of other videos that he created as well. I really like the one called 'Oldest Trick in the Book' where he captures George Bush and repeatedly calls him a 'war criminal' over and over again, which is like funny, weird, silly, but it does kind of explicitly comment on feelings surrounding 9/11 and the Iraq War.

Not to use a cliche but there's definitely pieces of media out that which just seem to transcend descriptive qualities in terms of how strange they can be, or how shocking or inexplicable they are, and sometimes it really just hits you on such a subliminal level that totally explicit descriptions could hardly get at what's really going on with it. But I think the real staying power of a lot of CBoyardee's work and its influence on the Internet just comes from how skilled he is at telling stories in this sort of way. But like they're the sort of thing that you'd like just show to your friend out of the blue and like "Hey, check out this funny/strange video I found." and then it just kind of spreads everywhere.

Maybe the whole thing is that like trying to inhibit yourself and not allowing things to play out as absurd just kind of strikes me as lacking something in the way of self-assuredness with artwork, especially with stuff that tries to be disturbing. But yeah, I dunno, I guess the way that it's composed with all of the inexplicable elements really does get at these underlying feelings and I guess there's way more of an appeal to absurdity than just "it's funny." Like I think these cartoons are definitely very funny but like they get at these more underlying, strange feelings that I think really stick out about them, where the precise nature of said feelings feel hard to articulate and remain way more introspective and personal than anything else. Weirdly I think these videos do tell a cohesive story of sorts, just in this totally surrealistic way (Dilbert gets sucked into CBoyardee's computer, goes insane and embarks on a killing spree.)

Hey, uh, something here looks familiar. Don't know what it is.

But there's something there and I guess the main thing really just comes from the maddening mood of it and just how I think absurdity and sincerity often do seem to intersect with each other way more than you'd think, and I feel that there is definitely something about this which does work. Is the absurdity because it's so ambitious and sincere? I dunno, but I think there's really something about the esoteric of it all where it just feels endlessly speculative about what it really could all be about, but like the best way I can have of describing it is just "catharsis" because it's like yeah. How else can you articulate it other than "there's noise in my head and this seems to do the trick in just still the waters" and honestly, maybe that's all there is to it. Endless speculation and rumination just proves to be futile after a while, I think.

Appendix - Reconciliation with Being Transgender

AHA, THOUGHT YOU COULD ESCAPE THIS BULLSHIT! WELL YOU CAN'T. THIS WAS THE HOOK ALL ALONG.

But yeah, like I remember something that I've noted about the "appeal of liminal atmosphere and alienation" is like how a lot of that really does seem something that connects centrally to my feelings of gender dysphoria and what not, and like most prevalently how I found like "There's noise in my head, esoteric solutions to the problem that somehow works in stilling the waters." and I find that more and more that really does connect a lot to my feelings of transness. Simultaneously it's harrowing but something where either I find myself stuck in these liminal and anxious, anguishing states or where there's a lot of catharsis and genuine joy that comes from it, and often times it can be so genuinely harrowing with what it makes you reconcile with.

To me though it really made me think a lot about my past and just reconciling with very pervasive feelings of alienation that I had, and just this whole-ass thing that extended well back into my childhood, but then I guess I'm glad that something is finally clicking in that regard. But some things in life are just like that where they just feel simultaneously aggravating but then at the same time where you lack a conceptual framework for understanding said feelings, so it just gets pushed to the back of your mind and something where it just feels like aggravation and noise. Like "I don't want to think about this because it's just too weird and complex." and I feel what's staggering about it is just how complex it is and how it unravels itself and just how unexpected a lot of the depths of it truly are. I would admit an underlying aspect of my transness, feel relief and then like this full body anxiety over thinking like "Oh my god, how the hell did that get out of my head?" Repression can happen but I don't think there's really any sort of special mechanism behind it honestly. I found that these feelings were just innate and a lot of it was just not understanding those feelings and just questioning structures of inhibition and attempting to become more and more incredulous towards it as a way of liberating myself from it. So in a way I convinced myself out of them, and often times where they just felt so weird to admit to.

Endless speculation, as I've mentioned, becomes unsustainable and I guess it's really just working with stuff that feels tangible information that I could work with and what not. Really I think that does explain like the whole "speculative that fills in the inexplicable" that becomes tautological in the sense that it's like there's nothing there that makes sense so it just grabs wherever. What could be my source of alienation? Could be a lot of things really. But then what precisely would that be and how would I reconcile with it? It's insanely weird but I think that's just something I think about which are like when aspects of yourself get imposed out of you or just that feeling of loss with something, and that sense of transitioning into another state of being etc. and how feelings are just kind of messy.  Am I overthinking and dwelling too much or is there just that much to think about? But really I find that it's just this constant experience of reconciliation and trying to work on things, and the intensive effort and the esoteric solutions involved with liberating myself. Sometimes it can feel really gratifying and other days it just seems to do you in in terms of how exhausting an effort it all is.

Who knows? Will I ever know myself? Maybe it's just a constantly evolving process and I should just accept the realisations as they come, rather than just constantly having myself working towards a complete state of myself. It's weird but I really do think grief and feelings of longing for some sort of past that never was is one of the central emotions that I seem to come across, and I guess it's really just a process of trying to come to terms with that, reconcile with it and forgive myself. After all, what's the point of ruminating on it anyway? Might get this out in writing but then good luck if my brain manages to internalise that message. Sometimes people can be really good at expressing feelings but then reconciliation is an entirely different process altogether. It's just a whole process of working problems out and then there's more abounding problems, but somewhere along the line I think there should be some sort of relief and catharsis that's gained from that.

And, the end for now. Maybe be battered and bruised beyond belief, but at least I have a nice beach and a sunset to watch at the end of it. Good a metaphor as any, I think.