Dreams of Ghosts: A Failing Grasp on the Past

At their core, games are unique as a creative medium due to their requirement of user engagement. Whether they are conducted in virtual or physical space, interactivity is largely what defines the games medium, as opposed to any aesthetic considerations. And though the specific category of “video game” has historically been thought of in rigid terms as pure entertainment, there have been many works produced throughout the past several decades that have challenged such notions by laying bare the medium’s most essential qualities. It is in this way that the 1998 video game LSD: Dream Emulator utilizes its chosen medium to directly engage with the player, all the while extending its impact well beyond the console for which it was produced.

Spearheaded by visual artist and musician Osamu Sato (b. 1960), LSD is an exploration game in which the player wanders a disconnected dreamscape. True to the subtitle “Dream Emulator,” Sato designed LSD as an interactive art piece wherein the audience experiences an approximation of a dream world.¹ Filtered through the hardware of the PlayStation, which emerged near the dawn of 3D computer graphics, Sato’s vision is rendered as a series of rough polygons, plastered with psychedelic imagery and submerged in a dense fog. Viewing the dreamscape through the eyes of an anonymous protagonist, the player lurches through the game’s environments, their view mechanically bobbing with each step as they experience the world around them. Despite the rudimentary technology with which it was made, LSD nevertheless captures the atmosphere of actual dreamscapes surprisingly well. The game quite literally operates using free association—pulling together scenery, colour palettes, and musical motifs essentially at random to form its locations.² Much like actual dreams one may experience, LSD shapes its environments as though it were attempting to collage together a coherent scene from a stream of disparate memories. In any given dream in LSD, one could find oneself chasing after a train inside a giant toy box, wading through knee-deep water around a shipwreck, admiring the craftsmanship of a giant foot sculpture in the centre of a feudal Japanese town, or following an infant through a labyrinth made out of pulsating skin. Though absurd in appearance and context, the dreamscape simply exists as a forum for the player to carve out their own experiences.

Each dream in LSD lasts approximately ten minutes, during which the player is left to their own devices. One can warp to different locations by making physical contact with objects and organisms; however, there is no overarching goal one must accomplish in the game.³ Contrary to design elements standardized by video games throughout the 1980s and ‘90s, Sato provides the player with no levels to complete or puzzles to solve. Neither the game nor its accompanying instruction manual give structure to one’s time spent in the dreamscape.⁴ Driven in large part by the lack of information provided to the player through these official channels, online communities have formed around the game in order to pick apart and discuss its many bizarre traits. LSD was commercially released exclusively in Japan, yet video footage, writing, and fan art related to the game began to crop up in the anglophone corners of the Internet throughout the 2000s.⁵ Driven to solve the game’s myriad mysteries, members of the LSD fan community have chipped away at its ostensibly disturbing and eccentric exterior, revealing its finer details: its locations have been mapped out, its imagery has been documented, and its randomized systems have been scrutinized.⁶ And though one may never be able to fully bend the game to their whim, the contributions made by fans to better understand LSD have enabled both veteran dream spelunkers and newcomers to fearlessly immerse themselves in the dreamscape.

The process of deciphering LSD is fundamentally communal, calling for collaboration and communication amongst a wide array of different individuals to parse through the game’s contents. Despite the parallels being unintended, this relationship between art and audience has continued to be explored in other works in the form of alternate reality games. Broadly speaking, an alternate reality game (commonly shortened to ARG) is a game in which a narrative is presented through an artistic medium and requires its audience to interact with external support materials in order for its narrative to progress. It is a participatory art form, encouraging players to share information with one another in order to accomplish the tasks presented by the game’s coordinators.⁷ From July 18th to October 25th, 2008, the Smithsonian American Art Museum held “[t]he first [ARG] to be hosted by a museum…”⁸ entitled Ghosts of a Chance. In this project, weekly calls would be sent out for art object submissions from the public, including prompts such as “Con Artist’s Replica” and “Diorama of a Travesty.” As the project progressed, each fulfillment of a prompt would unlock a chapter of an ongoing narrative. The story revolves around characters from a bygone era—the titular ghosts, for whom the donated art objects are artifacts that will enable them to rest peacefully in the afterlife.⁹ The mythology of Ghosts is treated seriously and with respect, as though the Smithsonian was legitimately infested with unruly spirits. In actuality, the narratives and curators of the program were entirely fictitious, with the framework of the ARG functioning in much the same way as LSD’s inciting concept: to suspend the players’ sense of disbelief and to immerse them in another world.

LSD and Ghosts are kindred spirits. Their subjects—the unconscious and the afterlife respectively—are abstract and ephemeral, demanding that their audience bring clarification to the works’ themes and ideas through their own contributions. It is fitting, then, that both were once at the risk of being irreparably forgotten, like an elusive nightmare or amorphous phantom. The ARG format appears to be largely absent from the contemporary art world. As such, one is required to act in the way many members of the LSD fan community have in order to unearth these pieces of museum programming: to take on the role of a cyber archaeologist. Along one’s path are a series of broken web links, missing image files, and improper citations. Often resigned to rummaging through bare-bones web archives, one may discover a small handful of ARGs that were once conducted in association with art museums. In addition to Ghosts of a Chance, there exists sparse information online relating to the Smithsonian’s PHEON (2010-2011),¹⁰ Innovasion at the 2010 Liverpool Biennial,¹¹ or The Vanishers at the Peabody Essex Museum (2011).¹² Outside of online news articles, LinkedIn resumes, and unsanctioned photography, official museum documentation of such events are few and far between.

Ultimately, LSD and museum-affiliated ARGs show the benefits and drawbacks of niche, community-based participatory art. On one hand, they allow the audience to enhance the meaning and significance of an artwork, all the while creating social bonds with like-minded individuals. On the other, these experiences are often poorly documented and preserved by their creators, making the task of rediscovering and learning from these experiments at a later point in time needlessly difficult. As the fan community surrounding LSD has demonstrated, however, the audience of an artwork can keep its memory alive in the absence of documentation by official organizations. Whether it be surreal video game experiments or eccentric museum events, it is the audience that constructs these works’ mythos—and it is in the minds and documentation of the audience that these media live on.

Nicole Leroy is a French-born American artist whose practice and research focuses on commercial culture. Her work predominantly incorporates found objects and children’s entertainment media, forming multimedia electronic sculptures. Reinforcing this practice, her research revolves around visual and popular culture, as well as the autonomy of readily available consumer objects.

1. Nick Dwyer, “Interview: Osamu Sato | Red Bull Music Academy Daily,” Red Bull Music Academy, Red Bull GmbH, November 14, 2017, accessed November 1, 2020, https://daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/2017/11/osamu-sato-interview.
2. “LSD: Dream Emulator Wiki | Fandom,” LSD: Dream Emulator Wiki, Fandom, Inc., accessed November 1, 2020, dreamemulator.fandom.com.
3. “LSD: Dream Emulator Wiki | Fandom,” dreamemulator.fandom.com.
4. “LSD: Dream Emulator Wiki | Fandom,” dreamemulator.fandom.com.
5. Dwyer, “Interview: Osamu Sato | Red Bull Music Academy Daily,”, https:// daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/2017/11/osamu-sato-interview.
6. “LSD: Dream Emulator Wiki | Fandom,” dreamemulator.fandom.com.
7. Eric Engdahl, “Alternate Reality Gaming: Teaching Visual Art Skills to Multiple Subject Credential Candidates,” Art Education 67, Issue 2 (2014): 19-27.
8. Engdahl, “Alternate Reality Gaming,” Art Education: 19-27.
9. Georgina Bath Goodlander, “Fictional Press Releases and Fake Artifacts: How the Smithsonian American Art Museum is Letting Game Players Redefine the Rules,” Museums and the Web 2009: Proceedings, eds. J. Trant and D. Bearman (Toronto: Archives & Museum Informatics, 2009), accessed November 5, 2020, http://www.archimuse.com/mw2009/papers/goodlander/goodlander.html.
10. Engdahl, “Alternate Reality Gaming,” Art Education: 19-27.
11. “The Innovasion – A Pervasive Game for Liverpool | Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art, ”Liverpool Biennial, October 9, 2010, accessed November 5, 2020, https://www.biennial.com/events/the-innovasion–a-pervasive-game-for-liverpool.
12. “the Vanishers: The App that Brings Objects to Life,” Rivertree Productions, Inc., accessed December 21, 2020, https://web.archive.org/web/20130716074839/ http://www.vanishersgame.com/.

This article is published in issue 38.1 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue