The game’s best beats come in the emotional pauses in the simulated chat client, and the understanding that even in brief, unsentimental sentences, the choice of one word over another might have unexpected intonation.
Ooo I remember that feeling!
Aaand I’m not sure I want to relive it!
I’m also slightly embarrassed to say I saved many of those chat histories from when the technology was just taking off because I thought some day they’d reveal a deep personal insight through a process I imagined was like fermentation. Seems more like purification is the only thing going on there so far.
“Putrification” it was supposed to say, but that’s funny too.
I could not imagine playing such a game without being overwhelmed by a deep and abiding embarrassment at the voyeurism inherent in my playing such a game.
The fact that the author intends such personal exposure to be the point of the game would barely mitigate the shame at my indulgence in the opportunity to observe another’s private life for my own amusement.
It’s things like this that really bring home the fact of generational differences. I hope she finds her target audience among the younger set and does well.
This hits pretty close to home. My first boyfriend was met online, through battle.net, and I still have friends to this day that I talk to online, met when i was in grade 10 playing starcraft daily. That community… it’s something I will never forget and i still long for it. May have to look into this game, reliving the nostalgia would be nice. : P
Yep, breath of a previous era here… Though some of it still exists, there is a feeling that communities and perhaps especially chats are drained by FB etc. Then again, I guess many things lose a bit of magic once you grow older, might be a bit of that, too.
It was all too brief, but the Internet was once a magical land for your typical introvert.
You could converse with people around the world and you didn’t have to worry about what you look like, what you sound like, or if were you making the appropriate welcoming non-verbal signals. It was all through the power of your words, and by that I mean simple plain text, and what you could express with them. You could take your time to craft a meaningful sentence; rare was the moment you thought to yourself “I should have said this,” as you would in the spoken world.
You could find your voice without fear of people tracking you down and using your face as the poster for the latest derogatory meme.
But those days are over. The internet landscape has everyone from global governments to organized crime to unscrupulous corporations to trollish thugs watching your every move, ready at a moment’s notice to use anything online against you. And you certainly can’t form meaningful relationships without a camera in your face and a mic, either.
Extroverts have taken over the internet. RL is the introvert’s paradise now. You can walk through a room unnoticed because everyone is staring at their internet enabled phone.
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