How I nearly tore this website apart by playing something called Stone Simulator
The following is lifted straight out of the Gaming Nexus Slack chat channel, where us staffers talk about everything from cooking to pro wrestling, cars to Dungeons & Dragons. Needing a change of pace, Randy harassed the other staffers with pretentious chat about something he found on Steam called Stone Simulator – Just Be a Rock. Just roll your eyes whenever Randy speaks and you too can roleplay as a bona fide Gaming Nexus writer.
Randy
I have begun playing Stone Simulator.
If you think for even a moment it's not what it sounds like...think again.
It's exactly what it sounds like.
Weeeee.
Haha, there's a Sprint button.
And a lovely soundtrack.
I've got Walden sitting in front of me.
Always wanted to read Thoreau.
We'll see which bores me first.
Randy
"This game totally rocks." - Gaming Nexus
"I wanna rock right now." - Still Gaming Nexus
Dang it.
I was pooping.
When I came back, I caught the tail end of something my stone was saying, I think?
I saw, "...even if I didn't ask for it."
Randy
That was an unexpected sight in the night sky:
Only minutes in, and I'm already asking questions.
Was I a part of that mountain?
Was I a part of that moon?
Is all of it a part of me?
How much has the rain smoothed my coarse surface?
Have crows eaten from my back?
How long do I retain the day's heat when the trees' shadows pull their blanket over me?
Oh.
My rock is sharing another thought.
It said:
"The clouds look so heavy. I can almost feel their weight. The rain feels like tears I cannot shed."
Never mind.
There's regular moon.
I wonder what that asteroid was.
Second Moon?
Randy
Remember staying the night at a friend's house as a kid, or having a late-night game session in college, seeing the sun come up and thinking, I should go to bed?
I've looked around at the too many details around me.
But I haven't looked at myself much yet.
I know, I know:
iT's NoT tHaT dEeP, bRo.
Randy
"The clouds seem to conspire to hide me from the sun."
The heaviest thing in the center of my camera likes to comment on the lightest things I can see.
It's second moon rise time again.
John
Did you just find a walking simulator where you don't walk?
Randy
A rocking simulator, if you will.
John
You're playing a screensaver.
Joseph
Randy playing Stone Simulator but not playing The Headliners with us is wild.
Randy
I am playing games with you, Joseph!
Look at today’s completely unsolvable Connections!
[Posts the day's completely unsolvable Connections from the New York Times app.]
Update to Stone Simulator! Didn't read the patch notes.
Would you believe I thought about this game for hours after I turned it off last night?
John
Do you just sit there and watch it?
Randy
Yes.
But I'm also thinking about, y'know, stuff.
John
What stuff?
Randy
About how being a rock helps you take the long view of things.
John
Is it a game if you don’t do anything?
Randy
Thinking about stuff is something.
John
It is something.
Randy
What if you went your entire life without thinking about stuff?
Would that be a life?
John
I dunno. I'd have to think about it.
Randy
I'm a hundred million years old.
Would it ever get tiring watching these fall leaves appear around me?
Would I have been disappointed if I'd missed the snow appearing on the nearby mountain?
It's raining again.
How many times has the ocean lifted up into the sky and fallen down against the hills and gathered in streams so it could return to the ocean?
This game has questions.
Instead of us always thinking we have answers.
John
You're like playing that scene in Everything Everywhere All At Once.
Randy
I might be. I've forgotten which scene you're talking about.
Not the hot dog fingers scene, I take it.
See, Joseph? John and I are co-op gaming right now.
Our definition of co-op gaming has simply been too narrow before.
John
[Posts YouTube of Everything Everywhere All at Once - Rock Scene]
Randy
Ohhhhh.
Right.
That was kind of awesome.
John
This is the game you are playing.
Randy
That was the most unexpected thing in a movie full of unexpected things.
John
They should come out with a multiplayer patch where you can be a group of rocks.
A quarry.
Randy
John.
Jonathan.
Johnny.
You remembering that movie clip from Everything Everywhere All at Once?
John
Rocky. Yes.
Randy
You just figured out this entire game.
John
Yes.
Randy
You just beat this game.
And you didn’t even play it.
If it is a game at all, some would question.
John
7/10
Would rock again.
A stone-cold stunning simulator.
Randy
Co-op done.
John
I was caught between myself and a hard place when playing.
A rocking good time.
I took it for granite.
I marbled at the scenery.
Randy
Ha, that’s a good one.
"But have you ever done it... stoned, maaaan?"
John
I can’t wait to see when Randy gets 1,000 hours in Stone Simulator.
Randy
"In a thousand days, a man eats a thousand cups of rice."
Okay, reading Walden while in my rocking chair.
I was watching someone else’s gameplay.
They were a different-shaped rock.
Sitting closer to the pond.
I turned it off.
Didn’t want any spoilers.
John
If it has save slots, start a new one to see if you spawn in a random place.
Randy
This is probably also a good time to remind people that I'm in the 95th percentile for having Neanderthal ancestry.
Thanks, 23andMe!
No, John, I'm not save scumming this experience!
I have to see this through.
Whatever this is.
Save scumming Stone Simulator. Pshhhhh.
Maybe I'll gift you this game, John.
Like that $1 Mountain game I've bought you four times in five years.
John
You do love these types of staring-at-nothing games.
Peeping Tom, as you will.
Peeping Randy.
Randy
We have different definitions of "nothing."
John
Sorry, staring at landscapes.
Leave no stone unturned, Randy.
Randy
Video games are often pretty bland without landscapes.
So this game has that going for it.
All you have to do to turn a rock into a rocket is add E.T. at the end.
And yes, I do like me a good un-game every once in a while.
Joseph, if you play some co-op Stone Simulator with me, I'll play The Headliners with you.
John
How would that even work?
Joseph
No, no, Randall.
That's not how that works.
You play games with us first.
Randy
Look, I would've joined you on The Headliners, but no one actually asked me.
We went straight from "No one asked Randy" to "Yell at Randy because he didn't play a game with us."
John
You should save scum.
Maybe some folks don’t want moss on them.
Maybe some folks want the snow to be a different pattern.
Randy
Too late.
Moss is happening.
John
Kate Moss.
Randy
Also too late.
The seasons pass, and the snows fall the same every year.
John
Does your kid watch you play Stone Simulator and shake her head?
How long does it take to go through a season?
Randy
An update says getting through the seasons will be "faster" now, but I can't tell the difference yet.
The storms have gotten worse.
Oh hey, it started really snowing.
Guess I've made it to winter.
Eric
I really don’t understand this game. Do you just sit and look at it? Isn’t that just a screensaver?
Randy
I don’t know… Have I only been sitting and looking at it?
Or have I been contemplating existence, frustrating my fellow game writers, and making them question:
What is a game?
Eric
That is not an answer.
John
So yes, he’s just looking at it, Eric.
Eric
That’s better.
John
It’s like if you had a yule log on TV.
Randy
How much of a video game takes place in your head?
How much of writing about video games happens in your head before any words hit the page?
Eric
I mean, most games are just clicking buttons to make something artificial happen.
I guess this removes the button clicking.
John
An idle non-clicker.
Randy
Yeah, I mean, I’m not pressing X as much as I would in Diablo.
Eric
But still...I struggle with the difference between this and a fireplace video.
John
There are seasons, Eric.
Eric
Even a digital fish tank seems more interesting.
John
I'll make Stone Simulator for VR.
Randy
Well, no one said it was really a game—except me, to make John and Eric unite against the idea of it being one.
John
So you can just stare around you.
Randy
I called it an un-game.
Eric
I play video games to stop my brain, not provoke activity.
Randy
I don't think that's true.
Games, for a lot of us, are diversions—like when a toddler does something they shouldn’t, so we redirect them to something less destructive.
The toddler doesn’t go brain dead.
They just focus on something different.
That’s us with games.
Eric
I’m not saying it’s not a game.
I’m just saying it sounds more like a meditation tool, which feels very contemplative.
Randy
It’s definitely that.
Eric
Right.
That’s good for you.
But for me, it’s the opposite of what I use games for.
Thinking about life makes me desperate and sad.
I don’t want stone assistance in feeling that way.
Randy
If we’re looking for a dictionary definition of "game" here? Probably not.
Okay, so no co-op Stone Simulator with Eric.
Eric
Not unless you want to hear about the futility of struggle and how I’m jealous of the stone.
John
I swear, Randy, if you start taking pictures of stones tomorrow…
Randy
I’m just using it as a palette cleanser.
But see? What other game could possibly make a player jealous of being a stone?
To make a game that goes places others don’t, you can’t just do what other games have done.
John
I don’t know why you aren’t turning these thoughts into an article and sending it to the devs.
Randy
Because the two highest-ranking members of Gaming Nexus don’t think Stone Simulator qualifies as a game.
We’re not Screensaver Nexus, and that’s all I’ve been able to get out of you guys so far.
John
What is ground?
Randy
The difference between snow and stone is that the sun will take the snow back up again.
Whereas the sun will only dry me off.
And I will still be where the snow aimed to be.
Snow wants to be on the ground.
That is where I already am.
No one thinks snow is failing because it's falling.
Snow doesn't have to be ascending in order to be what it's meant to be.
Maybe that's true for me, too.
Eric
What we need to do, see, is strap that stone simulator up to an LLM [Large Language Model] and then ask it to solve for world dominance in the game world.
Randy
Paint the map red.
Is not the whole Earth just a giant stone?
Stone Simulator has already conquered the map.
It is only us humans that fail to wrest control away from the stone.
Ooh ooh, or think about Stone Simulator "conquest" this way:
The Stone Age is the first age of human existence and culture.
The current era is called the Information Age.
Why information?
Because of the internet.
What is the device we all carry around in our pockets with us every day?
A cell phone.
Which, for many years, we've all come to use as an internet-accessing device more than as a phone to just talk to people on.
And what is that internet-accessing device made up of?
About 12 different types of stones.
Silicon (from quartz), copper, gold, silver, even tin used in one of the touchscreen layers.
And what do we do with these internet-accessing devices made of stone?
We stare at them and scroll until we are angry and/or depressed or run out of battery (batteries made of lithium and cobalt, both stones).
So, even though we're thousands of years past the Stone Age, we're only called the Information Age today because of a bunch of stones.
Stone already has world dominance.
Stone was one of humans' first and most important technological advances.
Today, that has never been more true.
Joseph
LOL I'm not reading all that.
