IFS: Reading, Writing, and Speaking in the Digital Age

Little Inferno is at once a cutesy time-waster and a complex metaphor.  The game, at the onset, appears to have no particular goal.  The player is presented with a "match", and a few mysterious coins with which to buy objects.  There are  no defined instructions, and the game offers no direction for the player.  The game's essayistic brilliance starts here.  By nature, the player uses the coins to buy things.  Anything.  The in-game store retails anything from wooden blocks to stuffed teddys.  The objects are then dropped into the fireplace, where they can be burned by the player.  Each of these objects let out more coins when burned, and this fact allows the player to buy shinuer and shinier objects as time moves forward.  The game is not fun, but it has an addictive quality.  The process of buying things only to burn them for more coins is an easy to understand concept, and it is thoughtlessly performed by the player.  It is a brief, and simple game, but the conclusion informs the player that it has been a metaphor for American consumerism the entire time.  In the simplest form, Little Inferno criticized the process by which American's seek to buy that, "one last thing" that will give them happiness in life.  The simplicity in the gameplay and the way it assumed materialism of the player to complete it solidifies itself as an essayistic game.