This week, short film Tunnel Run was released on YouTube. It follows a man taking on a job with Hadron Industries in order to make enough credit to play the augmented reality Tunnel Run game.

Synopsis –

In the near future, a man delivers packages through the lens of an augmented reality system. TUNNEL RUN is a cyberpunk short film about gig work, gamified reality, and the fine print nobody reads.

The film was obviously made with a lot of love, and much thought has been given to the aesthetic of the movie, including using analog CRTVs in the process of generating the special effects. The team behind the film was small but committed, with both the soundtrack and the game created by the lead actor.

It’s an interesting film, and the lo-fi look of it feels more like a feature than a bug. The film is a perfect reflection of real life. For so many of us, life is a soul-sapping fetch quest. We work for a large percentage of our time, to earn money to buy the things we want and need. And even when we are in a position to buy the things we really want, they very rarely live up to what we really hoped for. But, if we attempt to take shortcuts, the result is very likely a bad ending.

There are some great touches in the film. The fetch quests in the Tunnel Run game mirror those carried out in the real world to earn the credits required, but it is shown that even these real deliveries are pointless, almost arbitrary drops that have no real point to them – futility rather than utility. The film is both a comment on commercialism and society and of gaming culture. Videogames are increasingly becoming, in many cases, a way of escaping the mundanity of real life by doing mundane things in the game. When the main character is ‘playing’, using the augmented reality device, his meat body is on autopilot, gormless and blinkered, oblivious to the world. That’s what gaming has become to a lot of people, a crutch that allows them to forget their worldly troubles, but it doesn’t fix anything. Are we right to escape into gaming worlds, or should we be more proactive in life to create a better situation for ourselves?

Tunnel Run is not just a short film, there is also a browser game, webcomic, music, and other material, which you can find at www.tunnelrun.net

You can watch the movie on YouTube, for free, below –