Source Mods You Should Care About: Tedium

I’ve been on an art game kick lately. It’s most likely because of the small amount of subjective thinking I get to do in my classes and that I renewed my WoW account last month, but hey, it makes me write.

Like I did last week with Radiator, I’d like to put the disclaimer that says ‘play the game‘ before I start discussing it if you’d like to try it out before having it “spoiled” by my dissection of it.

Tedium is a short game. There is one small loop with a couple of actions that you can take, and you can break that loop very easily. It’s rather abstract, there isn’t any dialogue or characters (other than the player character who is irrelevant, as it’s first person with no sign of actually existing), and it only consists of three “scenes”.

The first scene is a very small apartment. It doesn’t even appear that the player character has a bedroom, just a room with a television, a sink, a stove, a couch and a bathroom (with a laundry machine in it; convenient!). The scene fades in from black, and you look around the room seeing the objects noted above. “Wow, there’s nothing to do here” I thought to myself. I looked around, threw some of the things around to see if there was anything important I needed, and left.

Having nothing to do in your home is kind of a depressing feeling. The room felt very confined, having only one exit and a door that you couldn’t open (I’m going to pretend it’s a closet, as you sleep on the couch every “night”, so it’s not a bedroom) reinforced that. I wanted to get out, much like I do of my own home. I heard on Snap Judgement one time that “Paradise is never exactly where you’re standing”, and the crappy little apartment that you wake up in in Tedium reminded me of that little quote so much that I just had to leave, because the “paradise” or true revelation of this game wasn’t going to be in that room.

After leaving the room, the player’s camera loads up in a cathedral-like building. It’s very intimidating, a wide open space with an elevator door at the other end beckoning to you. If you try to turn around and walk out the front door you’re confronted with the message “Your duties have not yet been completed”, and your only choice is to walk across the eerie, concrete cathedral and go into the elevator.

As you get to the top of the building, you walk down a fairly long hallway to get to your final destination. There’s a hole in the wall where color-coded letters are spat out, and three holes on the adjoining wall that are colored to match the letters. It was at this point that I realized that there was a counter in the top-right corner of the screen. As the letters fell out of the dispenser, you put them in the corresponding color-coded deposit boxes and the counter goes up. after you’ve placed four or five, the letters stop coming out of the dispenser and you have it’s time to go home.

This is essentially where the game ends. If you correctly placed your letters into the proper receptacles, you get to go back home, go to sleep, and repeat the whole loop again. However, if you “accidentally” (come on, it’s the simplest task you could possibly perform) place the wrong letters into the wrong receptacles and make the counter go from 500 to zero (it gets reset to 500 if you complete a “day”), the corrugated steel door next to the receptacles that you completely ignored opens up, and you jump down the hole.

After this, you see the letters in a hole in the wall, solidifying the fact that your actions at your “job” were meaningless. You continue down the hallway and the architecture around you gets more and more abstract, eventually looking something like, well, the header image. It’s both breathtaking and refreshing to finally get out of those confined spaces you had been trapped in the whole first portion of the game.

As the name implies, the theme of the game is the concept of tedium and how that tedium can drive us to do rash things and become liberated from your dull, monotonous life. Your repeated actions in a job that you don’t really know how you’ve gotten or what you’re really even doing is “ruined”, and you find out that you weren’t actually doing anything important at all.

Eddie Cameron (the mod’s creator) does a wonderful job of expressing the emotions he intends for the certain events through the architecture in the map. He discusses his intentions and shortcomings with the mod in his postmortem in much more detail and substance than I could ever hope to talk about someone else’s work.

You can pick up the game at moddb if you’d like to check it out.