Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley releases I DIDNT REALISE YOU THOUGHT LIKE THAT as a free browser game
The next chapter of Serpentine's THE DELUSION imagines every hostile online comment made physically real, and asks who you would open the door for.
The announcement's framing is a door: “OPEN DOORS GIVE PEOPLE HOPE OR TURN THEM AWAY.” That's also the mechanic. In I DIDNT REALISE YOU THOUGHT LIKE THAT you move through a world where every hostile online comment has become physically real, meet factions locked inside rigid ideologies, and decide—door by door—who and what you let into your world.
The game builds on THE DELUSION, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley's exhibition at Serpentine North that ran from September 2025 through January 2026—a multiplayer “live community play” about polarization and censorship, and the artist's most ambitious commission to date. Now Serpentine Arts Technologies has released it as a standalone work, free on web and mobile, developed with the nonprofit Beyond Code Collective and set in the post-apocalyptic world of Brathwaite-Shirley's graphic novel Below the Blue Line.
The direction of travel is the notable part. Museums usually bring games into the building; Serpentine keeps sending them out of it. This is the same commissioning program behind Ian Cheng, Jakob Kudsk Steensen, and Gabriel Massan's Third World: The Bottom Dimension, and putting the work on the open web treats the game as the artwork's final form rather than its gift-shop echo.
We spoke with Brathwaite-Shirley on the Killscreen podcast back in 2021 about building game worlds as autonomous archives—experiences that shift depending on who is playing. Five years on, the archive has a public URL. Play it at ididntrealiseyouthoughtlikethat.com.
