The following essay is a follow-up to my previous essay, The URL is the Key, which focused on the superficial aspects of E.B.O.N.Y. Riddle Game. I’m going to get into the weeds here, so bare with me, and come wading in the water.
“Perfect living is not easy.
Careful planning with randomness doesn’t
match. Your eyes can’t see
the truth; probable future gets
closed, whilst alternative space/time wins.”
- E.B.O.N.Y., The Weirdest Riddle Game On The Internet
INTRODUCTION
Before E.B.O.N.Y. begins, you are greeted with a disclaimer that is suitably vague: Jellyfish don’t talk, pushing drawing pins into someone can cause injuries, and jumping into an elevator shaft can kill you. Things that are normal in E.B.O.N.Y. can cause other people question your sanity, be illegal, lead to severe injuries or even death if done in the real world. In other words, E.B.O.N.Y. is a game, and by its nature, is not real.
The barrier of fiction and non-fiction appears on a surface level to be cut and dry. Non-fiction is real and fiction is not. But I don’t believe that distinction is so inherently obvious.
REALITY
There is such a thing as objective reality. In a literal sense, you could hypothetically catalog the universe as it is, mapping, listing, and sorting every interaction down to the atomic level in a timestamped ledger accurate to the nth degree, but it would be a herculean task, and certainly no human would be capable of doing such a feat, nor would any computer or artificial intelligence that exists in 2026 either. Still, even without the ability to accurately catalog objective reality to the fullest detail, it is something that I still know exists. This is, in effect, what we mean by non-fiction.
Take, for instance, a historical event. It’s entirely possible, especially if it is ancient, that the event never happened, or at least it didn’t happen as we commonly believed. The actual details of objective reality, what really happened, did exist but our records are spotty and people mythologized and retold the story and what we have may be very accurate, but it is not a photograph or recording of what actually happened. In this instant, fiction and non-fiction’s divide has been ruptured.
In many respects, the challenge of being a historian is having to sort through this muddled mess to make as good of a guess as is possible, but at some fundamental level, we must fill in the gaps with our best or acknowledge that we have lost a piece of objective reality as it existed. All of this is assuming that we even know such a gap exists and we don’t take it for granted that there may be pieces of the record of reality that are false and we don’t even question if they are or not; false bricks in the wall that look identical to the real one, and with so many bricks, how could we even reasonably test every single one? Fiction and non-fiction blur each other at the edges.
But there is another force at work here too: In the case of myths, legends, half-truths, lies, and other falsities slipping into the record as we know it, they are simply a mistake in an otherwise solid wall. They’re exceptions, not the norm. You can pick up a novel and know that it is not real. This is what we know commonly as the ability to distinguish fantasy from reality. It is obvious and self-evident to a non-insane person that events made up in a novel are not events that occurred in objective reality.
However... suspension of disbelief exists. While we are reading a novel, watching a movie, playing a video game, we pretend for a while that what we know doesn’t exist, in fact, does. We treat the fictional experiences as though they have real value and the characters we see as though they have real feelings and the choices we make as though they have real weight. The enjoyment of fiction is created, first and foremost, from the ability to suspend disbelief no matter how fantastical what we are experiencing is. One of the most common criticism of media that fails to captivate is that it failed to suspend the disbelief of the viewer.
The strange divide of fictional media is that we can simultaneously acknowledge the fact that it does not exist in reality, but to enjoy it, we pretend as though it does. That feeling of longing and emptiness at the end of a movie trilogy or video game is the coming back to reality following full immersion; in other words, an onset of depression because the sudden weight of realization that the self-induced hallucination that something that did not, and very often could never, exist was real and no longer is. The veil is broken and one must concede themselves back to the objective reality as best as they can understand it.
This can be seen in the surprising effect that resulted from the release of the first Avatar movie when internet forums were flooded with people who felt genuine depression and desperation that the world of Pandora did not actually exist.
But if the effect of suspension of disbelief is so strong and if we are capable of forgetting at will that something that is not real is not, in fact, real... then are we able to question what exactly reality (Or more accurately a reality) is?
FICTIONAL REALITIES
What I’m saying is: With due respect to the objective reality, why are the fictional realities that we treat as though they are part of the objective reality, not real? Now I want to stress a separation here: Fiction is fiction. It is not part of the objective reality even if suspension of disbelief makes us pretend it is so. It is pretend, after all. But fictional realities hold sway of us, subjects in the objective, and in many regards deserve respect as though they were real because the effects are real.
As Arthur Schopenhauer stated succinctly at the beginning The World as Representation, “The World is my Representation.” The human experience is not the rote cataloging of objective reality but of one’s own subjective experience of it (subjects in the objective, as I put it in the previous paragraph) which is influenced. In The World as Representation, the influence discussed are many, but one of the primary examples that Schopenhauer cites is senses. If you are blind, the objective version of the world still exists, but your experience of it is different from someone who can see, and neither are more valid interpretations of the world than the other, simply differences in perception but that are fundamental in one’s subjective experience of the world. In other words, the subjective experience of reality is entirely valid as reality to the subject, but it is a variation of the objective reality that all subjects have a slightly different experience of.
Fictional realities are, then, similar in aspect to this. If you can feel a scene, see a scene in your minds eye, imagine its sights and smells, and feel emotions about it, then it is successfully influencing you in the same way that reality- the real reality- is able to. The fictional reality lies in an uncomfortable middle ground, known to be false but real in sensory experience.
So what is E.B.O.N.Y. exactly? In many ways it is the fictional reality brought into the objective.
WADING IN THE WATER
I feel as though a piece of me exists within E.B.O.N.Y. and perhaps there is more than a piece; there could be a whole me, or many mes.
This is the core essence of what E.B.O.N.Y. is: E.B.O.N.Y. is the recycling bin of fictional realities. The narrative of E.B.O.N.Y., as it is presented to the player at the start of the game, is that it is a simple puzzle game about exploring a dark forest, but that obscures the deeper principles inside of the game. It’s hard to discuss E.B.O.N.Y. in depth because the first commandment of the community is “Thou shalt not spoil.” and that is a standard that I intend to maintain (though even writing this walks a fine line.)
Nevertheless, what is revealed throughout the game, without spoilers, is that E.B.O.N.Y. is the place in which fictional realities, places and ideas, are left. Characters from media, alter egos, locations, and things, all of them form this amorphous, growing mass-less mass. The dark color palette of E.B.O.N.Y. is not just a creative choice but instead emblematic of the fact that this is a void of lost places and ideas collected and reassembled into logical nonsense.
I’ve used two oxymorons now because it is the meeting place of everything lost (A two word phrase comes to mind, though I cannot say it out loud. Instead I must leave it at an “if you know, you know.” And if you know, let me know.) and come together into this void. I say there are possibly many mes in it because E.B.O.N.Y. has affected me as a person at various stages of my life. The child I once was is gone, and so is the tween, and then the teenager. Now I am an adult, grown here on a continuous line that can be plotted, but ultimately any snapshot of who I was previously playing the game is no longer the concurrent me.
E.B.O.N.Y. is the place of lost ideas and things, and so myself as he exists and constantly changes, finds himself at various stages within there. Sometimes I see things that remind me of E.B.O.N.Y. or the soundtrack comes up on my playlist. In that moment, the fictional reality comes to me and my imagination supersedes the real, and just as E.B.O.N.Y. then becomes my temporary imagined reality, another snapshot of myself is dropped into it in return.
Every time I wade in the water, I realize I’m actually underneath it. My reflection above me is looking down from the dark sky. How can I ever be so sure that jellyfish don’t talk, pushing drawing pins into someone can cause injuries, and jumping into an elevator shaft can kill you?