by @marathemara​

Every game needs a setting–a board, a table, a Mushroom Kingdom, an open-world sandbox, somewhere for the action to take place. For Homestuck’s Game–SBURB, SGRUB, or whatever your world calls it–that somewhere is the Incipisphere, a little bubble of space inside the infinite Medium in which your session of the Game plays out. What I like best about this space is that it’s carefully structured to promote the values the Game intends to teach its players.

The Incipisphere has two moral poles. At the center lie Skaia, a symbol of light and creativity, and Prospit, a source of useful prophecy and helpful NPCs. Reaching Skaia is one of the goals of the Game, and its full potential can only be unlocked by all players working together.



The other moral pole surrounds the Incipisphere in the form of the unknowable Horrorterrors, who try to lure players away from the goals of the Game and make them act alone and in destructive (grimdark) ways. They are accompanied by the somewhat less eldritch NPCs from Derse, who hate the symbols of Skaia and conspire to entrap and betray the players.

The goals of the Game seem to be to work toward knowledge, teamwork, and creativity, and against hatred, isolation, and destruction. This is reinforced using a metaphor from the players’ own culture: up is good. The Incipisphere is a flat circle, like a solar system with Skaia as its sun, but going to Skaia is always represented as an upward journey, through flight or the building of a tower. The Horrorterrors are never explicitly downward, but as the opposite of Skaia, they can’t very well be anywhere else. Just as an American wants their spirits lifted when they feel down, just as an Alternian highblood oppresses the lowbloods, so too does the Game use up and down to reinforce its values.

[From the Uncyclopedia: the version of Chutes/Snakes and ladders @ohthewhomanity and I played as children. This is another game which uses Up Is Good to reinforce social values.)

But the moral poles of the Game are not where the interesting stuff happens. The players’ planets lie between Prospit and Derse, and it is at this middle position that they begin, and where they choose whether to help or hinder their teammates, whether to work for Skaia or the Horrorterrors.



The middle is also home to the Veil, an asteroid belt whose flying rocks will ultimately destroy the players’ home world, but also allows it to be created in the first place. And one rock in the Veil contains the ectobiology lab in which the players themselves were born. Creation and creativity begin here in the middle, giving whatever player discovers the lab and causes their own existence a little nudge in the right direction and saying something nice about human (and troll) nature: though we may end up either high or low, we all start in the middle. Though the rules and values we will learn throughout our lives were put in place long before we existed, though our dreamselves are assigned to Prospit or Derse, we don’t really start at either end. Each of us can still go either way, and the choice is ours.