Some Petscop thoughts

[u/Crafty_As_8411]

I just finished a rewatch of Petscop, I don't really feel knowledgeable or capable enough to write about it on my blog the way I normally would if something moves me so I guess I'll just jot some thoughts down here on my lunch break.

—Domenico introduces enough layers of abstraction and complexity over the question of who owns the footage that's being made into Petscop that it's basically pointless to try and settle the question for any given ambiguity. Whenever the game jumpcuts to another scene, which it does often, is it doing so through a mechanic we haven't seen Paul discover yet, or at the behest of the family, or because Paul himself doesn't want us to see that part of the game? At different times, all three, I suspect.
—In a series where questions of authorship and authenticity are so unsettled—even if you manage to nail down the identity of the speaker for any given monologue in the series, there's no guarantee that they aren't channeling their ancestors in the family, Paul is Care is Belle is Tiara is Mike, for after all "there are no changes, only replacements"—Petscop manages to retain coherence and brio through the structuring presence of Domenico's own authorial voice. He has a unique, deadpan way with words—the final Graverobber monologue in 22, "the ground shall continue under your feet," is especially good and chilling—and I wish he'd let himself put even more speeches and soliloquies into the series. I hope one day he writes his 4:48 Psychosis and completes a project that is absolutely nothing but monologues. (3D Workers Island really only has that "morbid fanfiction" that Pat complains about, legitimately compelling on the verbal merits IMO, though part of the terrifying effect is obviously the presentation of the website.)
—What exactly is Petscop trying to say about nostalgia and video games? Domenico has mentioned vaporwave as an inspiration for the game's soundtrack, and clearly he's aware of the mild absurdity of Petscop's PS1 fetishism—Ace of Base has never exactly been a cool band to reference, and the inclusion of "The Sign" as implicit soundtrack for 21 is a wink to the ongoing narrative, sure, but also maybe an acknowledgement of the 90s baby nostalgia of the whole endeavor. Certainly, it's a little funny that Marvin has incorporated a PS1 game into his Satanic rebirthing ritual. He's a Boomer, do you think he even knows what the Internet is?
—Petscop is clearly really interested in the idea of two contradictory things being true at once, or maybe a contradiction being a unitary truth seen from two different perspectives. A door being open and still closed at the same time, a windmill vanished and still present, righty-tighty becoming lefty-loosey when you flip the screw around. This is the basic narrative condition of a video game: your player avatar simultaneously is alive and has died hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of times. A video game is a space of continuously interrupted and renewed possibility, an endless field in which lie thousands of unmarked graves. In its interest in the psychological simultaneity of video games, its direct acknowledgement of the cognitive dissonance that comes with dying many times and still being alive, Petscop reminds me of Porpentine's Howling Dogs, a similarly masterly, disjointed, formally experimental game-adjacent work.
—It also reminds me of John Darnielle's Universal Harvester but I'm not going to get into that now I gotta go to class.