Imagine an industrial building site, all diggers and dull earth. It’s sunrise, but the thick purple air is more readily attributed to the pollution burping out of honking machinery. The earth is subject to the various impacts of machinery. Trucks leave their heavy imprint, diggers tear and rend. Commuters trudge past on the other side of a chain-link fence. Does the fence keep them out or is it penning them in? Imagine a butterfly – the only remnant of the vanishing natural world, quite literally displaced by the heavy machinery of industrialisation. Imagine it yellow, like a daisy, flittering about between corrugated fences and palettes of dirty metal. It’s fragile and gentle, a little sliver of beauty. It casts light on the face of a worker, and he pauses for a minute to watch it go by. He is touched. Now imagine the butterfly sucked in through a machine’s air vent and shredded. Surprise! That’s bathos. It’s also a scene in Mosaic, a 2019 game from developers Krillbite Studio.

Krillbite Studio are indie developers working out of Norway. Their hit game was Among the Sleep, a 2014 horror game where the protagonist is a toddler, and we’ve also discussed their more recent game Sunlight. Mosaic is a game about the horrors of the workforce. It’s about being a cog in the machine, about unfulfilling corporate jobs and the impossibility of joy under modern capitalism. We’ve been talking a little recently about the theme of labour in video games, particularly with reference to Hardspace: Shipbreaker in January. I suggested then that job simulators (or really games about labour or work more broadly) balance two competing impulses. Sometimes they want to depict work as fulfilling, and sometimes they want to depict it as exploitative. Mosaic falls firmly in the second category. It is relentlessly glum in its vision of the modern workforce. Work is hell, everyone’s a ghoul, and you’re a nobody who’s going to get stepped on. Or rather, that’s one reading of the game. There’s another one that might be more compelling. We’ll talk through them both, and then we’ll come back to bathos.

So the first reading straightforwardly endorses the glum outlook as an authentic critique levelled by the text. We’re all just cogs in the machine. Capitalism will chew you up and spit you out. That’s what Mosaic is about. On the surface, Mosaic certainly has a wide-ranging critique of modern labour. Its fictional world has ads for ‘Contentisol’, a pain relief medicine pitched with the slogan “Get back to work today”. Pharmaceutical intervention is offered here as a band-aid solution, as something to make you content rather than addressing our fundamental ill-suitedness to working forty hours a week in an office. We don’t need medicine, Mosaic says, we need to stop treating ourselves like this. Another ad for a new mobile game, BlipBlop, carries a double meaning inciting suicide (“Blow Your Mind – Out Now!”), implying that mindless consumerism is driving us all to madness and death. BlipBlop is actually playable within the world of Mosaic – it’s a clicker game, where you click the mouse to make a number go up, and if you do it enough you can unlock bonuses that improve your clicking. It’s essentially Steve Richey’s Don’t Move. Tellingly, all of Mosaic‘s Steam achievements relate to BlipBlop. Mosaic uses the achievement mechanism to draw out the psychological processes enforced under capitalism: give the workers some meaningless incentives (a sticker, an achievement, maybe a pay rise in line with inflation), and they’ll click the button forever, willing and enthusiastic participants in a cycle of endless consumption.

That’s the first reading, anyway. That’s the straightforward option. Mosaic is a game about how the corporate machine sucks. It’s a game about pulling the plug, about tearing yourself out of the economic machine. At the same time, there are points where you wonder – is this protagonist a bit whiny? Are things really all that bad, or is he having a bit of a sulk? There’s a question, I think, as to whether Mosaic fully endorses its surface critique of capitalism, or whether the problem is exaggerated through the lens of the miserable main character. We see hints of that exaggeration in how our nameless protagonist relates to other people. At the start of each day, the protagonist takes the lift in his apartment down to the ground floor. He always shares the ride with the same two people, pictured above. If you turn to look at either of them, they react to your gaze by looking away. Thus the dilemma: you can look sideways and have them reject you, or you can ignore them and stare straight ahead. You can reach out and experience rejection, or give up on trying to connect and rot in your isolation, stuck in physical proximity to people who couldn’t be further away. It’s presented as a critique, but also – like, don’t stare at people in the elevator. It’s okay to feel isolated, but are we really trying to solve the problem with forced elevator eye contact?

Really, there’s a sense in which the protagonist doesn’t help himself. He feels isolated, but he tries to fix the problem in unhelpful ways. He tries to make awkward eye contact in the elevator, and when it doesn’t work, instead of reflecting on his method, he turns the rejection into some big critique of isolation in the modern city. It’s characteristic of his broader disdain for anyone who has acclimatized to the corporate environment. Office workers are not depicted as people: they are drones, automatons, robots in suits. They have no inner light or humanity. They do not see the joy of the natural world. In the first reading, we might say that the corporate world has sucked the life out of them, turned them into husks who need to be saved. But in the second reading – maybe they’re totally fine. Maybe their framing as mindless drones is less a reflection of who they actually are and more a reflection of the protagonist’s attitude towards them. Are they robbed of their humanity by the capitalist machine, or by the protagonist’s hostility towards them? Is capitalism the problem, or is the protagonist a hateful misanthrope? In one scene, a magical fish asks the protagonist “When was the last time you spoke to another human being?”, and “When was the last time you did anything outside of work?” Is capitalism really the problem, or is this guy hurting himself? In places, he seems willfully self-destructive. He is told five times that his contract will be terminated if he keeps showing up late to work, and yet he keeps on dragging his dumb ass as slowly as possible down the road. Is he really a victim, or is he victimizing himself? Is capitalism really a problem, or is the critique of capitalism just a way of externalising responsibility for his shitty life? It’s not my fault, it’s capitalism. They wouldn’t even look at me in the lift.

These conflicting readings bring us back to bathos. Bathos is what happens when you’re trying to tug on emotional heartstrings but you end up looking silly. All high school poetry has bathos. It wants to be serious, but it’s badly written, and it turns out funny or embarrassing. The butterfly sequence is bathetic. It’s hackneyed and cliche. The symbolism is so overt, and the outcome so contrived, that any emotional resonance very quickly drains away. The butterfly murdered by a building site is silly. It supports the second interpretation of Mosaic. This is not a game about human suffering under capitalism. It’s a game about a guy who, you know, is clearly struggling to find his place, but who’s also having a sulk about it. He hasn’t found a fulfilling life, and he has a shitty office job, and he lumps responsibility onto external systems so that he doesn’t have to own his problems. The butterfly sequence is a projection of his self-pity rather than an accurate representation of the world. It’s silly. When he unplugs himself from the machine and runs off to join a street band, I’m not certain that it’s best understood as claiming freedom from capitalism. It reads to me like someone taking ownership of their life, and putting in the effort to make connections and chase his dreams. I’m glad he ends up in a better place, but I’m not sure he ever understood what his problem was.