Slime Rancher 2 is glorious and ghastly and that’s what’s fascinating about it

A few weeks back a friend recommended Jonathan Crary’s 24/7, a short, vital book I have just finished reading. I suspect a lot of it went over my head, but the basics are pretty simple. Crary, who is a professor of modern art and theory at Columbia, makes the case that the contemporary world’s focus on an endless 24/7 treadmill of consumption and toil has made sleep the true enemy of capitalism. Sleep is the last place where you cannot be sold stuff, or made to work, and so capitalism must fight sleep, and it will probably be a fight to the death.

Crary takes this argument in a number of fascinating, alarming ways. What he doesn’t mention – and I understand this, I guess – is a great-uncle of mine who used to own a turkey farm, and had heard that turkeys were so stupid that when the lights went off they thought the day was over. He rigged up a system in his turkey farm, a farm which clearly should have been shut down by the authorities, in which the lights continually went on and off, the theory being that the turkeys would age by a day each time this happened, and would be ready for market sooner. I don’t need to add anything at this point, but I will: my great uncle was not a very nice man and should not be interpreted as the hero of this story.

Both of these things – Crary’s illuminating book and the involuntary memory about a family member that it prompted – created what is basically the single least ideal mindset in which to experience Slime Rancher 2, which is out in early access at the moment and is taking over the world. Slime Rancher 2 is a thing of joy: exploration and curiosity delivered in thick, buttery pastels. But it is also the kind of horror that Crary would potentially identify as pure capitalist indoctrination – a game that people are exposed to rather than asked to play. I don’t think that would be entirely fair, but everything about this game is contradictory and challenging.

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