Why Are People Making Memes About Games Being 'Unsightreadable'? The 'Dash Spider' Meme Explained

If you've been seeing people post increasingly confusing images to your favorite gaming subreddits and wondering why everyone's so concerned with how "unsightreadable" a level you've never seen is, odds are that the Geometry Dash Spider virus has taken over your corner of Reddit.

The meme often takes the form of a vague square shape created using the layout and mechanics of another game and relies on the same kind of referential pattern recognition memes that made the likes of Loss and Amogus so inescapable in the 2010s.

Here's where memes about the infernal Dash Spider section of the new Geometry Dash 2.2 games started.

What Is The 'Dash Spider' Meme And What Does 'Sight Readable' Mean?

The Dash Spider meme comes from the high-speed platformer game Geometry Dash. The rhythm-based video game often relies on players learning new game mechanics as they play and intuiting certain moves given past patterns in Geometry Dash. The term "sight reading" is lifted from sheet music to show how a player may be able to intuit and play a level without thinking too hard or studying it closely.

The Dash Spider meme emerged from Geometry Dash player and YouTuber GD Colon criticizing a small section of the game's latest release, saying that a new wall-climbing spider-like mechanism was introduced too suddenly. He even posted a brief compilation of otherwise competent players immediately failing when they encounter "that Spider section."

Here's what the section of the game looks like, and the shape of the walls, buttons and spikes shown below are all often recreated or hidden in Dash Spider memes.

How Did The Dash Spider Meme Start?

The YouTuber credited with starting Dash Spider discourse was also one of the first to post a meme about the level on /r/geometrydash in November 2023, with an additional reference to the Digging For Diamonds template.

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But jokes about the Dash Spider section being "unsightreadable" and unwelcoming to new players didn't really kick off until Tuesday when Redditor /u/jail_abyss posted a video showing a different hellish level transitioning to the Spider level.

How Did The Dash Spider Meme Spread?

The meme spread from /r/geometrydash to other gaming and non-gaming subreddits in the span of a day, going from /r/btd6 and /r/Terraria to /r/mathmemes, /r/trolleyproblem and /r/LycorisRecoil.

The captions on posts about Dash Spider often referenced how "unsightreadable" the level is, or how confusing it may be to new players. The level shown in the picture doesn't really have to make sense or even exist, it just needs to resemble the vague boxy shape of the Dash Spider.

What Are Some More Dash Spider Memes?

GD Colon posted a compilation of several Dash Spider references to /r/geometrydash yesterday, with more examples appearing across the internet in subsequent days.

For the full history of Dash Spider, be sure to check out Know Your Meme's encyclopedia entry for more information.