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# In Excuse Me! the real obstacle course is social decorum
- URL: https://www.killscreen.com/excuse-me-real-obstacle-course-social-decorum/
- Published: 2015-08-24T16:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2015-11-17T17:40:21.000Z
- Description: Humanity’s most common phobia, according to a plurality of strange websites that specialize in this topic, is arachnophobia. Fair enough. Creepy crawly spiders are hardly pleasant. But fear is contextual: Your biggest fear when home alone is rarely your biggest fear when at a public event. For resea
- Author: David Rudin
- Tags: News, anxiety, Beans beans the magical fruit the more you eat the more you toot, Excuse Me!, manners, #wp, #wp-post, #Import 2024-07-26 09:39

Humanity’s most common phobia, according to a [plurality](http://www.fearof.net/?ref=killscreen.com) of [strange](http://psychology.about.com/od/phobias/p/commonphobias.htm?ref=killscreen.com) [websites](http://www.forbes.com/2006/12/13/most-common-fears-forbeslife-cx%5Favd%5F1214commonfears%5Fslide%5F2.html?ref=killscreen.com) that specialize in this topic, is arachnophobia. Fair enough. Creepy crawly spiders are hardly pleasant. But fear is contextual: Your biggest fear when home alone is rarely your biggest fear when at a public event. For research into that latter category, we have the decidedly far-from-exhaustive profiles of contestants on *The Bachelor*. Every year, these profiles reveal that televised Lotharios and their concubines fear nothing more than the sudden onset of diarrhea on a date. Again: fair enough.

“The world’s first flatulence crisis management simulator”

This scatological tidbit came to mind while considering *[Excuse Me!, a game that bills itself as](http://squiddershins.itch.io/excuse-me?ref=killscreen.com)* “the world’s first flatulence crisis management simulator.” In [Squiddershin](http://squiddershins.com/about/?ref=killscreen.com)’s entry for the 2015 “A Game By Its Cover” game jam, you control the movements of Peter Le Pétomane, a moustachioed man who is feeling decidedly gaseous. If that weren’t a big enough problem, Peter is at a restaurant. Your job, then is to navigate the crowded environment and find Peter a secluded place to pass wind.

*Excuse Me!* reimagines social mores as something of a maze. The flatulence angle is new, but the underlying gameplay ideas aren’t that radical. In practice, you are on a race against time through an obstacle course of sorts. Been there. Done that.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/previously/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/pgfsnm_big.png)

This similarity to other games is what makes *Excuse Me!* so compelling. Insofar as our fears are contextual, it makes sense that a typical venue can be recast as a chamber of social horrors. A restaurant is scarier when full than when empty, much as it is scarier when you’re on a date as opposed to eating alone. In effect, to reckon with your fears is to reckon with a series of social constructs. Flatulence need not be understood at crisis, but we—and *Excuse Me!—*choose to do so. So let loose (not in that way!) and navigate the obstacles that are the construct that is decorum.