Petscop & Hyperflexibility

petscop is one of my fav artworks, and i think there is something to be said of the way the mechanics of petscop (the game) allow for a lot of different things to happen.

reminds me of something i read about homestuck’s classpects, which i read about here, i think? https://www.stormingtheivorytower.com/2014/07/hyperflexible-mythology-classpects.html homestuck is about a game, sburb, and each player within it has a classpect, described as:

a magical area of expertise or “aspect,” and a way in which that aspect is used as a tool by the character: a “class.”

this goes further than, for example, mtg having 5 different colours each of which represent something. in mtg theres no codified way of HOW you interact with the colours. hometsuck has 12 aspects, and 14 classes, which means different combinations can do vastly different things even if they share a class or aspect. further in the piece:

This is part of the nature of Hyperflexible Mythology: it straddles the line between opening up possibilities and providing structure in a useful way. Without leaving the existing system it’s possible to create a huge array of characters […] As the powers are often so ill-defined […] it’s possible to explore and imagine all kinds of different character powersets while still largely remaining true to the information we have.

sburb has even more systems for player individuality: strife specibi, sprite prototyping, what 2 keywords make up their land, for trolls they have blood colour and troll romance’s quadrants. in universe, this is to allow players of sburb to have a highly tailored time in the game; the game is built for their self actualisation. this also allows people out of universe to make OCs with a high degree of specificity - its the ultimate personality test. there are more dimensions to create an OC for homestuck than, for example, an OC member of organisation xiii from kingdom hearts.

why say all of this for petscop tho? petscop ALSO has a lot of hyperflexibility, though maybe its not in terms of mythology. however, theyre in service of different things. petscop’s hyperflexibility is not meant to serve as a way of self actualising, but as a way of allowing others to recreate you in their image, or to keep you in the past.

in petscop 13, the game says this when paul (in a demo recording) catches every pet:

You have seen everything in the game, so far, but there will obviously be more. It’s a growing organism. Your controller inputs will be useful, but your feedback will be even more useful.

i dont care about a “petscop has hyper advanced AI” reading, because just looking at the mechanics of the game there’s a lot of ways in which it IS a growing organism, even if some of them are actually technically infeasible on a ps1:

• the face system, letting you combine traits of faces into arbitrary combinations, some of which have bespoke rooms
• the demo recording system, where inputs are logged and played back if the console is left idle
• p2 to talk, where the player can talk to others via a phonetic typing system used by the player 2 controller (its not exactly stenography tho)
• needles piano, where the player can play music, and can also play it in a way that the game recognises as (in)correct
• draw mode, where the player can draw on existing textures, like what belle does with pink tool

the end parts of the story of petscop end up being told in these modalities. it is no longer just “exploring the game by rainer”, it becomes a story of paul and marvin and belle’s interactions in the school, the tension building leading up to the rebirthing. the actual rebirthing process utilises very little mechanics built specifically for paul - its the combination of input recording, p2 to talk, and the needles piano, applied in a new way.

its almost like petscop is a sandbox game for reenacing the experiences that have run through these families, the marks and leskowitzes and hammonds and all of the petscop kids. it is the growing organism, folding new people into the family, and we will never even see most of it. and it is also the most emotionally affecting parts. Here I Go. Family. etc

petscop contains old versions of itself. both on the disc and on memory cards. in practice a ps1 memory card would not fit most of these things, even p2 to talk wouldnt fit - javelin (embedded steno engine) takes 16mb which is 2 ps2 memory cards.

going back in time but not being able to rewrite it - discovery pages convo, talk of rewriting a cd-r, and yet that convo with jill is there. assuming text convos can come from the memory card, in the same way that demo recordings can, theres an immutable base set of facts that cant be altered (cd-r), and yet new things keep being built on top of it (memory card). different interpretations simultaneously exist (the spell that changes your past, the door being open and closed, lina = boss). its hyperflexible but instead of being meaningful to everyone it becomes so huge it can never be understood even by the people who make it or the people it is made for.