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Impress Your Professor || Mircea Eliade

Is religious experience unique?  Let's presuppose yes, that religious experience is a thing-in-and-of-itself, sui generis.  Why then, do not all men have religious experiences?  Not all men participate in the sacred, nor seek to participate in it.  But, if religious experience is an experience of being, of interaction with god, the numinious, why do some men not seek it?  Well, Eliade has an answer for that,.  In fact, he decided that religious scholarship wasn't enough.  He needed M O R E.  So he got into ontology, creating a thesis that posits the existence of two types of man, the profane-man, homo sapien, and the sacred-man, homo religiosus.  On it's surface, this can sound absurd (it is) but Eliade is heralded as one of the foundational figures of religious studies, and while we can't say he's important just because of that, it's obvious that he contributed something of note to the field.  So, let's examine his work Sacred and Profane and try to figure out what his concepts are, how they operate, and how they might contribute to the way we talk about religion and religious experience.

IMPRESS YOUR PROFESSOR || MIRCEA ELIADE: HEIROPHANY, THE SACRED, AND HOMO RELIGIOSUS

PART I: PRE(SUCK)OSITIONS

I started this video talking about a presupposition, a very important one that we must understand when reading Eliade's work, as it is the foundation for his entire theory.  While Eliade is often said to have helped found the field of religious studies, he was certainly not the first scholar of religion.  He built his theories on the shoulders of the giants before him, namely Rudolph Otto.  Eliade said of him, "... he succeeded in determining the content and specific characteristics of religious experience... Otto characterizes all of these experiences as numinous... for they are induced by the revelation of an aspect of divine power.  The numinous presents itself as something "wholly other" (ganz andere), something basically and totally different."  The idea of ganz andere pervades Eliade's work, but the more common term we use in religious studies today is sui generis, a thing in and of itself, so I'll be using that when talking about the uniqueness of religion.  Eliade writes from the position of religious uniqueness and this presupposition answers a lot of questions a modern scholar might have when approaching his theories a la carte.  Keep this in mind as we move forward and as you interact with Eliade's theories as whole.

PART II: HEIROPHANY & THE SACRED

A heirophany is a manifestation of the sacred.  It's also a very hard word to say.  I like to think of heirophany as having a little more nuance than that definition suggests, as it is also a symbol for the sacred, and is itself a sacred symbol.  It is not just the signifier, but also the signified, it IS what is manifested.  It signifies the sacred that is manifesting within it, while also being the sacred.  So, signifier, signified.

What, then, is this "sacred" that is manifesting?  For Eliade, it exists in opposition to the profane.  It is what is not profane, that's it.  That's really all he ever gives us.  It's reminiscent of a lot of different scholars to me, namely the Hegelian "I am me because I am not you," and Levi-Strauss' signifier/signified-oppositional linguistics theories, along with Derrida's critiques of those theories and the inherent inferiority of one of the oppositional terms.  Derrida's critique, I think, is the most relevant of the concepts, as we can see that profane is painted very heavily as the lesser of the ways of being-in-the-world.

The sacred can manifest itself in anything, with Eliade citing 'rocks, trees, and men' as possibilities.  But he wants you to keep in mind that people are not just worshipping them as they are, they are worshipping them for their being-a-heirophany, not their being-an-object.  They worship them because they set themselves apart from all other objects, thus creating themselves out of opposition.  The best example of a heirophany and the one that most people know is that of Moses and the burning bush.  Obviously, Moses is not taking his shoes off and talking to a bush because it's a bush or because it's profane--he's participating in this behavior because god, the numinous, manifests himself in a profane object, the bush, making it a sacred object, a heirophany.  I will take a second to say that what I just described is technically what is called a "theophany," meaning a manifestation of god, but Eliade uses this example so I will too.

But I do believe there might be an even better example we can use to illustrate what a heirophany is and how it's constructed: Brian David Gilbert's "Every Sonic game is Blasphemous."  Now, if you're unfamiliar with BDG's work, he makes a series called "Unraveled" for the channel "Polygon."  They are usually video-game related videos that explore absurd tasks in relation to the video games, such as counting the OSHA violations in Super Smash Brothers or re-writing the Pokerap to be good.  In this particular video, BDG examines the Sonic games in relation to the "Sonic Bible," a guide to who Sonic is and how he should be portrayed.  In his examination, BDG finds that none of the games show the true Sonic.  And in a fit of rage, he says (insert the Paladin quote).  He is on a mission of revelation, seeking knowledge of the numinous through holy scripture.  In this, we see the "Sonic Bible" positioned as the heirophany, that which is manifesting the Sacred, in this case because of it's revelatory nature about the Numinous, being Sonic.  Because of this revelation, it allows BDG to directly interact with the numinous and the sacred, which Eliade says is the "point" of worshipping heirophanies, as they bring man closer to true, objective reality.  And for BDG, the truest reality is that of Sonic as a being who possesses a type of divine power.

There is also an interesting bit where he mentions that he has not actually played the Sonic games, (show this clip).  BDG has never actually interacted with the profane-games, meaning he does not have a good gauge of what a profane revelation about Sonic is.  He only knows the sacred in relation to Sonic as the numinous.  One might think he would not truly know the sacred since he has not seen the profane, but for me, this shows that while the difference in the sacred and the profane is important, it does not exist only as the sacred in relation to the profane within the object (or in this case, objects), but the sacred in relation to ALL profane, as the sacredness is not diminished if one has not interacted with it's profane iteration.  One does not have to have interacted with that exact object, i.e., the bush or the games and Sonic's portrayal in them, to then see its sacredness and separateness from the profane iterations of the object.  As Sonic is manifested in the games, it is profane, in fact it is more than profane, it is blasphemous, and BDG can recognize this because he has the Sacred to compare it to; he knew the scriptures were sacred because they distinguished themselves from ALL profane, not just profane iterations of Sonic.  This allows him to dictate the value of iterations based on the sacredness of his heirophany, the Sonic Bible. See?  RLST is relevant to Youtube.

PART III: A QUICK NOTE ABOUT SPACE & TIME

Now, what if I told you that the profane-man, while being a worthless piece of shit who could never live up to his father's expectations, also experienced space and time differently than the sacred-man?

Heirophanies establish a connection between our world and the heavens, creating a vein through which the sacred-man can interact with the sacred.  They also found the world, allowing the sacred-man to orient himself in space, letting all other space flow from this manifestation.  It is also in this establishing of a fixed point in space that man will reenact the founding of the world in a temporal sense, recreating the world as he conquers and settles new places.  In this, Eliade Others the profane man in a spatial, temporal, and ontological sense.  The profane is not only chaotic, as he says, but completely foreign, unknown, and at times, menacing.  And according to Eliade, man cannot live in this state, "Life is not possible without an opening toward the transcendent; in other words, human beings cannot live in chaos." (34)

I take personal offence to this as I am both a chaos magician and chaos goblin, attempting to cause havoc and mayhem under the guise of neo-marxist liberalism and the destruction of Western ideals.  And I just don't feel like he should come for me like that.

PART IV: TWO MODES OF BEING IN THE WORLD, OR, THE (CONTINUED) DEFAMATION OF PROFANE-MAN (LEAVE HIM ALONE)

"The reader will very soon realize that the sacred and profane are two modes of being in the world, two existential situations assumed by man in the course of his history."  When viewing this assertion through the lens of sui generis, we see that the non-religious man exists in an entirely different mode of being.  BY HIS VERY NATURE, the non-religious man is NOT the same type of BEING as the religious man.  And that's a pretty big assertion there.  He even coins the term for this specific religious-being, which is homo religiosus.  He says that this being is entirely different from that of the profane-man, but they do share in some behaviors.  This was a bit puzzling for me at first but with a lot of reflection and ego-checking, I concluded that I had been reading it wrong.  And I think it's very easy to read it wrong, as Eliade wasn't as equipped with the language needed to explain this idea as I think he wanted to be.

The argument he presents is thus, In the first chapter he says of modern day terms regarding "the chaos, the disorder, the darkness that will overwhelm our world." That these represent "that the paradigmatic images live on in the language and cliches of nonreligious man.  Something of the religious conception of the world still persists in the behavior of the profane man, although he is not always conscious of this immemorial heritage."

I will amend his argument for him, (however pretentious that may be) so as to make it digestable: It is not the behavior of the non-religious man, as that seems to attribute the behaviors to the nature of that being, instead it is the cultural zeitgeist, these remnants of beliefs, what I call "phantom rhetoric" that persists.  This phantom rhetoric represents the vestiges of a belief that was once held, but is now gone.  While I usually use it to refer to individuals as well (like Eliade is doing) I will say that there is a cultural phantom rhetoric, these phrases and ideas that are left over from beliefs that are not held in the cultural consciousness anymore, such as this descent into chaos.  Moving forward, while I do still have a problem with his attribution of nature in the profane-man, I think his argument can be stronger when viewed from an attribution of nature in culture.  I don't think this does a lot to actually change what Eliade is saying, I just wanted to give it smoother language so it might be easier to navigate the rest of the text for me personally.

I will talk a little bit about his argument as it stands without my amendment, but really only to drag it.  He pays us the gracious respect of noting that the profane-man does have what he deems "crypto-religious behavior."  GOD.  He says, (24) "..In the course of this book we shall encounter other examples of this sort of DEGREDATION and DESACRILIZATION of religious VALUES and FORMS of BEHAVIOR."  I don't get why he doesn't just come out and say the profane-man is an affront to the true type of existence, that of homo religiosus--cause he's really dancing around it.  In this section he's talking about non-religious experiences that might orient the profane-man in the world, such as birth and marriage, and he's asserting that the comparison between those experiences and religious experiences are degrading to the true ideal, the absolute reality of religious experience.  As if these aren't culturally significant experiences that often DEFINE a person's life, ya know, like their birth?  I don't think, personally, that you degrade a religious experience by saying that a non-religious experience had the same, if not more, of an impact on you.  Talk about invalidating.

For Eliade, there exists this man, this non-religious person, who does not feel, ever, what the religious man feels, because he does not seek or interact with the sacred.  It's also interesting to note that he speaks about the fact that a "completely profane world, the wholly desacralized cosmos is a recent discovery in the history of the human spirit."  And my GOD does that just ooze with edgelord energy.  He ends the first part of Sacred and Profane saying this, "For our purpose it is enough to observe that desacralization pervades the entire experience of the nonreligious man of modern societies and that, in consequence, he finds it increasingly difficult to rediscover the existential dimensions of religious man in the archaic societies."  AND OH BOI is that problematic.  There is far too much to unpack in that one statement alone, but I will let it stand, as it is, as a representation of Eliade's mindset about the religious man vs the non-religious man, as he posits that the religious man has an easier time understanding the "existential dimensions of religious man in archaic societies."  Mind you, he's a religious man.

He paints the non-religious man out to be such a hopeless, sad-sack in so many ways, the most egregious of which is, (23,24) "Properly speaking, there is no longer any world, there are only fragments of a shattered universe, an amorphous mass consisting of an infinite number of more or less neutral places in which man moves, governed and driven by the obligations of an existence incorporated into an industrial society."  LIKE WOOF, the religious man no longer belongs to a world, ontologically, he and his world do not exist, he is tethered to the sacred by the remnants of his religious behavior, doomed to live wandering this vast expanse of space, a slave to his work.

"...Religious man's desire to live in the sacred is in fact equivalent to his desire to take up his abode in objective reality, not to let himself be paralyzed by the never-creasing relativity of purely subjective experiences, to live in a real and effective  world, and not just an illusion..." (28)  This is a really interesting perspective on the way homo religiosus positions himself in the world, as it posits the religious as the objectively real.  Usually, we are asking whether or not it is real, using the ideas of real vs Real, but Eliade takes this for granted, presenting us with a being that holds the sacred, and subsequently his unique experience of it, as not only objectively real, but as that which determines everything else's realness in relation to it.  That which is not sacred is not as real.  The profane in this takes a large hit, positioning it as the far lesser term in these two.  (LEVI-STRAUSS INTENSIFIES)  He also says, "This is as much as to say that religious man can live only in a sacred world, because it is only in such a world that he participates in being, that he has a real existence." (64)  And ontologically speaking, this is messy, as the profane-man takes yet another hit, finding himself with a lack of participation in being, as he is a quasi-being in this, imitating the being-ness of the greater being, homo religiosus.

Eliade's ideas about the industrialized world are painfully apparent the further we get into the book.  He says at one point, "...the gigantic transformation of the world undertaken by the industrial societies, a transformation made possible by the desacralization of the cosmos accomplished by scientific thought and above all the sensational discoveries of physics and chemistry."  (RIGHT WING IDEOLOGIES INTENSIFY.)  For Eliade, we can see that the industrialization of the world, the modernization of society, that is what has stripped the profane-man of his ability to connect with the "sacred dimensions of existence in the world."  The profane-man is always posited as lacking something. (51)

PART ??: A QUICK NOTE ON ELIADE, THE SCHOLAR

Eliade DOES talk about himself in the third person in this book and it's the FUNNIEST thing I've ever read.  It's on page 15 of the introduction and I think he does it to seem objective, but it ends up coming off as extremely pretentious.

He also proto-calls out himself when he says, "For there is always the risk of falling back into the errors of the nineteenth century and, particularly, of believing with Tylor or Frazer that the reaction of the human mind to natural phenomena is uniform."  And I oop, looks like you played yourself, instead of saying it's all humans, you just MADE AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT TYPE OF HUMAN BEING AND ASCRIBED THE ATTRIBUTES TO THEM.  "Oh, well, if he doesn't conform to that, he's an exception, or he isn't a part of this entirely new category that I made up."

I will give this to Eliade: he is trying.  He has seen the mistakes made by his predecessors and I believe he believes that he is on a noble quest to illuminate truths that weren't previously known.  It is a tragedy that academics are doomed, often, to make these sorts of mistakes, to get so wrapped up in their own curiosity that they cannot see the mistakes they're making along the way.  His quest, at the start, is very noble, it is how it devolves that troubles most scholars.  He wants to show the difference between the Sacred and the Profane, not what religious experience is or how it works or its variance.  For him, it is about figuring out where the line lies so that all other assertions (whether about religious experience as a whole or in its variance) can move forward with that line in mind.  But along the way he stumbles, mainly because the footing he's relying on so heavily was already crumbling beneath him when he started.

As a scholar, Eliade is very good at the whole "defending an argument with examples thing."  He creates a theory, then can very convincingly back up the implications of it, although he doesn't always revisit the argument itself.  See: the set up and sacred and profane with these concepts, which are shaky, and then his example-analysis, which is damn-near flawless.  I would truly recommend looking into the book on your own, especially if it's been assigned to you for reading, but I hope this has given you a good idea of what he's trying to communicate in a larger sense.  

PART VI: CONCLUSION'

To understand my qualms with Eliade's premise, one must understand my qualms with Otto's work as well, but that's a different theorist, so for now I'll settle on this: his presuppositions are bad.  Very bad.  He presupposes Sui Generis & that sets him up for failure in a lot of ways with his language.  BUT, that doesn't mean we should totally scrap his work.  I mean, It is really fun to think about the world in this dichotomy of sacred/profane, you can begin to neatly parse the world and behavior surrounding it.  It's also really fun to think about the world in terms of spaces and temporality.  There's a section in the first chapter, "Sacred Space and Making the World Sacred," where he talks about how towns are constructed around a center intersection and a holy building is built there (43) and while reading it I was struck with the thought of how, often, you'll find clock towers in the middle of a town, placing temporality (and our relation to it) at the center of the space.  Symbolism, as a whole, is really fun to work with when it comes to space, and Eliade does provide a nice romp through religious symbolism in this piece.

When studying Eliade, one must keep two things in mind: his personal views and his presuppositions.  With those in mind, he's a fun scholar to interact with and honestly even more fun to build on or critique.  His work has been used in both ways in the field since it became big.  There's a lot to be done with it, and I don't think we should ever stop looking at it as an important work to the field, as it stands as a testament to what scholarship used to be and hopefully as a warning to new scholars that you cannot wave away your own worldview when creating theory.

OUTRO

A big thank you for watching.  My goal was to create a primer and critique of Eliade's work, although I do understand my critique was pretty much "sui generis bad," but don't worry, I will definitely expand on why I'm not a fan of this theory later on.  For some reason 4 hour videos of me yelling about where religious scholars have gone wrong isn't favored by the youtube algorithm and honestly?  What a tragedy.  Please like, comment, and subscribe if you enjoyed this, as it helps me out a lot.  Tune in next time to hear me answer the age-old question, "Why are some atheists like... that?"

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Impress Your Professor || Mircea Eliade

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Toss A Coin To Your Destiny: The Real Villain of the Witcher

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Alone With Soma: A Video Essay

Reality of Self: A Dating Sim & A Horror Game Hit It Off...

Introduction

“Who are we to declare the human perspective as the benchmark against which to measure everything universally?”  Was the response to a post on the Steam Soma forums by user DiMaggio.  I had to google whether or not he’d coped it from a philosopher, but it seems his own.  This question, among many others, is raised by the landmark horror game Soma by Friction Labs.  The culmination of many years of fear-inducing and awe-inspiring games, Soma stands as a bastion of what good psychological horror can be.  It’s immersive, world-shattering, and philosophical, leaving the player to contemplate questions that are usually reserved for graduate theses.  As Markiplier put it in his Let’s Play, “Don’t just challenge people in terms of gameplay, challenge them in terms of understanding.”  Soma was not the first to bring up these issues, but it presented them in a setting many thought befitting of the subject matter: horror.

Ever since I took my first course in undergrad and learned that there was a word for the way I viewed the world, nihilism, I’ve wrestled with existential dread.  I’m haunted by the lack of meaning in the world, how devoid the world is of any semblance of inherent purpose.  Sci-fi, in particular, causes this to flare up in me.

In George Zebrowski and Charles Pellegrino’s hard sci-fi book, “The Killing Star” you are met with humanity at its bleakest moment: only two survivors on Earth after being wiped out by an alien force.  You must follow their stories and the stories of the few other survivors out in space who are awaiting destruction.  The book is an exploration of hopelessness and helplessness.  There is an inevitable end, one of death and destruction of the human race.  There is no coming back, no pushing through with human determination or any of the bullshit sci-fi writers have sold us in the past.  There is only destruction.

When I finished the book I was shook, to say the least.  It renewed my sense of existential dread in a way I hadn’t known before.  I became listless, depressed, and generally unhappy.  It is something that always lies beneath the surface, but some things bring it to the top with a blinding force.  I am left feeling empty and alone in the universe.  This is a feeling of horror.  It is the horror that comes naturally to me and it is the horror that Friction Labs tried to capture within their game.  By setting the scene in a desolate wasteland without any real hope of your protagonist actually making it out, you are made to suffer, made to push your way through this world to an inevitable end, to the destruction of the human race, of Earth, of everything you had ever known--even if it had been dead long before you woke up in that chair.

I’d also like to talk about a dating sim.  So, listeners, it’s time to buckle in.

It’s time.  It’s time to enter the holo-sim.  It’s time to go to Phi.  It’s time… to talk about consciousness, reality, and what it means to be human.

PART I: The Games

In September of 2017 Benjamin Rivers, Inc., released, “Alone With You,” a sci-fi indie dating simulator.  On its surface, it is a cute, story-rich visual novel.  Yet, below that surface lurks the same horror found in Soma.  Although, in AWY, it is not horror, it is simply existence.  In fact, it’s okay with attempting to be human, it’s pushing that boundary without sparking fear.  The developer said of it, “Alone with you is meant to provoke real, honest feelings.  The goal of the game was to see if the player could feel real things towards very not-real people.”  So why does this dating simulator feel so much like a horror game to me?  While playing it, I couldn’t help but harken back to the themes Soma presented to me so succinctly.  And it begs the question: do these themes have to be fear-inducing?  Are the things in Soma, besides the monsters, besides the darkness, besides the emptiness--are they inherently scary?

You start the same in both games, alone, unaware of what’s happening in the outside world, and awaiting some sort of purpose and answers.  You know who you are in Soma, you’ve been given a name and a former life.  In AWY, you do not know your past, name, or history.  Instead, it is you.  Your name is the one that the game speaks to you with.  It is your identity put into this story.  There are two different levels at play in both games.  In Soma you are removed from these issues because you are not Simon; in Alone With You, you are removed because you are not the one experiencing them, at least not explicitly.

In Soma, your companion is not an AI, although they are not human.  Catherine Chun, a resurrected brain scan of one of the Design Engineers, greets you early on and accompanies you for the journey.  She acts as her former self would have, just as you do.  She has a plan, a purpose, and a desire to carry it out.  She sees you as the missing link for the completion of her grand plan: that of launching the ARK, a simulation that houses all of the brain scans she did at PATHOS-II, the company under the sea you’ve suddenly found yourself in.  By launching it into space, she is buying the simulation thousands of years instead of the mere decades it might have underneath the sea.  She views this as the heroic continuation of humanity, at least in some form.  She is your guiding hand in the game and is fairly reliable as a companion.  She does not coddle you, but she is still human.  Unlike Simon, Catherine has accepted her fate.  She went to the bottom of the Ocean with PATHOS-II, watched the meteor destroy the surface of the Earth, and ultimately watched the AI, the WAU, malfunction and take over the facilities, killing everyone inside.  And now, after having conceived and brought to life the ARK, she finds herself resurrected with Simon as her only hope to achieve the end she worked so hard for, the end that she watched so many people kill themselves over.  Her motivations are clear and you, as Simon, must follow her, for you really have nothing else you can do.  At the start, your only motivation is moving forward, somewhere, and soon she tells you of the ARK, entices you into believing you could be on the ARK too.  But it is your own understanding or lack thereof, that coaxes you to follow her.

During the game you’re confronted three separate times with your predicament: first, when you discover that you are not, in fact, human anymore.  Second, when you have to transfer your self from one suit to another.  And third, when you once again transfer your self into the ARK.  But--it is not a transfer.  There is no cut and paste in this world, only copy-paste.  There are four Simons in this game: Human Simon, Robot Simon, Diving Suit Simon, and ARK Simon.  As a player, you jump from Simon to Simon, not having to experience the lack of shift.  For you, it is a continuation.  For Simon, it feels that way.  Each time, the new Simon feels like he merely moved on, not always thinking of the Simon left behind.  When you go from Robot Simon to Diving Suit Simon, you have a choice to either let your copy wake up later on or to kill it.  Diving Suit Simon rightfully freaks out over this and he and Catherine exchange a metaphor: one of a coin toss.  DS Simon believes he “won the coin toss” and ended up in the second body, but--and he never really elaborates on this--something else, perhaps this new copy? ended up in the first one.  It is here we see that a lack of thought protects him.

Let’s take a break from the spooky scary stuff and talk about love for a moment.  In Alone With You, you have an AI companion, who, really, I think is the one you’re supposed to fall in love with because I certainly did.  The AI is very much human: it is concerned for you, wants to know your opinions, has a certain type of affection for you, and almost seems to express jealousy at times.  It is very upfront with you: you need to get off the planet ASAP and you can’t do it alone.  You’ll need the help of people that used to work on the planet, but they’re dead--so you’ll need to go and look around for some extra parts and at night speak to simulations of the dead people.  Got it?  Easy.  So you set out on your journey, finding your way from site to site, corpses and stories at every turn.  From the site-based structure to the littered bodies, to the eerie emptiness of it all, I was reminded of Soma, of this story that oozed horror, that made the loneliness feel so real, even when you weren’t truly alone.  But in Alone With You, with its bright colors and beautiful soundtrack, it makes me feel oddly serene, even knowing the clock is ticking in some sense, that I’m the only living thing on that planet.  The AI is there for me, each night I’m greeted by vibrant, stable people working to help me.  There is so much hope in it all.  And it’s not hope for humanity--we know that Earth is done for, that’s the whole reason for the project started by the company that owns the colony you’re on.  Hudson-Cartier, the company, spent 16 years on a project that ultimately failed, ultimately led to so many deaths.  And yet, when I step into that Holo-chamber, I’m transported to a world with hope, love, and, strangely, joy.  I am asking myself the same questions as I did with Soma: are these people… human?  Are these simulations… real?  What does reality mean in this context?  If these simulations feel real and experience is our gauge for reality, does that not mean what they feel is real, is human?

But also, we get to date, which is arguably much more pleasant than running from strange, humanoid-like creatures.  And in this, you need not think about I, who you are.  Simon contemplates this throughout Soma, pushing you to contemplate it too.  In Alone With You, it’s a suggestion: what do you think about these people, these people who are not you.  My main thesis is that Soma and Alone With You, although vastly different, express the same core concepts and do so beautifully.  By looking at the concepts and how the games approach them, we can see why Soma’s expression of the ideas is terrifying and why AWY’s expression is eerie and unsettling at worst.  Ultimately, both games lead us down the same path but with radically differing scenery.

PART 1.5: A Brief Note On Gameplay (because I guess these are video games)

Soma should have been a visual novel, ala Edith Finch or the like -- at least, that’s what I whole-heartedly believe.  As Joseph Anderson pointed out in his video, the gameplay is lacking.  Because he did such a great job of outlining what it lacks, I won’t spend too much time on it.  There are elements in Soma that must be “played” for them to have the same impact, they simply would not hit as hard if they were not in an interactive media.  The tone, as we’ve seen with games like Edith Finch, is not solely reliant on combat, or the type of interaction you have with the world.  As a player, you can experience just as much horror thinking there is something out there as you would knowing something was out there and it was coming to get you.

There’s a quiet part of Soma, when you’re on your way to Phi, at the bottom of the ocean, alone.  At least, you think you’re alone, but in the shadows, in the darkness that lurks on the sides of you, is the figure of Ross, one of the humanoids that has his own desires--that of destroying the rogue AI that has taken over the facilities.  He tells you that he will follow you, and as a player, if you are not super observant, if you keep your eyes down and forward on the road lit by blue lights, then you can easily miss him in the dark.  But he is there, watching, waiting.  There is something truly unsettling about this to me--that you cannot interact with him, that he is always out of reach, but he is there, present and menacing.  At this point, you’ve deduced that Ross probably won’t hurt you, but you don’t know his full intentions.  He still looks like every other monster you’ve encountered, every monster you’ve hidden and run from at every site.  I’m reminded of the fear I have surrounding AIs in games.  They’re omnipresent and seemingly omnipotent; the bounds of their power not always revealed.  Ross’ power isn’t fully revealed, you know he is plugged into the WAU, the AI, and subsequently can operate many of the systems within the PATHOS-II compound.  He never tries to hurt you outright, but the horror comes from possibility.  I think that if Soma had relied a lot more heavily on this type of possibility, they would have made a much scarier game.  But, I’m just a fucker with a philosophy degree, I can’t say much on game development.  (Yet--I will.)

Alone With You, when thinking about developer intentions, hits the mark pretty well.  The only thing in the game that really threw me and quite a few others off were the corpses, scattered about like trash, forgotten and degrading.  There isn’t much explanation for this, and only a few of the corpses make sense in their current positions.  There is one body, of an X-Ray tech, McKenna, who is left in his lab and ultimately dies of malnutrition, that makes sense--he was locked in there after beating a nurse, Darius, to death, presumably following a fight.  But, the corpse of Darius remains and we must assume that he died a while before McKenna, long enough for another member of the facility to lock McKenna away and leave a note on the computer about it.  So why wasn’t his corpse moved, especially given that the timeline denotes that some deaths were almost a year after the initial Rift Event?  In Colony B, one of the sites you can visit and the one that was hit the hardest when they lost contact with the AI, the Director, Pierre tells you in the holo-sim that eventually they had to leave bodies there because it was too much a drain on their resources, but it seems odd that they would choose the psychological burden of seeing the corpses over the burden of moving them.  Other than this, the game and its story are very clean and the visual-novel-like gameplay works well with the concept.

On my first playthrough, I did not know what to expect and I certainly did not expect what I got.  I was sold a cute dating sim and instead got an existentially-drenched, horror-filled scene of death and longing and loss.  This, at least for me, was an okay switch-a-roo pulled by the developers.  I don’t think their intent was to fully blindside the player since there isn’t any danger present in the game and it’s not like you’re dodging monsters, you’re more dodging scenes, listening as the AI grows more and more uncomfortable at the destruction.  From a story perspective, the AI stands more as your moral voice than your own protagonist, as you’re seeing it through their lense of guilt.  The AI feels--and this is important--they feel.  And you’re wandering through this world, helping them to process.  This structure, one devoid of previous history but always forging new experiences to have opinions and ideas about,  fits the tone of the game perfectly and I believe it’s why I was able to connect it to Soma so well.  Alone With You is my story, your story, every story you can make and insert into the framework.  Unlike many visual novels, you aren’t just discovering the story, you’re making it.  It’s a type of collaborative storytelling that I haven’t seen in a visual novel before, as they’ve made the world and protagonist ambivalent enough for me to form my own assumptions and conclusions about the world around me.

This is best expressed in the protagonist themselves.  And this is the hill I will die on with this game: I don’t believe the protagonist is in a human body, nor human in a traditional sense.  I think they are something created by the AI when it realized that everyone was dead, or at least seemed to be, and that time was running out for it to figure out what happened and appease its own guilt.  This explains their bare-bones past, with only vague allusions to their life back on Earth, before they came to the colony.  It would explain how they survive the explosion at the Comm tower, their lack of care for the world around them, as they are incomplete and not fully connected to the colony as the holo-sims were.  The protagonist is an amalgam, the perfect combination of human traits and memories as to make them believe they are human, feel they are human, and act as though they are human.  The holo-sim chamber isn’t for the protagonist, for you, it is instead for the holo-sims.  Even if the AI occasionally says it sees how it helps you, its main objective is to get the holograms to work better through interaction, a type of interaction it can’t provide.  The only wrench in this is that the AI does not have an option to escape, but it does have an option not to “die” alone, which I believe is the option it obviously wants you to pick, and after having crafted this elaborate story to get you to help it, it banks on you choosing that option.  I don’t believe the developer intended this, as I feel it would be too close to a sort of “it was all a dream” ending, but there is enough quiet space in the story that I can happily fill it with these thoughts and not have it disrupt too much.  An awfully beautiful hill to die on, isn’t it?

PART II: The Questions

There are three main questions that both games touch on:

Who is I, the self, the ego?

What is Real?

What constitutes “human?”

There are other questions, one in particular that I’ll touch on in my conclusion, but for now, I’ll focus on these, going through what each game says about them in turn, then finding the middle ground that both connects and divides them.

QUESTION I: Who is I, the self, the ego?

In Soma, you are directly confronted with this question as you play Simon, the protagonist.  It is your own self you are wrestling with.  You come to realize that you are not the same Simon that lived 100 years ago.  That was an entirely different self.  It was not the same Simon, even if he had the same memories.  The two could and do, at some points, exist simultaneously.  Yet, those Simons are different entities.  Their consciousness, experience, and reality, feel different, and so, in turn, they are different.  They are two completely different subjects, two different points of input, no matter if they have the same background.  The Self, in this, is completely reliant on experience, there is no self without that experience--as we see when Catherine isn’t “turned on” or put into something in the omnitool, she says she doesn’t experience the lack of time, it is merely an omission of that time.  She’s experiencing one moment and then the next without experiencing the time in between, even if it still “happens.”  In theory, that lack of experience is death.  She is dead to the world in those moments, revived when the power is turned back on.  This is getting into “sleep is also death” as an argument so I’ll stop here: we experience things subconsciously while asleep, there isn’t a complete omission of experience.  So put that argument back on your bulletin board and simmer down.

So, in Soma, the question of Self is fairly settled: you are you, you experience the things you do, any copies of the Self thereof are not you.  Any wrestling with the idea of Self is because Simon does not accept that it is not a coin toss; he wants to believe that there is a chance that his consciousness could still make its way onto the ARK, as he is when he launches it, as he is when he’s made it to the Diving Suit.  He wants so desperately to believe that he deludes himself, buys into the metaphor that is so obviously not the case.  And it’s not as if Catherine really helps--this is the one part where she isn’t actually helpful.  One could, and many have, argue that she intentionally lies to Simon in this aspect.  That she does nothing to dissuade his line of reasoning in regards to the coin toss, despite knowing that it only works as copies, not as a “brain transplant” as he says he wants.  Simon knows before the Diving Suit what will happen and he definitely knows what will happen before the ARK, but he is so caught up in it, so desperate for hope and the belief that he can find a future that isn’t at the bottom of the goddamn ocean, alone, rotting with an AI that he may or may not have killed that he doesn’t see it.

The Self in Soma is sealed, but what does it say about reality?

Alone With You

In Alone With You, we’re given a self-insert as a protagonist and their role in this is fairly ambivalent, a Miyazaki-like protagonist (go watch Big Joel’s video on this, please!).  You float through the world on the command of the AI, but you can make choices--your autonomy is evident in conversation and in who you choose to see more than once in the Holo-Chamber.  But the protagonist themself does not have opinions that differ from your own, you are never told what to think about a situation.  You are, in effect, the protagonist, not just controlling them.  They are you, you are them, so on and so forth.  So there isn’t much issue in that--but, you deal with it as it concerns the Simulations.  Each night, you visit a simulation of one of the four people whose help you need to rebuild the shuttle to get off the planet.  The simulations are built by the AI from information and memories they have--although they do not have all of their memories since the AI lost contact with most of them before they died.  They lack the end of their lives, and they have to wrestle with the information you bring to them: their choices made after their current self-knowing point.  They outright question and dismiss their own Selves at times, as W does in one of your first interactions with her.  She says, “All I have is this little garden.  And it isn’t even real.  And, I guess, nor am I.”  Although I’ll talk more about this exact idea in the next section, she acknowledges a Self within this, but then dismisses it in the same stroke.  She is there, present, but she isn’t Real.  The Self, who she is, exists but not on terms she knows, understands, or agrees with.

The construction of these holo-sims is fascinating to me, as it circumvents many of the problems presented in Soma.  They are made by the AI and stored within the AI’s database, meaning they aren’t bound to any external system and they can run “in the background,” meaning not projected, while the AI is on.  This idea is one I can’t really picture or conceive of because our tech doesn’t even come close to existing on a scale as large as this.  I guess it’s probably close to the compiling of code, a system running through itself, but the tech needed to even make a brain scan and then run it on only a computer… in both games, it’s beyond my comprehension, as it calls into question a lot about the tech itself and how it works.  In order not to get bogged down thinking about, I’ve hand waved it away with, “oh, ya know, future shit.”

But there are still some interesting differences in the tech within Alone With You that, as I said, fixes some of the problems that Soma presents.  Instead of being bound to external hardware, the Simulations are one version that persists throughout the game and the AI seems to be able to transfer them from system to system, as it tries to do at the end of the game by offering to send them with you.  They cannot circumvent the problem of a second-death, though.  These Simulations are not the human versions of themselves transferred into the system.  They are, as W describes them, “back-ups.”  She says, “The me you see… this is the most recent version.”  The AI is able to build them from what it knew and they are functionally consciousnesses.  The Self, in this, is made to believe itself is a self and there is only one current self.  They know of their past selves, and that makes them question the reality and meaning of their current self, but there is no denying, for them, that they are different than their old versions.  There is no possibility for delusion like there was for Simon.  They are fundamentally different selves, and that is where their dread lies, in the reality of their selves and the meaning that accompanies it, or their fear that meaning does not accompany it.

QUESTION II: What is Real?

Soma

What is experienced is reality.  There are hundreds of years of philosophy wrapped up in that statement: Kant’s revolutionary ideas about how our minds organize, parse, and shape the reality we perceive, Lacan’s ideas about how language shapes our minds and, in turn, our reality, Derrida’s ideas about how language is even shaped, so on and so forth.  To even get to such a concrete statement is to stand on the shoulders of giants.

Within Soma, reality is determined by who is experiencing it.  Your reality, as the player, shifts with each shift in Simon’s Self.  You follow the new Simon, until the end.  You perceive the world as Simon, winning that coin toss every time.  But that isn’t the largest challenge to your idea of reality.  Instead, it is the concept of the ARK.  At the end of Soma, when you find yourself on the ARK as the ARK Simon, you take a survey where you are asked: Do you think this new existence will be a life worth living?  This entire survey could take up a video on its own, but that one question hits close to home after such a game.  Is this new existence, this new reality, worth experiencing? There’s a quiet omission there--is this new existence worth experiencing, even if it isn’t Real?  And that question begs my original question: what is Real?

In religious studies, we speak on two distinct terms: real with a little r and real with a Big R.  Big R is Real -- the experienced, the emphasized as true; little r is perceived real, the perceived as true.  Virtual reality is considered real with a little r, at least right now.  But the ARK, that would be REAL, all caps.  It’s the experience of a consciousness that is entirely virtual, so the surroundings and reality match that which is experiencing, the virtual self.  This is the brain in a vat argument, that we can and will one day create something similar to the ARK.  Maybe, says Daddy Musk, we are already living in a simulation.  If it is functionally the same, does it matter?  And in truth, not really, since the consciousness you and I have is the one that is here, in this simulation, experiencing what we are experiencing.  For Simon, though, it matters, because there is a Simon left behind--there always is.  There is a Simon still sitting in that chair, in the dark, alone and scared.  But for the ARK Simon, reality stays REAL, all caps.  It is the shift in self that makes the change in reality difficult.

We also are met with robots who believe they are human.  For Simon, he wonders if they are people.  In this, he recognizes that the brain scans are functionally consciousnesses.  He seems to disregard this when messing with the brain scans in simulations, which, for me, seems to say he doesn’t fully recognize each of those scans, when booted up, as a consciousness.  This makes sense since we tend to recognize consciousness as it pertains to body, taking up space.  The scans exist in a virtual reality, not in tangible reality, and the realization that they’re just as much a consciousness as he is would probably take a while for him to form if he ever would form it.  This implication doesn’t just hang in dead space though, as pointed out by Joseph Anderson--he talks about one of the elements of horror being that Simon’s brain scan was used experimentally, so he was resurrected and killed thousands of times over.  This horror is circumvented in Alone With You, as I’ll touch on later, but it is a key point in Soma, but it is not thrust upon the player.  You’re meant to sit and stew with this game and its implications.  This is a type of horror that creeps up on you, settles in with you in bed at night, keeps you from sleeping because you can’t stop thinking: what did it feel like to experience such short life, but with the memory of a long one?  Who, or what experienced it?

I also had an epiphany 45 minutes into a painful hour-long cardio session after staring at the lights on the machine long enough to disassociate and realize that the real terror in Soma is the very fact that both Simon’s brain and Carl’s brain could even convince them that their Reality is different than “reality.”  Perhaps it’s terror and comfort all in one.  We know the brain does a lot to protect us, as Catherine points out to Simon when he questions why he still feels so human--our brains simply superimpose our previous way of viewing the world onto the new set of inputs.  But, what if we don’t want to be deluded?  What if I’d rather know I was stuck in a robot body?  As an autonomous being, I’d prefer knowing my predicament, especially if it answered previously unanswerable questions.  I’d like to know if we were currently living in a simulation because at least I’d know there was a beginning, maybe even some sort of meaning within it.  But, asks the 19 year-old-white-boy in a Philosophy 101 course playing “Devil’s Advocate,” how do you know you’d want that?  Of course, you say that now, not being in that predicament, living and breathing in your very-human body.  How do you know?  I don’t, Brian, but that doesn’t mean I can’t yearn for control in the face of its non-existence.

The real horror of Soma is our mind’s ability to shape reality--the fear that our brain can take a reality different from what we know and make it functionally the same, the fact that we can be deluded so fully and thoroughly by the thing we put our trust into, willingly or not.  The WAU can try to simulate reality but if our brains don’t buy in our egos won’t either.  But when our brains buy-in there’s nothing stopping us from living in “functionally Real” spaces.  The scary part is that our brains can do that.  My brain can do that.  Your brain can do that.  And we can’t do anything to stop it.  If it pulls us into a functionally real state of being we won’t be able to get out.  The fear comes in the unknowing.  We can’t control it either way.  Our reality is filtered and shaped by this brain of ours whether we like it or not.  I doubt he knew it but Kant wrote the greatest horror story ever, telling us that our brains are actually what dictates our reality.

Alone With You

Reality is less shakey in AWY.  The Simulations are aware of their state--they have Selves in what they perceive to be a non-Real world.  They understand they are simulations of people who have come before, living in a space of their own creation.  But, still, they wonder profusely about what that lack of Realness means.  This anxiety appears in somewhat off-hand comments from them, things they will hand-wave away a moment after they say them.  It doesn’t seem as if they don’t want to talk about it in general, more that they do not want to bother you with it.  In the game, you are constantly reminded of how dire and unsettling the situation you are in is.  I think this is in part because it’s honestly very easy to forget with the tone set by the expectation of the game.  I’m there to date these holosims, everything else is cursory to getting my virtual dick wet, or, ya know, getting to know them on an intimate level intellectually.  So these simulations, who are wrestling with some intense existential and metaphysical questions, defer to your disaster as being worse, trying not to stress you.  They were resurrected/created by the AI for the sole purpose of getting you off the planet, their reality and existence is dependent on the direness of your situation.  Their entire lives as simulations are dedicated to you.  Wow, wait, I just realized how kind of fucked up that is?  Like I’m forming bonds with these people and their entire existence is about me?  Sounds kind of… stockholm syndrome-like?  But, but, they seem happy to do it!  They tell me constantly how much my visits mean to them, how the AI has them working around the clock, how they… they’re doing all of this for me... 

Hold on, I need a moment.

ANYWAY -- their reality, as I said, is less shakey.  They’re in a simulation that does not come close to the ARK; as your first date points out when you go to look at the Northern Lights with them, there is no feeling of cold.  The simulation is far from perfect, and that, I believe, helps with the feeling of non-reality.  And I think, as a player, having seen simulations that were perfect, this may be better, especially for the short term.  It was evident that, for some fucking reason, the simulated consciousnesses that were in robots could feel pain in Soma.  It makes me glad that the Simulations, big S, did not share the same problem.  They did not have to really wrestle with -- is this real?  They quickly said no.  But that doesn’t mean it was dropped as a problem: now they had a question of “what does it mean?”  And Oh Boi does meaning open a whole can of worms.  I can’t speak to what it would mean for the Simulations, now that their reality isn’t Real anymore.  They seem to find meaning in helping you, which is nice, as they’ve found a place to put all that damned anxiety.  But there isn’t really any difference to me between the meaning of existence in a virtual world versus a tangible one.  Both are equally devoid of inherent meaning.  Sure, a lot of religious scholarship will need to be done when we hit this stage, as consciousness is not akin to a soul for most theologians and the creations of new ones, while probably seeming like an abomination, will raise some important questions (questions that, coincidentally, Simon asked).  But as it stands within AWY’s world, there is a tangible reality and a virtual one and the tangible one seems to hold more meaning for the SImulations, as there is a definite sense of loss when they speak about their former selves, even if they recognize that now they are inherently different than those people.

QUESTION III: What constitutes human?

Soma

When you’ve nailed down Self and Reality, you can come back down to the scorched Earth and start asking more concrete questions: what constitutes humanity?  And I realize this may not be the best question philosophically, as one might be better off asking, what constitutes aliveness and what are its implications -- but I’m not looking to write another thesis so let’s stick with what makes something human.  Simon is confronted with outward humanity first when he meets Carl, who insists he is a human, despite the fact you can clearly see he is a broken-down robot.  It is the insistence that he is human that is so unsettling, as you must confront that his Reality of Self is different than the reality you perceive.  After trying to convey what he sees in his Reality, Simon finally accepts that Carl does not and will not drop what Simon probably sees as a delusion.  But, that is Carl’s Reality--big R--nothing could be done to convince him otherwise, as it would be like convincing you that the computer you’re watching right now is actually me, in your room, talking to you.  For Carl, his Reality is that he is human.  Whether recognized outwardly or not, it is his Truth, big T.

Now, I, and many others must be careful wading into these dark waters, because relativistic reality is a dangerous game to introduce.  The implications of careless theory can be unforetold and nightmare-inducing, at least for an academic.  So I will do my best to lay out stipulations here.  Reality is, in some part, defined by the observers of a subject.  Truth about your own perception cannot be disputed.  If you perceive yourself as human I cannot deny you that.  But if you perceive yourself as the fastest man alive, then I can dispute that, unless you are, in fact, the fastest man alive.  But what makes inward reality different than outward?  Well, you cannot test inward reality, for the most part.  It’s very difficult to dispute someone when they say they see something one way, even if you see it differently.  But outward reality has measures, ways that we define an object.  Speaking Platonically~ uwu Plato ~one can talk about the form of a human, a bipedal, hairless, conscious being.  Although, one does not become non-human when losing one of these things, except in the case of consciousness.  When losing consciousness, or the ability to use it as efficiently or in the same way that you used to, one is often said to have lost their humanity, or a part of it.  So, we can deduce that at least one of the major parameters for the label is consciousness.  But!  These beings, like Carl, are conscious.  They have the mind of a human, they merely lack the body.  The name for the game, Soma, comes from the Greek word, pronounced the same and spelled, obviously, in Greek, and it means “Mind,” in particular, mind as distinct from body.  There is a lot wrapped up in this that I’ll leave to the English majors, but here I see it as a direct allusion to the fact that Simon’s humanity is actually tied to his mind and not his body.  Our bodies are, after all, just vessels, even if our mind cannot, at this time, be separated from them.  When we do finally figure out how to upload ourselves to the mainframe, how then, will our definition of human change?  Has it already, as we wrestle with the concept of AI?  With the idea of humans inhabiting bodies made more and more of machine?  This is not an arbitrary philosophical discussion--as many of them tend to be--but a question that will continue to haunt us until the day we inevitably hit singularity and transcend philosophy.

And again, we are hit with implications: if we define our humanity by consciousness, do all of the doctors who would start and end simulations become worthy of the title of War Criminal, as they slaughtered countless humans, albeit virtually, in their times of testing?  Is the WAU, the AI that I will, for the most part, ignore in this analysis because it’s a weak and poorly executed plot point, suddenly become a savior of humanity, as some in the Soma theory community painted it out to be?  I believe the theory-intent of the developers was to leave us questioning.  But, I do believe that Simon himself reaches a conclusion: he is no longer human.  He is no longer what he used to be, but that does not mean he does not feel the same.  For him, the question is not am I human?  Instead, it is: what do I do now that I am no longer human?  What does this mean for me?  More than once Simon tells Catherine that he thinks his brain is protecting him from thinking about it too much, and Catherine, who is arguably more stable than Simon, seems to be of the mind that one should not ask certain questions, for their answers are unknowable and their implications unsettling.  Faced with his own lack of humanity and those around him, Simon simply drops the question.  It is a moot point for him, and he seems to make a philosophical shift to the more “theoretically sound” question that I posed in the beginning: what constitutes “alive” and what are its implications?  But even then, he doesn’t seem to truly contemplate it, Simon, as a person and a protagonist, is not much in a state to think about these things, they are cursory to his quest and are on the sidelines.  The lights go off for him at the end, but they do not for us.  We are left, wondering, staring at that black screen as it looks back at us, a dark mirror reflecting the questions we can’t seem to answer.

Alone With You

The AI, whose name is just a jumble of letters and numbers, but who I will call “my love,” is one of the most human things in Alone With You.  They are so wonderfully caring, patient, kind, honest, and earnest.  They want the best for you, urging you forward, always keeping your safety and autonomy at the forefront.  In every interaction, you see they truly want you to get off this planet, even if it means they’ll die there alone.  And yes, it is in their programming to care about you, to learn as much as they can, but they tell you it’s their birthday, for crying out loud!!!  They watched you in the simulation and saw that exchanging information brought you and the Sims closer together and they want that same connection!  I made a lot of sobbing noises when the AI talked.  At one point they even express that they’re getting overworked as if a computer system can truly feel taxed and then express such a thing!  My love for AIs and the fact that I would definitely date one is an entirely different topic, but the AI, my love, stands as a good representation for how Alone With You treats humanity, or rather, humanness.

The creators set out to create virtual loves, loves that are human.  Even if these are Simulations, they are still very much human.  Their humanity, even when they lack a body (the body you just passed in that corridor or found in that room, oh wow), isn’t questioned.  They question their reality, their meaning, and their purpose, but they don’t question whether or not they are still Human, per se.  It doesn’t even seem to be a question on their mind.  As with Soma, it seems that they are human because they feel human.  And having that as a frame of reference probably helps a lot.  The AI does not know what it feels like to be human, and it expresses its shortcomings a number of times even if it’s perfectly fine and did the best it could and shouldn’t be so hard on itself.  You, never having lost your human body except in my wild conspiracy theory, are viewing all of these things through the lens of H U M A N.  You are the quintessential human, that against which all other creations measures themselves since you’re the only one left on the planet.

As with Soma, some implications come up with the Simulations: is the AI cruel for making these simulations, who will ultimately die, just to help you?  Does this show an inherent value in both Simulations and You, being that you are of greater value, to which all other creations bow to preserve?  This checks out, as the AI is designed to help Humanity survive, and it’s this command that usually gets an AI developer into trouble, as it can be interpreted in so many different ways.  Ultimately, the AI is so human I would say they are more akin to Catherine in Soma than the actual AI, the WAU, as the WAU is remarkably un-human, unfeeling, uncaring.  That’s why it strikes such fear in the player, but both Catherine and the AWY AI, my love, seem to care about you and the mission.  They’re doing their best, even if it’s flawed; they’re very much human.  And the same goes for the Simulations, they are so very human, having made, in some cases, very rash decisions that ultimately led to their deaths.  The people you find dead around the colony had their own lives, tangled and wrapped up in one another, living and working together for 16 years to build this grand place.  And you can hear this loss, longing, and regret in the Simulations, in the AI, in the way the buildings creak when you find your way around them.  The loss of humanity, of humanness, is ever-present in the world, and it’s only because it left such a great mark when it was there, trying always to bend the world to make it more habitable for humanity, a task that, in the end, failed, and killed dozens of good people.  

Comparison

What is the main difference?  Expectation.  As Joseph said in his video, there is an expectation in Soma that it will be scary, it is billed as a horror game.  The atmosphere, the story, and the very nature of it is grounded in the horror genre, even if it doesn’t always execute it perfectly.  I plug in Soma and I expect to be uneasy, if not scared.  In Alone With You, I do not expect to feel that way, in fact, I first played the game on one of my few days off, expecting it to be light-hearted and easy-going and I was, instead, met with a game where I was literally dodging corpses to go and find the remains of people I was expected to go on dates with.  That was unsettling, to say the least.  And yet, even with the atmosphere, in some ways, being very similar--the oppressive loneliness during the day, the sounds of dripping, creaking equipment, malfunctioning systems, the quiet, anticipatory moments when you think something will be just around the corner--I still felt very different when I was in AWY’s world, contemplating these questions.  It was almost as if they were being asked by a professor I liked instead of pointedly directed at me in an undergraduate philosophy course by a guy named Greg who was really into Nietsche and logic.  In reality, I’ve made an hour-long video parsing what tone does for a story.  But I’ve done it because I find it fascinating.  This, to me, is truly incredible: that the same questions can be asked in two entirely different contexts and produce radically similar answers and feelings within the player.  No matter how hard AWY tries, you will still be confronted, in part, by questions that merit some sort of dread, whether about your own predicament or the predicament of the simulations.  This dread, of the existential sort, is the same that runs through Soma.  As I’ve said before, these games are meant to be sat with, thought about, parsed, and measured.  They’re meant to provoke, and they’ve done a great job--they’ve provoked hours upon hours of thought and work within myself, I can’t imagine the amount of brainpower that has gone into thinking about and talking about these two games the world over.

In reality, Soma tries too hard to be scary, when it’s dealing with a subject that inherently scares most of us and AWY, in some ways, misses the point of its own story, dodging the meat and potatoes of the existential crisis it’s bound to induce.  They’re far from masterpieces, but they incite within me a love for exploration, not just of their worlds, but of the things that scare me the most, confronting it alone and with friends, from a perspective of fear and of curiosity, and I haven’t found any answers, I don’t think I ever will, but the journey, the road I took to launch each of those ships, will sit with me more than what came after, more than knowing I’d die on that planet in a simulation, more than knowing I’d live on in space in a simulation.  For a little while, I was so profoundly happy to be human and to know what that meant for me that I forgot my existential dread, even when it stared me in the face.

Conclusion

My desire for making this is to express a few things:

#1: Existential dread is shit, and it’s very present in these games

#2: Both Soma and Alone With You are incredible games that are innovative and more than worth at least one playthrough.

#3: Games don’t have to be scary to explore scary concepts!  Sometimes things are just inherently scary, and they don’t need any dressing up to make that more apparent.  In fact, you could probably stand to dress it down.

You, as a player, do not have to think about any of the things I’ve mentioned.  You can do as one of my old favorite Youtubers, Anklespankin did and just play it, not minding the story, not minding the philosophical questions, t-bagging the last human on Earth as she takes her dying breath.  There is a beautiful agency in this, an agency I feel we have in life: you can ignore the existential terror that accompanies humanity.  It does not have to be a part of your suffering.  But, if you do choose to explore it, you can do so in a context that suits you.  Maybe you want to confront it in a world that you think complements it, one of fear and dread-filled ambiance; or maybe you want to confront it in a friendlier, more care-focused world, with friends who are also wrestling with it.  That agency is what makes games and life great.  Our choices matter and part of those choices are our thoughts, what we choose to contemplate and what we choose to toss aside.  If you made it this far then I’m happy you chose to spend some time thinking about these questions and I hope you’ll do as the games and I have intended: to sit with it, find out what it means to you, even if it seems meaningless, even if it feels like you’re alone in it, you’re not.  It’s always time to explore our reality and the implications.  And right now, truly, it’s time.

[luxeennui]

Alone With Soma: A Video Essay