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Darius Kazemi has solved the internet. He's completed it, at least, or maybe he's just performed a dazzling fatality. Whatever: Kazemi's built a bot that scuttles around on Amazon, logging in with its own account, and then buying him stuff at random. Inevitably, I picture one of those spidery, biomechanical things from The Matrix or Minority Report, sneaking over shimmering virtual rooftops, clettering down drain pipes made of pure information, toting little spun-silver sacks filled with loot. Look at him go! Books, CDs, improbable trousers: whenever a package turns up at Kazemi's house, he never knows what's going to be lurking inside. It's ingenious, really: ingenious and oddly troubling. This is an experiment in zombie capitalism: ceaseless consumer transactions with no room or requirement for the consumer themselves.I can't do any of that sort of stuff, although I'll admit I see the dark, airless appeal of the project. Instead, I've got Little Inferno, the latest game from the designers of World of Goo and Henry Hatsworth. It's dark and airless in its own right. It's also comical, chilling, wonderfully clever, and - at times - shamelessly euphoric. Kazemi - and his skittering bot - would be proud.
Little Inferno's a satire, preoccupied with the systems that thread themselves through consumerism and compulsion, willingly lost inside the weird muddled thrall pulling acquisition and destruction together. It's a game about games, too: it's concerned with the cynical mechanics that some designers use to keep you hooked, and yet, through its quiet craft and witty implementation, it's also about the ways in which these mechanics can be redeemed.
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