Dreams of the Cosmic Corner
by SealWyf, HSM editor
I had fallen asleep in the booth, wrapped in my coat, shortly before closing time. Now the bar was quiet and deserted. I opened the street door, expecting to find more rain. But the sky was clear and full of stars — way too many stars for a city sky.
The city was gone. Beyond the shattered edge of the parking lot, a vast blue globe spun in interstellar space. The edge of Africa slipped past. Then India, then Hawaii. Behind me, the full moon hung above the guttering neon sign — much too large and off its axis, rolling like a cratered billiard ball.
If game design is a form of story-telling (and I sincerely believe it is), personal space design is a form of poetry.
Some spaces are banal and predictable, the equivalent of the verses in Hallmark cards. But the best ones, the ones that make us think and feel, can be works of art. The recent pair of small spaces from nDreams, Carla’s Coffee Shop and Cosmic Corner, are definitely poetry.
I’m not surprised that these are nDreams spaces. As the company’s name hints, they specialize in virtual worlds that tap the subconscious. From the floating islands of Aurora, to the nightmare space of Savage Manor, to the surreal cyberpunk universe of Xi: Continuum, nDreams has shown us the parts of our minds that yearn for something beyond infinity pools and gold-plated refrigerators. These two pocket estates are excellent additions to their growing body of intensely personal creative work.
These spaces are also remarkable for their monetization strategy. Who ever expected to see a personal space in Home for $1.99, unless it was an older property being pushed as a loss leader? But that’s the price of Cosmic Corner, a “fun-sized” personal space with a habitable box roughly the size of a small parking lot, and scenery that stretches to infinity. The pricing of Carla’s Coffee Shop is also unusual, since it is only available with a bundle of unrelated furniture. You have a choice: get your apartment with a set of older party-themed items for $2.99, or a collection of new “Chameleo” furniture for $4.99.
For me, this was not a successful pairing. The furniture items don’t match the mood of the space, and there was nothing in either bundle that I really wanted. I got the bundle with the Chameleo furniture because I didn’t have it yet. But now, having seen it, I’m experiencing severe buyer’s regret. The constantly-changing colors may be a technical tour-de-force, but the effect is crude and garish. Still, if I think of it as getting two spaces for seven dollars, it’s not all that bad.
I had thought that the spaces were connected, and that you could walk from one to the other. But now I can see that they are two different “Carla’s”. The one in Cosmic Corner is definitely a bar — the neon cocktail glass proves that. While Carla’s Coffee Shop is, well, a coffee shop. It’s also a clever cultural reference, since it bears more than a passing resemblance to the iconic late-night coffee shop in Edward Hopper’s painting, “Nighthawks” — in mood and color tone, if not in actual detail. (It’s this kind of understated literate detail that makes me love nDreams spaces so intensely.) The surrounding city is also different in the two spaces, even allowing for the fact that most of it has been stripped away in the Cosmic Corner.
It’s not clear at this point what the connection of the spaces will be. Perhaps they were two independent projects, released together. Perhaps they are part of a larger story, which will gradually be revealed. I do hope it’s the latter. I’m a sucker for stories, especially those that invite audience participation.
The professor clicked to the next slide in his PowerPoint presentation. “One of the most common effects of the collision of p-space with normal reality has been the instantiation of dreams.”
I wrote “inst. dreams” in my notebook, but my mind was elsewhere. That dream last night, about the bar in outer space — where had that come from? At least I thought it was a dream. Since the p-space collision, you never knew any more. Things you assumed were dreams might be visions and premonitions, or even glimpses of a separate reality.
I wondered if the person I had been in that world was now dreaming of me in this one? And was that other “me” now wondering the very same thing? It was an infinite regress of mirrors, too dizzying to contemplate. Better to concentrate on the lecture, with its dry graphs and statistics.
One important detail in Cosmic Corner is almost an Easter egg, because it can’t be seen except by using the Home camera. Put the camera into first-person view, then aim it straight up. Do you see the space warp overhead? There’s also one in the Carla’s Coffee Shop space, though it is fainter, less developed. So yes, there is definitely a story here, one embodied in at least two related personal spaces. The last time we saw something similar in an nDreams space was in Savage Manor, another apartment that contained a story.
I doubt that Savage Manor and Cosmic Corner are connected (I’m prepared to be wrong on that), but I suspect they have at least one designer in common. Whoever it is, I definitely approve of his or her aesthetic sense. Suggestion to developers: it would be nice to have a set of credits attached to a personal space, for those of us who are fans of creative Home design.
My current theory is that the connection between Carla’s Coffee Shop and Cosmic Corner is one of increasing imagination. Carla’s Coffee Shop is in the real world (or what passes for it in Home), while the Cosmic Corner is a dream based on it. It’s the dream of the point-of-view character, one of the faces at the window in “Nighthawks”, with the coffee shop recast in the dream as a seedy bar. The Coffee Shop is already edging into dream territory (the faint space warp proves that), but it’s only fully developed in Cosmic Corner.
In the dream world, the cosmos itself has been warped. The earth is rotating on a strange axis. We might interpret that as our own angle and orbit around it, but then there is the matter of the Moon. It’s rolling loose like a marble, showing its normally hidden back-side as it tumbles in space. Thinking about the implications of this leaves one distinctly unsettled.
I’ve heard there is a way to glitch Cosmic Corner, and fly free to the Earth and Moon. I may do that someday, if I learn the details. But in the meantime, I have simply added Juggernaut’s Essence of the Seven Winds, so I can float weightless in the space while gazing at the world. It seems appropriate to be flying in a dream.
Sleep drifted into dreams. I found myself back in the bar. No, this time it was a deserted coffee shop. Rain blew against night-darkened windows and slicked the cobbled street beyond. I sat by the window, warming my hands on the thick white mug, and examining my own reflection.
Suddenly, my face merged with another face outside the glass. It was a man in a raincoat and a soaked fedora. As our eyes met, I seemed to see inside his mind. He was an artist, a painter, and he was memorizing the scene — the rainy night, the quiet eatery, the solitary figure at the window.
Then he walked on, and I realized I was remembering an old painting from an art book. So who was this man who walked into my dream? Another dreamer, perhaps — lost in his own inner mazes. He had wandered through the rainy wilderness of sleep — his path touching mine for one brief moment before the worlds shattered and we were cast among the stars.
March 15th, 2013 by SealWyf_ | 2 comments
SealWyf is a museum database programmer, who has been active in online communities since before the Internet, and in console gaming since the PS1. In games, she prefers the beautiful and quirky, and anything with a strong storyline. She is obsessed with creating new aesthetic experiences in PlayStation Home.
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I bought the coffee shop with the smaller package. It comes with the “star” props like paparazzi, red carpet and a “cinema” sign. I turned my place into a movie theater having a premier evening. At this point only the lobby is available, of course. But I’ve set it up with tables, awards and even a few special drinks. I even have a bouncer at the front door to make sure only the invitees get in!
nDreams, please reduce the number of furniture slots for the paparazzi and smoke machines.
I love the way you intertwined the article with that short story.Beautiful.I also saw the space warp,one of the first things I noticed as my camera is pretty much always out but I didn’t see that it looks just like a butterfly until I read this article.Thanks for showing me something I missed!