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After a break from the game, I return with a friend to explore more worlds. Although for the moment he is not ready to join me, so I got a head start and joined a game called "You vs Homer". It's another cat-and-mouse type game where you run away from Homer Simpson.
I didn't get far in the minigame itself, so I took a break at the arcade next to the lobby. This was easily the most significant find for me as this inconspicuous waiting area in a joke world had one of the most advanced interactable arcade machines I had seen so far.
The game on this machine utilized a pseudo-3D engine to create the illusion of depth, which was a similar technique used for the 1992 PC game Wolfenstein 3D. To see this run while inside of another game resulted in a level of immersion I find slightly ironic.
Looking at this I like to imagine it was my friend playing this beside me, but this was just some stranger who just so happened to be wearing an avatar my friend uses. This kind of Deja Vu happens often.
At this point my friend had come online, and we met at The Black Cat to start off. I feel like I've captured this kind of visual dynamic before in my other photos, with one user's avatar being an intimidating human and the other being some kind of cute animal.
I turned my head and saw this. This is not part of the world, but instead a part of someone's custom avatar. When you see stuff like this happen you know you're in for something interesting.
The culprit was this guy. While he was breaking social norms of altering the world with exploits from his avatar, he did so out of amusement rather than malicious intent. He was cool.
This was scary though.
When I gave him attention he started showing off more of his avatar's capabilities. Here he recreates a penultimate scene from popular manga series JoJo's Bizarre Adventure Part 6: Stone Ocean, where the main antagonist ascends into the sky to get closer to heaven.
His love for JoJo was made evident as he summoned one of the series most powerful abilities known as "Made In Heaven" to his side. I have to admire the dedication users put into their avatars to fully express themselves. There really is no limit to how you want to present yourself.
While I had wanted to explore some worlds, my friend wanted to build puzzles with me instead. As a result, I wasn't able to get as many photos as I had liked.
The time I spent with him, however, was well worth it. Here he's showing off some avatars a friend of his had designed.
It's crazy to think that something digital can truly be "once in a lifetime". I don’t think I’ll ever meet the artist that designed these characters, nor the full context of who they are, and yet I got to see them.
My friend started accidentally hitting some expressive poses that I wanted to capture, so I asked him to recreate one that I had just seen where he was angrily looking at a puzzle piece.
This one I captured in the moment, where he was studying the colors to see where it belonged in the puzzle. I'm not sure how to explain it but I just found this pose to be cute.
Selfie with me and my friend with the completed puzzle. I switched into an avatar more cute to go along with his avatar. Fun Fact: this avatar was designed by the character designer of the PC game Spiral Knights, which my friend is a big fan of.
I should also mention that's where those strange technological readouts you see in the corner of these photos come from. They're meant to only be seen from my perspective, but the camera somehow was able to capture them.
Here we started a custom puzzle upstairs. I had imported a meme my friend sent to be used for the puzzle template. Seen here is the dismay of my friend as he realizes how difficult this is going to be.
Some of the pieces were exactly the same shape and had nothing but white on them. Due to how the scripting worked for the puzzle, these two identical pieces could not be used in-place of each other, so we had to guess where they correctly "fit".
We did manage to get through it with time. It was fun doing so, and we had a good laugh about the whole thing. Surprisingly I found it harder to do the suit than the blank white void.
The completed puzzle. "The Spy Listens To The Wall By Pink Floyd And Has A Genuinely Strange And Haunting Experience."