The program is easy to use
The program is user-friendly and simple to use. ider in Fallout 4 found a secret room in the game that was later incorporated into the story by the designers to give the players the sense that their actions had a tangible effect in the world around them
Imagine if there were infinite Ted Cruises like there are infinite Kangs? Yeah, I said it: Ted Cruz is more dangerous than Kang the Conqueror! You heard it here first. [Applause]
The hunt for pop culture Easter eggs has never been more intense, whether it’s YouTube channels treating MCU releases like the Zapruder film or Reddit posts declaring once and for all that every Pixar film takes place in the same universe. Easter eggs sustain a veritable cottage industry of blogs, podcasts, and YouTube channels, but why is this pop culture detective work so incredibly captivating?
Is obsessing over perceived connections just benign fun or is there something deeper at the heart of our fixation? And can the perennial hunt for ever more Easter eggs tell us anything larger about our cultural and even political moment? Let’s find out in this Wisecrack edition.
Our Easter eggs ruining the world? Creators hiding messages in their work is hardly new; during the censorship-happy Middle Ages, heretical writers fearing punishment from the Church buried notes and phrases in their texts to conceal their true artistic intentions. One even used an acrostic puzzle to ink their signature on an especially erotic text. (See what you did there, boy, I like it.)
By the Renaissance, painters like Peter Bruegel the Elder and Michelangelo embedded analog Easter eggs: Bruegel and Bosch’s work with hidden scatological humor, while Michelangelo did things like paint one of his enemies as a resident of Hell in his iconic Last Judgment. Now I’m just thinking about all the people that I would like to paint as a resident of Hell. If you’re thinking that too, name names in the comments - you know, just go for it.
Flash forward to The Beatles and the Easter egg bonanza was full on: when they used a technique called backmasking to record their song “Revolution 9” in reverse, fueling conspiracies that young Paul had kicked the bucket. (But don’t worry, he’s still alive, according to some.)
But the term dates back to 1980, when Warren Robinette, a pissed-off game designer at Atari, sick of the industry standard practice of denying designers credit or royalties for their work, built a secret room in the game Adventure where he hid his signature. Rather than scolding him for his deviance, Steve Wright, Atari’s director of software development, was delighted, comparing the hidden gem to the thrill of discovering a well-concealed Easter egg in your backyard.
From there, we were off to the races: an Easter egg started cropping up in software, video games, movies, and more. Marvel soon learned that the voracious appetite for Easter eggs could almost single-handedly fuel massive box office success, and the hunt for the best of them became its own niche of Internet content.
So, imbuing hidden meanings in artwork is nothing new, but it’s still worth asking what makes Easter eggs and pop culture so incredibly compelling. That can probably be best answered by a term you’ve likely never heard before, unless you’re a secret acolyte of German neurologist Klaus Conrad. Now, Conrad coined the term “apophenia” in 1958 to describe the uniquely human urge to spot patterns in the world around us and infuse those patterns with meaning. As information science scholar M.R. Sauter explains, humans are storytellers, pattern-spotters, metaphor-makers.
When these instincts run away with us, when we impose patterns or relationships on otherwise unrelated things, we call it apophenia. Whether we’re spotting the recurrence of Starbucks coffee cups in Fight Club or illustrations of the horrors to come in Squid Game, our brains are just constantly in search of patterns in our quest for meaning-making.
In fact, apophenia is so damn prevalent, game designers have to actively try to combat these instincts in their work. As designer Reid Berkowitz explains, apophenia is the plague of designers and players, sometimes leading participants to wander further and further away from the plot and causing designers to scramble to get them back - or better yet, incorporate their ideas. He describes how a raider in Fallout 4 found a secret room in the game that was later incorporated into the story by the designers to give the players the sense that their actions had a tangible effect in the world around them.