QNTM

QNTM entanglement

Videogames and literature collide in the search for new forms

Working under the alias QNTM, Sam Hughes has made a number of videogames over the past few years that are as likely to make you feel frustrated as much as pleased. There’s Hatetris, a version of Tetris in which you can always rely on receiving the worst possible tetromino, and Absurdle, an “adversarial” take on Wordle, in which the game only begins to shuffle through a pool of potential answers once you are already guessing. But Hughes isn’t a developer or a designer, at least in the traditional senses. Rather than creating actual games, the majority of his work is perhaps better described as ‘game adjacent’ – his written fiction attempts to illuminate the nature of videogames as a medium from the outside.

Hughes’ 2020 novel, There Is No Antimemetics Division, was republished in November this year. It tells the story of ‘anti-memes’, hostile entities that are invading our world to feed on our memories. The book started life as a work of online fiction, set within the universe of the SCP Foundation. If you’re unfamiliar with SCP (it stands for both ‘Special Containment Procedures’ and ‘Secure, Contain, Protect’), it’s a voluminous collection of weird literature, all by different creators, but anchored to a shared world and theme. Each SCP entry focuses on a different paranormal anomaly, exploring its powers and describing the efforts of the eponymous Foundation to capture and safeguard it. The earliest readers of Antimemetics were often unable to discern whether the book contained a single narrative or a collection of short stories. This was a product of the discrete-but-unified nature of the SCP world. “The way the SCP Foundation is structured encourages readers to dip in and out,” Hughes says.