And so I feel that in the absurdity of the startup world, you can draw that throughline to games, where you see free-to-play games taking off that have the same approach.

They just keep doing that and keep raising more money. And now all of a sudden you just own everything and you know, a lot of them don't even end up making money at all. You know, the way a startup works at all! It shouldn't really work, because you're spending tons and tons of other people's money to basically give something away for free so that you get everyone hooked on it so that you own the market and disrupt everything else. There's a lot here that can be read as being about growing up on the Internet and witnessing startup culture and gentrification take over in real time. So I'm like, whoa, I just woke up from a dream, you know?

GQ: What was it like finally releasing Donut County after working on it for five years? Ben Esposito: It was a really interesting turning point for me because I kind of feel like I was stuck as the person that I was in 2013 when I started it and I had to finish this game in order to continue growing and being a person. So naturally, we had to talk to him about his long, public journey to release one of the most delightfully weird games of 2018. In the games industry, the developers who make video games are rarely public faces the way film directors are, developers like Esposito are hard to come by. It's also primarily the work of Ben Esposito, an independent game designer known for his work with the weird punk games collective Arcane Kids (responsible for fever dreams like Room of 1000 Snakes, CRAP! No One Loves Me., and Sonic Dreams Collection). This is, as you may surmise, a strange video game-one of the most delightfully weird things I've played in 2018.

In Donut County the hole you play as starts small-it's maybe about the size of one you'd find at a golf course-and as you move it around a stage (a backyard, a traffic jam, a fireworks store), it grows as it swallows up bigger and bigger things, all wryly logged in a growing 'trashopedia.' It's a lot of fun, but it's also a problem for everyone who actually lives in Donut County-so imagine their frustration when they find out it's all a raccoon's fault. Donut County, the story goes, started as a joke: what if there was a game where you played as a hole? Just a mass of emptiness.

Donut county game online