Spiraling Shape
This could lead to excellence
Or serious injury
Only one way to know
Go, go, go
Go ahead, wreck your life
That might be good
Who can say what’s wrong or right?
Nobody can
There is no coherent way for me to express what I am trying to say. This difficulty is inherent to the nature of what I want to say. You see, I often worry I am overthinking these things, that I am treading into paranoid schizophrenia and seeing conspiracy theories in newspaper clippings ala A Beautiful Mind. However, here, where I am writing this right now, I am not worried. There is no room here for right and wrong. There is no room here for crazy or sane. All there is is me trying desperately to express fragments of the whirlwind of thought that goes through my head as I try to twist free of the infinite collapsing storm of the hexagon.
Feel the surface. Wood? Glass? Cool? Warm? At first cool, then slowly being warmed to match your hand by way of Newtonian harmony? Feel, and notice. Understand the surface, until eventually it melts under your hand or your hand melts into it and you become it.
Everything is the same thing, unified at some basic level if in no other way than by existing in the same universe. Everything is unique, as well, if in no other way than occupying different space than its compatriots. We are all marching to the same beat.
The beat pulses in my six-sided heart on my computer monitor. My heart, as always, is just taking it all in. The shapes collapse into it, and I… I try to avoid them as they fall into my bottomless void.
Lately it seems like all the games I play are rhythm games. The reason it seems this way is because all games have their own rhythm, and in tandem with the accompanying soundtracks there is always a meta-rhythm if only one is attuned to it. The same way a beeping bus and drops of water find a rhythm in common if you are willing to parse one complex enough, games and their soundtracks become inseparable.
Some say they are stressed out by Super Hexagon or frustrated by the demands it places on them. I don’t understand why anyone would engage with the game on that level. If you are getting frustrated at the game you will probably never get good enough at it to not be frustrated. The part of your brain that is capable of frustration shouldn’t even be involved at this point. There’s no room for you between yourself and the hexagon.
Abandon yourself as a refugee abandons once-treasured objects if you would seek the hexagon. You won’t need you where you’re going.
The feeling I got when I finally completed hexagoner was nothing so crass as pride. Granted, pride showed up about 15 seconds afterwards, but at the moment all I felt was the rush of being part of something amazing and exciting. It wasn’t that I did that, it was that I was part of it. Just sheer shivering euphoria climbing up through my fingertips for a moment of a moment, leaving the hair on my arms standing on end.
Sometimes you make the wrong decision and go right when left would have been the shorter path, and you notice right away that you’ve messed up, but if you keep going you’ll make it anyway and if you hesitate it all ends again. So maybe you should never hesitate and never give up… but if you survive mistakes doesn’t that encourage bad habits for the future?
He who fights with [walls] should look to it that he himself does not become a [wall]. And when you gaze long into [a hexagon] the [hexagon] also gazes into you.
Fogging the view, cupping face to the window
In darkness you make out a spiralling shape
Putting all reason aside you exchange
What you’ve got for a thing that’s hypnotic and strange
There is no context. There is no externally imposed symbolism on the hexagon. It is like a sensory deprivation chamber but in reverse: Rather than shutting down my senses by depriving them of stimuli, it fills them entirely. It completely engages the noisy parts of my mind that interrupt greedily when I am trying to think, splits my brain in two, consumes entirely the attention of my lizard brain so my analytic mind can stand back and have a little bit of alone time.
But there’s never time to construct a complex thought, I just find tiny fragments of emotionally charged insight that ripple through my throat and across my chest.
The music swells. I haven’t heard this part before. I’ve never lasted long enough.
Why do movies save their brightest and most bleeding light for their emotional climaxes? When your eyes start to water, your mind is confused, and you are certain you must be emotionally affected. Maybe that’s why I feel so open and vulnerable sometimes when I gaze into the hexagon, because my burning eyes are reverse-Pavlovian priming me to engage emotionally.
See the little hexagon spin, and let it take you into yourself. Some people count beads, some people sit in the lotus position and hum.
And some people say it’s like life because you are ceaselessly dodging obstacles and can never rest. Some say it’s like death because rest always comes, eventually, no matter how you fight.
The hexagon doesn’t judge you. The game begins, and if the triangle is crushed the game ends. Is that a bad thing? There is nothing to tell us so. The music stops, which is sad because the music is nice. The hexagon does not judge, the hexagon merely begins and ends and records and shares itself. The hexagon is merely itself. The hexagon doesn’t crush you because it hates you, it crushes you because it is the hexagon.
The [world] doesn’t crush you because it hates you, it crushes you because it is the [world].
Usually there is an aggression to speed. Usually we move rapidly in the context of our world, and assert a kind of dominance this way. In the Super Hexagon, there is no aggression, there is merely a ceaseless quest for coexistence. Sometimes I wonder if the ‘obstacles’ aren’t actually my allies, caught against their will in the pull of the hexagon, and I’m just desperately trying to avoid colliding with them for as long as I can in order to avoid hurting them. It’s hard not to see the applicability…
I want to ask why there aren’t more games like this, but of course there are. They’re just not enough like this.
I am not the same person I once was.
I have seen the hexagon.
Put out your hands and you fall through the window
And clawing at nothing you drop through the void
Your terrified screams are inaudible drowned
In the spiral ahead and consumed in the shape
The spiraling shape will make you go insane
But everyone wants to see that groovy thing
Problem Machine 
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