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Games

‘Killing Time at Lightspeed’ Is the Ultimate FOMO Simulator

With so many of us constantly refreshing our feeds, how would it feel if everything could change between swipes?
Screenshots courtesy of Gritfish.

Imagine that you've been away from Earth for ten years. Now imagine trying to catch up on—god, even just the past two years would be enough—using only Twitter. It would be like trying to figure out what happened in a TV show via the tweetstorm aftermath, but for a decade of politics, relationships, drama, and slowly decaying friendships.

Such is the life of Jay in Killing Time at Lightspeed, who is on a 29-year journey to a distant planet, able to entertain himself only with the game's version of social media, Friendpage. But for Jay, the flight only takes half an hour, meaning that each time he refreshes the page—months, if not years—have gone by. You'll respond to a message about a burgeoning relationship only to find it dissolved by the time you check your messages again, congratulate someone on a job only to find out they hated it a year later.

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Killing Time at Lightspeed, which launched last summer but has only just made its way out of my backlog (we all have them, right?), makes me feel incredibly introspective about my own use of social media. The incessant refreshing, the waiting for things to happen, the way you forget about life events as soon as they reach the bottom of your timeline, to be replaced by the latest awful politics fuck-up. Joy replaced by anger, replaced by laughter, replaced by fear, sadness, happiness, and so on. The ephemerality of life is mirrored in miniature, 140-character thoughts thrown out and lost in the ether.

There's no more intense feeling of FOMO than that in Killing Time at Lightspeed. This is what social media is about now, the feeling that we should be changing our status to "Engaged," the worry that we should be at a protest, the anxiety that things are happening without you and the world moves on, still, while you sit at home pressing F5.

But in Killing Time, the world moves on in the blink of an eye. The time it takes to make a cup of coffee, to drink that cup of coffee, and to "Like" the fact that your friends are slowly forgetting you.

Follow Kate on Twitter.