How Little Inferno (2012) Portrays Consumerism and Isolation
Little Inferno (2012)
Game Written by Kyle Gray
Tomorrow Corporation
Analysis by: Ahna Dwyer
(You are given a “Little Inferno Entertainment Fireplace” from Tomorrow Corp, with which to burn items from the series of catalogues you are now in possession of. Your only goal is to purchase from the Tomorrow Corp catalogues and then burn them, which earns you more money to spend on more things to burn.)
Whilst initially presented as a time-waster pay-to-win game, Little Inferno soon turns into a parallel to our current American capitalist patriarchy shockingly well. The game seems to present both the negative impacts of blind consumerism and cultural hegemony on the mind, as well as the profound effects connection and relationship can have on breaking free of systemic oppression.
The player starts the game being told that 1. The world is slowly beginning to freeze over and 2. That you are now the new owner of a “Little Inferno Entertainment Fireplace” to keep you safe from that.
As with nearly everything, you’ll come to find out, the objects being burnt are sold by the Tomorrow Corporation. They sell you the fireplace, they sell you the things you burn in the fireplace, and with the money you earn from this endeavor, you invest your coins right back into their catalogues.
The only deviations from your spending and burning experience being the letters you receive. These are sent to you from CEO of Tomorrow Corp and inventor of Little Inferno Entertainment Fireplace, Miss Nancy,
as well as updates from The Weatherman,
and your excitable little next door neighbor girl, Sugar Plumps.
Sugar Plumps is curious, seems to be about your age, and starts off in the same situation as you. Staying warm, eyes fixed to the fireplace, and just beginning to ponder what might be beyond it all. She asks you for a few items to experiment with that you purchase and send to her via envelope. These come into play later.
Early on in the game she sends you this exchange:
You can (and will) use her notes as kindling seconds after you’ve read them, but what little connection you have with others through these are ultimately what inspires you to progress and go beyond the limits you are initially set by the Tomorrow Corporation’s intentions.
You continue through the process. Buying, burning, reading. You get a small envelope again and you are greeted with this.
She acknowledges that you are not the only ones facing the same fate. You are all set in front of your fireplace, distant, but there together nonetheless.
It is then that her letters become more investigative (and somewhat worrying) in nature.
The question is now whether you even have control over your own viewpoint. Are you an active player in your life or are you fixed to one perspective forever? If the lens through which you see the world is always first person, unable to look back, what remains undiscovered? If you stay fixated only on your fireplace, what is it that you’re missing?
Sugar Plumps makes her choice when you cannot.
And then you’re alone again.
Back to the buying and burning, but somehow it feels emptier now. You are given a vague and soulless message from Miss Nancy to covertly pass blame for SP’s death away from her company’s product.
…
Another letter.
A letter from a familiar face. They go on about their life and reminisce about the days you both spent in front of the flames and how it was all perfectly designed not to matter at all.
You are now offered a choice. The chance to change your life in a way that, once you choose, you can never come back from.
The items you once gave to Sugar Plumps are special. She tells you that it is your choice to combine them and see what happens, but it is a choice you can never undo. You are given, for the first time in the game, the active choice to progress. The only way to see your world for what it is and make change is to willingly and completely destroy all you’ve known thus far.
So you do.
This is the first time you can see from a third person perspective and the world has opened up. The mailman who has been delivering all those packages was placing them next to you the whole time. Sugar Plumps has taken the initiative, grown up, and moved on to somewhere she’s happier. You finally reach the Tomorrow Corp’s doors and get to ask the burning question: Why?
CEO of Tomorrow Corp, Miss Nancy, presents herself as a caring mother figure with your best interests in mind. However, when you finally see her in the flesh, she will tell you that the world has become too inhospitable for her liking, and says she does not have the answers and (in a darkly much-more-relevant since 2021 way) ascends beyond it all in her giant rocket to space. Leaving you alone to freeze, along with everyone else she’s spent a lifetime selling her products to. While Miss Nancy remains unaffected by the downfall of the rest of the world, you do not have the means to escape without personal consequence.
You’re the one who has to leave the downtrodden corporate building, trudge through the snow, and ultimately, decide for yourself how the story ends.
In game, you are given reassurances and updates from sources you cannot verify. You are simply told that the world is getting colder, it cannot be fixed, and no one knows why. It is implied that the reason for the change is the continued use of the fireplaces, feigning the corporation’s interest to help you, but are ultimately worsening the problem. Instead of addressing the issue, those in power only provide a temporary fix, a distraction from what must be done in order to counteract the inevitable crisis they helped to build in the first place.
I believe this game and narrative functions very similarly to the American society we see here in 2021. You are encouraged through cultural hegemony to consume when you have a problem, consume when you don’t, and work to be able to earn the money to spend it all again. It is a narrative seen time and time again through advertisements, systemic education, and cultural pressures.
The only way one can manage to effect tangible change, however, is by gaining new perspectives and insight from other people. Our late-stage oligarchical hegemonic society requires you to be complicit in order to perpetuate it, therefore needing you to believe in it and its rules without question. To see them as nature, rather than choice. This is sustained only by ignorance, and the greatest way to break through it is the ability to see the world for what it really is, in truth. It must be an explicit choice to radically alter what you know and escape the confines of your own limited worldview, that while comfortable, holds you back from truly living in reality at our best. Our world is determined by those who participate in it. And you’re one of them.
At the end of the narrative, you are the sole decider of whether or not you give a world to others better than the one that was given to you.
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