This post contains spoilers for Pony Island. If avoiding spoilers is your bag, go play the game first; it's worth your time.
Pony Island is a metafictional puzzle game in which you, the player, are playing a game called "Pony Island". (For convenience sake, I will from here on in be referring to the game itself as Pony Island and the game-within-a-game as "Pony Island".) As the game goes on, it starts to seem as if "Pony Island" has been designed and developed by Satan for the purpose of harvesting souls from unsuspecting players. "Pony Island" is a very simple and inoffensive endless runner involving a pony which jumps over gates, but it has been deliberately broken and made unplayable to encourage users to 'insert soul to continue' with the game. Between sessions of play, you must find portals into the game's source code in order to escape various traps the developer has set for you; the "code" of "Pony Island" is pretty nonsensical, although the puzzles involve real programming concepts like loops and branching trees.
When you give up on "Pony Island", you are booted to a GUI desktop, but of course you're not done playing Pony Island yet -- or "Pony Island", for that matter. It's pretty clear that the overarching system is still part of Pony Island, although there are occasional fake-outs in the game intended to briefly make you think things are happening on your real computer; at one point, a character even asks you to uninstall Pony Island from your hard drive. As you try to find a way to escape the "Pony Island", you are contacted by an entity who claims to have the ability to help you get out of the game developer's trap. But this seems not to be the whole story. I have only played as far as the basic ending; I believe there is also a secret ending which may call into question the assumptions which the player is encouraged to form during gameplay.
One thing I find interesting about Pony Island is the questions it raises about the relationship between game player and game developer or designer. In at least the design of solo games, the developer has to strike a delicate balance. Games are supposed to be "fun", and the fun in games comes from challenge -- from finding a way to beat the game by solving problems within a bounded set of rules. Too little challenge makes the game trivial, a waste of time; too much makes the game unfair and frustrating. Thus, the relationship between developer and player is necessarily antagonistic. The developer is deliberately trying to make the player fail if they don't play well enough, but the player also needs to be able to succeed, to overcome the challenge, in order to have fun. And that balance between challenge and success will be different for every player. Some want their games "Nintendo hard", requiring diligent practice and skill building to overcome, while others want to be able to pick up a game, play, and win a level or two without much effort. With every choice about the difficulty of their game, the developer deliberately alienates part of their potential audience. Difficulty settings and play-style options can mitigate this to some extent, as can cheat codes and hacks, but even that is seen by many players as pandering to those who don't want to put in the honest work required to "git gud".
This tightrope act is further complicated by the relationship between game design and game monetization models under capitalism. Most games, after all, need to be able to make a profit for their publishers and sellers if they are to even see the light of day. In the days of the arcade, games were coin-operated amusements, and the player was required to insert more money every time they failed; and so games were designed in such a way that they were very difficult to beat in order to keep the money coming. With the rise of consoles and personal computers, the model changed to a lump-sum payment, but many games -- those that gave rise to the epithet "Nintendo hard" in the first place -- maintained that ethos of difficulty for difficulty's sake, both because it was just baked in to design philosophy and because it made the game's play lifetime longer and thus convinced consumers that they were getting more game for their money. But too many unfairly difficult titles threatened market demand as players felt their money was being wasted on unbeatable games. Railing at the perceived unfairness of such games in creatively foul language is the stock-in-trade of the immensely popular Angry Video Game Nerd. Combined with the expansion of computer memory and evolving concepts in game design, more games became an experience rather than a pure challenge, one that could be completed by more casual players who weren't willing to put in the time and practice necessary to beat difficult titles. But the pendulum continues to swing. Nowadays, older gamers nostalgic for the gaming experience of their youth are demanding difficulty again. Gaming has become part of a social identity, and thus many self-identified "hardcore gamers" feel that their very identity is under threat from games that cater to the "filthy casuals". Furthermore, the rise of digital distribution of games -- and seamless digital online payment options -- has led to further evolution in monetization models. Game publishers can now charge microtransactions in exchange for real-time gameplay advantages, and this has created pressure to make games harder and more of a grind in order that people be tempted to get a leg up and remove some of the frustration by paying a little bit of money, over and over.
At first, the developer of "Pony Island" (who, I will remind the reader, is apparently Satan) doesn't seem to want you to play their game at all. Until you find a way to "fix" the game, you won't even be able to get past the options screen. Once you have made a few minor repairs, the core gameplay loop of "Pony Island" is fun but casual. The game, however, is ugly as sin, deliberately hard to look at, and it becomes clear over time that it's not even finished. The developer has literally become the antagonist. You are not just trying to beat the game, but beat the developer themself at the game of forcing you to play the game, a game in which losing -- or rather, giving in and taking the easy way out -- will see you dragged to hell. But the Devil is not an unsympathetic fellow. At one point, you are informed that the soul he wishes you to pay him is just a token of appreciation for the joy you have received from the opportunity to play his fun game. He asks for nothing else. "Pony Island" is thus less like the AAA abominations of Activision or Electronic Arts, and more like a kind of demonic shareware.
This story, then, has not only sociological and game-theoretical, but even theological implications. What kind of God would condemn you to play "Pony Island"? For what sin have you been trapped in this maze of illusions, this dark wood of error? Is the act of gaming itself unwholesome, taking the gamer away from contemplation of God's grace? Merely by playing "Pony Island" -- or for that matter, by playing Pony Island -- are we damning ourselves to hell? Or is Satan's attempt to unfairly trap us an unmitigated evil, and the decision to play "Pony Island" simply a coincidence, a snare that we have fallen into purely by chance? Are games a harmless diversion, even a positive good in providing us with fun entertainment, or do games have a negative impact on society -- not just violent games or gambling games or shovelware and shitty microtransaction-laden games, but all games? By creating difficult games, even near- or completely unplayable games, are developers harming gamers? By trying to win, and to make our opponents lose, are we harming each other? By gaming, are gamers harming themselves? Is the desire to be challenged, to fail again and again in pursuit of the high of winning, somehow unhealthy, masochistic, psychologically damaging? In playing games, are we condemning ourselves to a hell of our own creation?
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