SOMA: Horror and existential dread
May. 5th, 2020 09:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
entanglingbriarsI tried to write a spoiler-free analysis of (one aspect of) this game. I really did. And it's just not possible. I can mask references to vital plot points by calling them "coin tosses" and I can allude to themes and motifs without spelling them out, but such an analysis would be neither accurate nor useful. I'll spell out the premise, but everything after that will be spoiler-filled.
The premise: after receiving brain damage from a car crash, Simon Jarret (the PC) goes to a less-than-reputable neuroscience clinic to get a brain scan to develop a plan of treatment for his brain damage. The visor of the scan machine goes down... and Simon wakes up in a creepy locked room with no idea of where he is or why he's there. The plot, as far as it goes, begins with Simon exploring his new environment, trying to work out where he is and why he's there, slowly picking up pieces of a story that was -- for the most part -- over long before he arrived, and (since this is survival horror after all) avoiding the occasional monster. It's not dissimilar to Amnesia: the Dark Descent in that regard (no surprises, both were developed by Frictional Games), but it tackles different themes, has a somewhat different interface, and evokes a wider variety of fears (at least for me). That's all I can say without going into spoilers, so everything after this is gonna spoil the heck out of this game.
SOMA relies on two kinds of fear where, I'd argue, Amnesia relied on only one. Both games feature horror, the terror that you're gonna die you're gonna totally frickin' die and oh dear God what is that I can't see it... The "nothing is scarier" variety of horror that people who enjoy survival horror as a genre are familiar with. But SOMA adds to this an element of existential dread.
The fundamental leap of faith you have to take to play this game is that minds can be accurately copied and uploaded into computers while retaining their essential nature. And the work you should focus on in that sentence is copied. In the world of SOMA, uploading your mind into a computer is not an act of transference. There is a "coin toss" with one winner and one loser. And in the game Simon's own coin gets tossed three times, marking the beginning, middle, and end of the game. The cool thing is that the first time the coin is tossed you aren't necessarily aware of it. A savvier player than myself might realize she's been uploaded into a robot, but the game misdirects the player away from that conclusion, so I don't feel entirely stupid for not picking up on it.
Still, the rules of the game are made clear fairly early on. But it's not made viscerally real until the second coin toss. Simon needs to transfer his consciousness into a different robot, one capable of going into the deep ocean. But wait! In SOMA "transfer" isn't an option, so when Simon wakes up in his new body, he immediately discovers that he is still in his old body as well. And he has to choose between killing that body or abandoning it, alone, in an empty world with no possibility of rescue.
The game actively asks questions (as in, there are literally dialogues between characters about) that I honestly don't find interesting regarding which, if either, is the "real" Simon and whether you can be human despite not having a human body. But the game also answers those questions in-universe, so I don't think those are the questions the player is actually intended to ponder.
The game instead evokes a visceral sense of dread. Every time the coin is tossed and your mind is copied to another body, you could either be the winner and have a sense of continuity into the new body or the loser and remain in the old one, which is likely to be discarded as no longer useful. You, as a mind, have been called into being because someone else had a use for you, and you can be discarded at will once someone, including another iteration of yourself, has no further use for you. There's a scene in the game where you repeatedly bring someone's mind into existence to ask him questions, than turn him off and reset his memories every time you're unable to elicit answers. And once you have the answers you turn him off for the last time and get to choose whether to delete his data files or let them remain to be potentially used by someone else.
While SOMA is a thoughtful game, its goal isn't to make you ask questions so much as viscerally feel what it would be like for those questions to become something more than abstract debates for drunk grad students. SOMA is a horror game, the point is to make you feel emotions, and this time one of those emotions is the dread of knowing that while you may be a person to yourself, to others you are simply a tool. Something to be created, discarded, or destroyed at will.
I could go on, there's another thing to be written about how this connects to H. Richard Niebuhr's writings on suicide and antinatalism's argument that bringing children into the world is necessarily immoral because they do not consent to it, but those aren't questions that SOMA really asks, it just points to them. You could easily play the game without engaging with them. But you can't play the game without feeling in your gut you're own self-objectification.
The premise: after receiving brain damage from a car crash, Simon Jarret (the PC) goes to a less-than-reputable neuroscience clinic to get a brain scan to develop a plan of treatment for his brain damage. The visor of the scan machine goes down... and Simon wakes up in a creepy locked room with no idea of where he is or why he's there. The plot, as far as it goes, begins with Simon exploring his new environment, trying to work out where he is and why he's there, slowly picking up pieces of a story that was -- for the most part -- over long before he arrived, and (since this is survival horror after all) avoiding the occasional monster. It's not dissimilar to Amnesia: the Dark Descent in that regard (no surprises, both were developed by Frictional Games), but it tackles different themes, has a somewhat different interface, and evokes a wider variety of fears (at least for me). That's all I can say without going into spoilers, so everything after this is gonna spoil the heck out of this game.
SOMA relies on two kinds of fear where, I'd argue, Amnesia relied on only one. Both games feature horror, the terror that you're gonna die you're gonna totally frickin' die and oh dear God what is that I can't see it... The "nothing is scarier" variety of horror that people who enjoy survival horror as a genre are familiar with. But SOMA adds to this an element of existential dread.
The fundamental leap of faith you have to take to play this game is that minds can be accurately copied and uploaded into computers while retaining their essential nature. And the work you should focus on in that sentence is copied. In the world of SOMA, uploading your mind into a computer is not an act of transference. There is a "coin toss" with one winner and one loser. And in the game Simon's own coin gets tossed three times, marking the beginning, middle, and end of the game. The cool thing is that the first time the coin is tossed you aren't necessarily aware of it. A savvier player than myself might realize she's been uploaded into a robot, but the game misdirects the player away from that conclusion, so I don't feel entirely stupid for not picking up on it.
Still, the rules of the game are made clear fairly early on. But it's not made viscerally real until the second coin toss. Simon needs to transfer his consciousness into a different robot, one capable of going into the deep ocean. But wait! In SOMA "transfer" isn't an option, so when Simon wakes up in his new body, he immediately discovers that he is still in his old body as well. And he has to choose between killing that body or abandoning it, alone, in an empty world with no possibility of rescue.
The game actively asks questions (as in, there are literally dialogues between characters about) that I honestly don't find interesting regarding which, if either, is the "real" Simon and whether you can be human despite not having a human body. But the game also answers those questions in-universe, so I don't think those are the questions the player is actually intended to ponder.
The game instead evokes a visceral sense of dread. Every time the coin is tossed and your mind is copied to another body, you could either be the winner and have a sense of continuity into the new body or the loser and remain in the old one, which is likely to be discarded as no longer useful. You, as a mind, have been called into being because someone else had a use for you, and you can be discarded at will once someone, including another iteration of yourself, has no further use for you. There's a scene in the game where you repeatedly bring someone's mind into existence to ask him questions, than turn him off and reset his memories every time you're unable to elicit answers. And once you have the answers you turn him off for the last time and get to choose whether to delete his data files or let them remain to be potentially used by someone else.
While SOMA is a thoughtful game, its goal isn't to make you ask questions so much as viscerally feel what it would be like for those questions to become something more than abstract debates for drunk grad students. SOMA is a horror game, the point is to make you feel emotions, and this time one of those emotions is the dread of knowing that while you may be a person to yourself, to others you are simply a tool. Something to be created, discarded, or destroyed at will.
I could go on, there's another thing to be written about how this connects to H. Richard Niebuhr's writings on suicide and antinatalism's argument that bringing children into the world is necessarily immoral because they do not consent to it, but those aren't questions that SOMA really asks, it just points to them. You could easily play the game without engaging with them. But you can't play the game without feeling in your gut you're own self-objectification.
