Ciarán Has Come Online

The nostalgia is already potent.

Yesterday, I played through a game by the name of Emily is Away. You may wish to play it before proceeding with this post; a playthrough only takes about 40 minutes, and it’s free. More importantly, it’s one of the more moving experiences I’ve had playing a game in recent memory. I’m someone who tends to have a fondness for low budget, narrative-driven indie titles (To the Moon, Analogue: A Hate Story – and yes, I will play Undertale at some point), so I guessed that EiA would be right up my alley – and how right I was. I’ve spent a lot of time yesterday evening and today thinking about it, and puzzling over why it affected me so deeply.

Several weeks ago, I had some words to say on this blog on the topic of immersion, and how I believe it’s something games can do better than any other medium. Immersion is, as it happens, an area in which EiA excels. It places you in precisely the same role as the game’s protagonist – sitting at a computer, watching messages appear on a screen. It even forces you to type out responses (admittedly, bashing the keyboard is just as effective as attempting to type the actual words, but the latter is more fun). You pick a name for yourself (I would recommend using your own name), by which the titular Emily will address you throughout, as well as a screenname (for added realism, pick an embarrassing old screenname). The game goes so far as to recreate a Windows XP desktop and an old-style pre-Skype IM service, complete with authentic sounds.

The use of the IM service is something I find deeply fascinating. It’s a potent form of modern communication, potentially used for hours at a time by young people, and yet it’s rarely depicted in any other medium. One of the reasons I fell in love with Homestuck was because of the way it used the language of IM so naturally – and make no mistake, it is a language unto itself. Not only in terms of abbreviations and emoticons, but, for instance, the ways in which people use line breaks – do you type everything you want to say at once into a single message, or spread it out over several? The effect is entirely different. It’s also a communication service that comes with its own codes and signals – the game is brilliantly adept at replacing “emerly35 is typing” with “emerly35 is deleting” for a couple of seconds, just to make you wonder: “What was she going to say?” Not only that, but the protagonist themselves regularly rephrases messages as they type. Like any good analysis of human communication, the game is as much about what’s not said as what is.

As you may have gathered by now, I have a good deal of experience in the things which the game depicts. The final chapter of the game is set in 2006, which coincidentally was the year I started using MSN Messenger in earnest. For the next three years or so, I would spend an inordinate amount of time on there, staying up all night in conversation at least once (indeed, MSN was where WAKE UP was conceived and put together in its original magazine form). I had MSN friends; people I knew in real life, but communicated with almost exclusively online. I don’t recall often having the kinds of heart-to-hearts which Emily and the protagonist have in the game, certainly not in such short conversations, but it does require some artistic licence; the same way people in films never say “hello” or “goodbye” on the phone. That said, I was a teenager; there was quite a bit of “I really like ______, but I don’t know what she thinks of me”. Some of my MSN friends became confidantes, people I would talk about these kinds of emotional matters which I would never discuss in person, being a deeply repressed shell of a person and all.

-SPOILERS AHEAD – PLEASE DON’T READ ANY FURTHER IF YOU HAVEN’T PLAYED THE GAME THROUGH AT LEAST ONCE-

From glancing over the (very positive) Steam reviews, I knew in advance that the game was going to break my heart. I even guessed more or less how it would do so. And yet I was in no way prepared. The game awoke a lot of memories, some of which had been dormant for a long time – potential relationships that never went anywhere, close friendships that fizzled out, awkward conversations in which any kind of real communication seems to elude you. It’s at once universal and very deeply personal in the way it examines relationships that stray between arbitrary boundaries. I’m someone who has a high opinion of the value of friendship, to the point that I dislike phrases like “just friends” for the way they privilege romantic love above all else. But I’ve fallen in love with friends before. I know what it’s like to weigh up imagined romantic bliss against potential alienation from someone you adore. And, like any apparently functioning adult, I’m suffused with regrets.

As soon as Emily brought up concepts of “having feelings” and “making a move” in chapter 3, I knew we were on shaky ground. And by the middle of chapter 4, I knew precisely where things were going. Chapter 5 just felt like being punched repeatedly. It was awful; I felt like on some level I had failed Emily, that I had done everything wrong. So I did something I’ve only allowed myself to do one other time* – I went back and remade some choices. “To hell with living with the consequences,” I thought, “this is something I’ve wished I could do over and over in real life.” And it didn’t work. Things just went wrong differently. I couldn’t even bring myself to sit through chapter 5’s painfully stilted conversation again. Because even before I got to that point, I’d begun to suspect what the game was really doing. Things were always outside of my control. Emily and I were always going to drift apart. It’s a strange, depressing kind of determinism, a study of entropy as a close relationship breaks down.

The whole premise of Emily is Away is extremely mundane – and that’s what makes it so brutal. The degree of immersion encourages you to take the whole thing very personally, and so I most certainly did. You may have noticed how I started using the first-person instead of “the protagonist” halfway through this post. I didn’t, until a couple of lines ago. That’s how far the game got under my skin – I started viewing it as something that had actually happened to me – which, of course, it was; a microcosm of a tiny tragedy. For the rest of the evening, I was viewing every IM conversation I’ve ever had as a labyrinth of missed possibilities. As silly as it sounds, I still feel as though I actually lost someone close to me; a relationship played out over the course of 40 minutes**. Any piece of media that can have such an effect has to be respected.

* - Chapter 3 of Telltale’s The Walking Dead, if you’re interested, and that was to try to avoid a character’s death.

** - I’m reminded of Nick Cave’s extraordinary ‘Far From Me’, which manages to capture a sense of a whole relationship and its inevitable decline in only four fairly short verses.