The story, as it is presented, is a bit scattershot and often purposefully ambiguous, as if the creators are waiting for us to assign our own interpretations to the goings-on of the story. Whether Kyle Gabler and Ron Carmel meant for the entire package to consist of a single unifying narrative is unclear. It’s humanity given a chance to start over without repeating the mistakes of its predecessors. The most hopeful bits of the end of the game feature the appearance of gooballs on another planet, perhaps even a moon of the original planet, thus far unsullied by corporate interests. The events that trigger said end-of-the-world are triggered by a single spambot. Those advances in technology are the undoing of the corporation, but at the expense of the world as a whole. A giant corporation irreparably changes the entire world for the sake of unwanted advances in technology.
A major part of the gameplay from the second chapter on concentrates on quite literally grinding up a large, female gooball (seen to the right) into a bunch of little gooballs for the sake of “beauty cream”. The second time through the game, where you’re not concentrating on winning so much as you are concentrating on paying attention to what it’s trying to say, ranges from clever to downright horrifying.
As such, my understanding of the undercurrent of the game was victim to a sort of willful ignorance as my time was spent focusing on the stuff a six-year-old would like, the stuff a six-year-old would get. The truth is, to that point, much of the play time that I’d devoted to World of Goo had been by the side of my own six-year-old daughter, as it’s a game that truly shines as a family-centered experience without being obviously marketed toward kids the huge fonts and the wry humor of The Mysterious Sign Painter are, as it turns out, awfully appealing to young children, as is the almost Tinkertoy-esque nature of many of the goo structures that are built throughout the game. Similarly, my 29-year-old self didn’t really grasp the allegorical nature of World of Goo until, provoked to comment on it, all I could come up with was to mumble something about an “anti-establishment” sort of undercurrent, which, while sort of accurate, is hardly insightful. There is no way for a six-year-old to understand that the story is based on an all-too-real arms race, and that the strange, unsatisfying ending to the story - a Yook and a Zook at the top of the wall that divided their people, waiting each other out for a good time to drop a civilization-ending bomb - was uncomfortably close to the actual political state of affairs at the time.Īt least, there was no way to understand it until my mother explained it to me and proceeded to give me nightmares for the next week. I mean, I found it funny enough, what with its increasing levels of Yook and Zook technology and the clever way in which Seuss found the most trivial thing possible for the two sides to disagree on (probably not in those terms at age six, but you catch my drift), but I didn’t know what it meant. When I was six years old, I didn’t get The Butter Battle Book.
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