McMickey and Air Jordan’s Hyperspace Safari is a YouTube-based video game that acquaints Internet users with the lesser-known crevices of cyberspace. For creator and independent game artist Hannah Leja Epstein, online gaming is a political act and a way to keep the Internet free from heavy-handed copyright controls.
McMickey and Air Jordan’s Hyperspace Safari will be featured at The HTMlles 10 speedshow being held November 14th at 680 rue Jean-Talon O. from 18h - 0h.
Hannah Leja Epstein is a contradiction in terms: a game developer who doesn’t write computer code. The Toronto-based artist instead relies on YouTube as a platform for her online video games, which she says are as much about her own catharsis as they are about activism.
“Any chance to make someone who is in a position of power and misuing it, look like an asshole, I am all over it – and have the most fun doing it. That’s my personal catharsis: just to point out that it’s happening in the first place. Then, hopefully, other people will look at it and get equally enraged.”
Her newest game – though it’s not a game in the familiar, shoot’em up sense of the word - is McMickey and Air Jordan’s Hyperspace Safari, a romp through the Internet wonderland that exists beyond the Google Highway.
The beginning follows a classical video game structure: when cyberspace guides McMickey and Air Jordan are suddenly stolen by the villain Copyright, you are left to your own devices to save your guides and find your way back to the familiar realm of Google and Facebook.
Epstein’s main intent in creating the game was to bring attention to our use of the Internet, as well as those who might misuse it:
“The Internet is a completely invented space. It’s all just imaginary. We can contribute to it in whatever way we want. It’s the expression of our collective unconscious and putting copyright in that kind of arena just seems so absurd to me...The control that is currently being exerted on the Internet by things like America’s Internet police conglomerate is the closest thing I have seen to thought control. The mind and creative, imaginary spaces are areas that should be completely free.”