![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
juushikaSpoilers! also character death and suicide and existential horror; but what you should really worry about is some aggressive spoilers for a good game.
A Machine for Pigs sidenote
I recently rewatched Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs via Gopher and while Gopher plays it well and has a sympathetic reaction, man, the game is such a disappointment. After Amnesia, it's bad enough to feel like a betrayal: Amnesia has a then-unparalleled atmosphere and is truly terrifying, and while the narrative relies more on Lovecraftian tropes than new ideas it's still a success, with Daniel's discoveries about his own character forcing the player to become complicit—there's no distance, no righteousness; the world is intimate and awful. A Machine for Pigs, meanwhile, copies that character development to less effect; the setting is lovely, but the core concept/metaphor—however on-point—is overwritten with the enthusiasm that one might beat a dead horse. The true joy of the LP was hearing Gopher, with his soothing voice and lovely accent, try to read aloud the notes in their grotesque, artless excess: the game is frequently hilariously awful.
So I went into SOMA with hopes and apprehensions galore, but the joke's on me because SOMA is fuckin' miraculous.
Part of what makes SOMA successful is that it's not horror. In fact, it could stand it drop more of the horror trappings from previous games, as the enemy encounters grow tedious. It has a tinge of "The Colour Out of Space," the sense of place is claustrophobic and ravaged, but it doesn't repeat A Machine for Pigs's mistake: reiteration (internal and external—it was just a game of sayin' and doin' the same old thing). It feels liberated, as result.
But SOMA's true success is story.
When I talked about Urobuchi, I talked about intentional narrative curiosity: that his stories foster and anticipate consumer curiosity; answer their questions with key information that unlocks more, and more meaningful, questions. SOMA possesses that level of intent, and does something magical with it:
It's not the first story about the anxiety of transhumanism (the Matrix/ARK parallels are hardly accidental), but it's one of the most confrontational that I've ever seen. There are a thousand examples, but here's one: Simon discovers that he's a robot copy of his original self, Simon reads Sarang's theories on continuity, Simon makes a copy of his robot-self and then has to decide what to do with the defunct "original," (Simon loses the coin toss and is the defunct original/Simon simultaneously wins the coin toss and turns a willful blind eye to the defunct original). At first blush, it's easy to dismiss Sarang et al's suicides out of hand; but in practice, deciding the fate of original Simon is far from easy.
In the same way it makes the player wonder about Simon's origin, the narrative frequently invites the player to consider an issue as a thought experiment—just before revealing information about Simon's identity and just before revealing that they are confronted with the issue in truth. Immersive media is the best platform for this, because it's the player's complicity that makes the issues immediate—not a third-party analysis but a question: having considered the issue of consciousness continuity, do you or do you not kill your other self? In fact, the most brilliant moment may be when the game asks these questions directly:
(see this Eurogamer article for screenshots and an interesting conversation about these internal narratives in context of the external world-building narrative)
the surveys forcing a level of engagement that only a game or a second-person narrative could achieve. To be honest, I'm blown away by this. Previous Frictional games have had some good moments of storytelling with some great moments of atmosphere, and A Machine for Pigs was one bit of storytelling buried under a thousand awful words; I had fragile hopes for SOMA, but it exceeded my every expectation. As a game, it's not flawless; as a story it's powerful.
SOMA timeline
Bless this beautiful person for compiling a full timeline of events in SOMA. Condensed highlights:
It always seemed strange to me that they had scientists studying the effects of mutated structure gel while the world was ending; what I didn't realize was the length of the timescale, which it turns out is plenty long enough for some scientific study.
I wish this were something Simon and Catherine discussed*; dates are available in found documents, but are difficult to compare on the fly, and while the time between Simon-1 and Simon-2 is staggering, the time between apocalypse and current events is equally essential. Simon can piece together a fair understanding of the WAU's growth and the fall of various stations, but the only insight he has in to the times between, of what it means to spend a year alive as the only human survivors of a dead planet, is the ARK project. There's an entire untold narrative, not of immediate desperation in the face of an apocalypse, but the full realization which can only come with time: the slow and steady hopelessness that makes the ARK necessary and the cult of continuity desirable as time simply passes in a doomed installation under the sea.
* And the reason they don't, I suppose, is Catherine. 2015 to 2104 is Simon's burden, source of his displacement; the end of the human race affects him, but the comet and aftermath he knows only in the abstract. Simon likes to talk out his anxieties, but Catherine as often rebuffs him; though their displacement overlaps, his anxieties seem to catch her off guard because she's repressing her own. Post-comet, specifically 2103-07-04 when Catherine scans herself to 2104-05-09 when she interacts with Simon, is her burden, part of what she refuses to think of, least of all speak of, and spans the bulk of that desolate year.
Responses to Catherine in other people's LPs
I just finished watching two simultaneous LPs of SOMA (long story*) and in both no one trusted Catherine—in part, I think, because no one was as self-deluded or unaware as Simon, so when they were anticipating some sort of final catastrophe they assumed it would come from Catherine (rather than from Simon's misconceptions) and/or that Catherine was untrustworthy because she wasn't warning them of an imminent failure. One LP called her morally ambiguous; the other, a liar.
This interests me because Catherine never lies. She's very smart, and not very good at interpersonal communication. A lot of "miscommunication" that occurs with Simon happens because Catherine is eliding or failing to correct; it doesn't occur to her to handhold, even would it would be kinder or may be necessary—and she sometimes does this to benefit herself. She assumes other people will be as smart as her and come to the same conclusions; but she's also compartmentalizing, and so rebuffs conversations that force her to confront her own anxieties, or she's avoiding the social friction of correcting people or reminding them of undesirable things. But she's deflective, not deceptive; or simply failing to provide information.
Catherine is obviously coded as non-neurotypical, possibly autistic, and other characters reflect what happens in real life, reading that difference as discomforting or difficult to engage with. She doesn't perform communication to other people's standards—and players, viewing through the lens of tropes and game structure, read it as antagonistic.
But her personal struggles and goals are as complex as anyone else's, and she's smarter than most of them—especially in direct comparison to Simon; she's consistently characterized and empathetic; regardless of her social skills, she's the game's emotional touchstone.
This is what balances the above tendency to elide non-neurotypical and threatening—because the narrative reveals that she's not a threat; instead, her otherness puts her in danger. I'm still not sure how I feel about LPers being unable to make this bridge—or about the game's narrative tropes as participatory, if temporary, ableism.
*thobari was watching Two Best Friends Play SOMA, so I checked it out; it revived SOMA feels, which I discussed with the boy, who then had his own feels and asked if I wanted to watch Gopher's LP (a rewatch for me) with him, ergo.
A Machine for Pigs sidenote
I recently rewatched Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs via Gopher and while Gopher plays it well and has a sympathetic reaction, man, the game is such a disappointment. After Amnesia, it's bad enough to feel like a betrayal: Amnesia has a then-unparalleled atmosphere and is truly terrifying, and while the narrative relies more on Lovecraftian tropes than new ideas it's still a success, with Daniel's discoveries about his own character forcing the player to become complicit—there's no distance, no righteousness; the world is intimate and awful. A Machine for Pigs, meanwhile, copies that character development to less effect; the setting is lovely, but the core concept/metaphor—however on-point—is overwritten with the enthusiasm that one might beat a dead horse. The true joy of the LP was hearing Gopher, with his soothing voice and lovely accent, try to read aloud the notes in their grotesque, artless excess: the game is frequently hilariously awful.
So I went into SOMA with hopes and apprehensions galore, but the joke's on me because SOMA is fuckin' miraculous.
Part of what makes SOMA successful is that it's not horror. In fact, it could stand it drop more of the horror trappings from previous games, as the enemy encounters grow tedious. It has a tinge of "The Colour Out of Space," the sense of place is claustrophobic and ravaged, but it doesn't repeat A Machine for Pigs's mistake: reiteration (internal and external—it was just a game of sayin' and doin' the same old thing). It feels liberated, as result.
But SOMA's true success is story.
When I talked about Urobuchi, I talked about intentional narrative curiosity: that his stories foster and anticipate consumer curiosity; answer their questions with key information that unlocks more, and more meaningful, questions. SOMA possesses that level of intent, and does something magical with it:
It's not the first story about the anxiety of transhumanism (the Matrix/ARK parallels are hardly accidental), but it's one of the most confrontational that I've ever seen. There are a thousand examples, but here's one: Simon discovers that he's a robot copy of his original self, Simon reads Sarang's theories on continuity, Simon makes a copy of his robot-self and then has to decide what to do with the defunct "original," (Simon loses the coin toss and is the defunct original/Simon simultaneously wins the coin toss and turns a willful blind eye to the defunct original). At first blush, it's easy to dismiss Sarang et al's suicides out of hand; but in practice, deciding the fate of original Simon is far from easy.
In the same way it makes the player wonder about Simon's origin, the narrative frequently invites the player to consider an issue as a thought experiment—just before revealing information about Simon's identity and just before revealing that they are confronted with the issue in truth. Immersive media is the best platform for this, because it's the player's complicity that makes the issues immediate—not a third-party analysis but a question: having considered the issue of consciousness continuity, do you or do you not kill your other self? In fact, the most brilliant moment may be when the game asks these questions directly:
Question
7. Do you think this new existence will be a life worth living?
Answers
1 Yes, just as much as my previous life.
2 Yes, but will less meaning
3 Maybe we can find a new sense of meaning in this world.
(see this Eurogamer article for screenshots and an interesting conversation about these internal narratives in context of the external world-building narrative)
the surveys forcing a level of engagement that only a game or a second-person narrative could achieve. To be honest, I'm blown away by this. Previous Frictional games have had some good moments of storytelling with some great moments of atmosphere, and A Machine for Pigs was one bit of storytelling buried under a thousand awful words; I had fragile hopes for SOMA, but it exceeded my every expectation. As a game, it's not flawless; as a story it's powerful.
SOMA timeline
Bless this beautiful person for compiling a full timeline of events in SOMA. Condensed highlights:
2103-01-12: Comet impact
2103-03-23: Survivors in Pathos-II begin recording and researching evidence of the WAU's modification of structure gel
2103-07-03 ARK project officially begins
2103-12-26 Failed attempt to launch the ARK
2104-01-16 Akers arrives in Theta, aka everything goes to shit; most remaining survivors die around this time
2104-05-09: WAU creates Simon-2
It always seemed strange to me that they had scientists studying the effects of mutated structure gel while the world was ending; what I didn't realize was the length of the timescale, which it turns out is plenty long enough for some scientific study.
I wish this were something Simon and Catherine discussed*; dates are available in found documents, but are difficult to compare on the fly, and while the time between Simon-1 and Simon-2 is staggering, the time between apocalypse and current events is equally essential. Simon can piece together a fair understanding of the WAU's growth and the fall of various stations, but the only insight he has in to the times between, of what it means to spend a year alive as the only human survivors of a dead planet, is the ARK project. There's an entire untold narrative, not of immediate desperation in the face of an apocalypse, but the full realization which can only come with time: the slow and steady hopelessness that makes the ARK necessary and the cult of continuity desirable as time simply passes in a doomed installation under the sea.
* And the reason they don't, I suppose, is Catherine. 2015 to 2104 is Simon's burden, source of his displacement; the end of the human race affects him, but the comet and aftermath he knows only in the abstract. Simon likes to talk out his anxieties, but Catherine as often rebuffs him; though their displacement overlaps, his anxieties seem to catch her off guard because she's repressing her own. Post-comet, specifically 2103-07-04 when Catherine scans herself to 2104-05-09 when she interacts with Simon, is her burden, part of what she refuses to think of, least of all speak of, and spans the bulk of that desolate year.
Responses to Catherine in other people's LPs
I just finished watching two simultaneous LPs of SOMA (long story*) and in both no one trusted Catherine—in part, I think, because no one was as self-deluded or unaware as Simon, so when they were anticipating some sort of final catastrophe they assumed it would come from Catherine (rather than from Simon's misconceptions) and/or that Catherine was untrustworthy because she wasn't warning them of an imminent failure. One LP called her morally ambiguous; the other, a liar.
This interests me because Catherine never lies. She's very smart, and not very good at interpersonal communication. A lot of "miscommunication" that occurs with Simon happens because Catherine is eliding or failing to correct; it doesn't occur to her to handhold, even would it would be kinder or may be necessary—and she sometimes does this to benefit herself. She assumes other people will be as smart as her and come to the same conclusions; but she's also compartmentalizing, and so rebuffs conversations that force her to confront her own anxieties, or she's avoiding the social friction of correcting people or reminding them of undesirable things. But she's deflective, not deceptive; or simply failing to provide information.
Catherine is obviously coded as non-neurotypical, possibly autistic, and other characters reflect what happens in real life, reading that difference as discomforting or difficult to engage with. She doesn't perform communication to other people's standards—and players, viewing through the lens of tropes and game structure, read it as antagonistic.
But her personal struggles and goals are as complex as anyone else's, and she's smarter than most of them—especially in direct comparison to Simon; she's consistently characterized and empathetic; regardless of her social skills, she's the game's emotional touchstone.
This is what balances the above tendency to elide non-neurotypical and threatening—because the narrative reveals that she's not a threat; instead, her otherness puts her in danger. I'm still not sure how I feel about LPers being unable to make this bridge—or about the game's narrative tropes as participatory, if temporary, ableism.
*
thobari was watching Two Best Friends Play SOMA, so I checked it out; it revived SOMA feels, which I discussed with the boy, who then had his own feels and asked if I wanted to watch Gopher's LP (a rewatch for me) with him, ergo.
