Dear Player: SOMA and the Body

Videogames can offer us a vast range of sensory experiences, but we tend to talk about them in terms of text: narrative and code, signifiers and rule sets. What does it mean to see or touch a virtual world? Focusing on SOMA, and drawing on Deleuze and Haraway, I want to explore how this game configures bodies and sensation. What game has time-travel, A.I., zombie-things, and sets it all under the sea after the apocalypse (plus you’re a robot)? Surprisingly not a Saint’s Row but rather one of the most immersive, elegant and thought-provoking games of the year: SOMA (2015), Frictional Games’ successor to the most significant horror title of the last decade – Amnesia (2010). It asks us what it means to be human, but also what it means to be alive, what it means to feel, and what it means to play a game with a machine.

In SOMA, the player begins life in the present day. We play as Simon, and we’ve recently lost someone we loved to a catastrophic collision of bodies and machinery, in this case a car crash. We’re off to get a brain scan to test for head trauma. We sit back into a machine in the present, but when the headset comes off, we find ourselves in a distant future in a rusting laboratory under the sea.

What is slowly revealed to the player is the knowledge that we, as we now find ourselves, are just a copy of that brain scan from long ago which has been downloaded into a robot body by the lab we find ourselves in. In this new world everything above sea level has been destroyed, with the last of humanity here under-water… and far from having a picnic.

1

The Artificial intelligence running and protecting the base has started to copy and convert humans and anything it can get its hands on into human-like cyborgs in a misguided effort to preserve humanity into the future. The AI seems pretty keen on the idea that shambling metal zombies are better than nothing. Our task, becomes one of further epistemic entanglement as we avoid this mad AI while we attempt to launch a digital back-up of the last humans into space. Those are the options for the future of humanity– software copies of people in a simulated paradise on a satellite or semi-sentient cyborgs in an undersea hell, and either way a collision of bodies and machines. There are a lot of literal and conceptual grey areas in SOMA’s murky mise-en-scene. This is a game that plays with paradoxes and thought experiments at the same time as it keeps its player highly tense, physically and emotionally stressed. While its plot sounds confusing, true disorientation comes in the form of screams distorted by water and vision blurred by faulty sensors.

2

Bodies and Sensation

As you can see, this is a dark game, full of claustrophobic and visually dense environments but not everything is as it first seems. The game is actually very open and minimal. The game’s very tactile surfaces are also submerged in thick mediating filters, shaders and other lighting effects, such that our vision swims, even when we stand on dry metal flooring. If we stand still and look at a monster its textures are dull and low-fidelity, but by keeping us in constant motion, and fomenting a grainy atmosphere with visual FX, we experience the world as a continuous and immersive nightmare. Our first person perspective locks us into our body, even when mirrors show us that our suit is empty, and we become very attached to our virtual limbs when we have to mimic their movement to open a door handle by circling our mouse or analogue stick. This is a game which is deeply kinaesthetically involving, even when we can’t see our character’s hands – we progress by pushing, pulling, turning and lifting.

3

Everything feels materially connected in this game – the AI’s metal tentacles suck at sea-life and machinery alike, trying to build inscrutable half-persons from whatever it encounters. As we wander from ruin to ruin our character is equally at home under the water and in pockets of air, but even though we are not restrained under the sea, our intense loneliness makes us fear the vast undifferentiated darkness. If in Bioshock, escape was our motivation and the cold ocean our prison walls, here we know that ‘escape’ is not straight-forward, and possibly ineffable to us. We must rescue a small matrix in a bottle, simulated souls, for we have no-where else worth going and nothing else worth doing.

Humanity is dead, and the misguided AI attempting to re-create it has tendrils extending further than the eye can see. In a beautiful aesthetic, merging the organic and geometric, the AI makes cyborg fusions of metal, human and fish using a dark fluid as ink black as the sea. Even our avatar itself, is the product of this AI, a humanoid suit with a booted up memory of Simon running it. We draw sustenance from the AI by plunging our arm into mechanical orifices in the wall, causing our vision to clear, but also projecting black veins across the frame of the screen. Everything in the world of SOMA lies on a continuum – no good no evil, no me no you. The horror of SOMA is the thick soup of sensation we struggle through, our identity unravelling, the walls bleeding and the barely living plugged into power outlets.

4.jpg

Mechanically, if we look at something horrifying, our interface starts to fall apart, the screen tears and after-images flare – the only way to avoid the shambling monsters is to look away and pray they don’t bump into you. As an incentive borrowed from Amnesia (2010) and Call of Cthulhu (2005) this powerfully effects the player, breeding a fear of the unknown which is hard to overcome. Anecdotally, players feel terrified until they die and the game resets – only then do they know what the anticipated shock feels like.

But in SOMA this mechanic also begs further questions – the AI can’t see you unless you can see it, and as the monstrous network is deeply connected to you, it implies that your ‘adversary’ actually sees through your eyes. Your eyes are cameras in a network that might betray you. Looking around in the first person therefore does two things it gives information to us and to the fictional AI, we are our own enemy, alienated from ourselves. This also acts as metaphor for the game itself – a computer is indeed spying on us at every moment, constantly noting what we’re looking at as well as often scripting our movements.

Moreover, in the game our perceptual experiences both make us feel in a deeply human way, and yet declare our inhumanity. Encounters violently visually affects us in an alien way – when we see something terrifying, our screen begins to distort and glitch. What happens here is interestingly double: narratively our mechanical body is experiencing damage to its sensors, but phenomenally, at the level the player feels as someone sat in front of a screen, these pixels stress and terrify us into fearing for our own body. It violently disorients us, it tears apart the image that constitutes our sole window onto this world, and it conveys pain at the same time as it casts doubt on who or what is feeling it – a digital memory, a robotic suit, an avatar, ourselves or all the above?

5

More than just a thematic reflection on multiple identity, we can also be confronted with sensory paradoxes, such that we can feel on multiple levels even within the digital space. In a world of twisted cyborgs and digital ghosts, SOMA suggests that our interface with the game is far from a straightforward division between human and machine, but a complex entanglement of the two.

Bodies and Ethics

For me, SOMA at its core is concerned with the somatic, with bodies – and what it has to tell us about the ethics of consent and guilt is intimately related to its protagonist’s existential crises. Its world is composed of a myriad of kinds of consciousness, kinds of person, animal and machine – from mindless drones to articulate cyborgs – and it faces the player with a series of mind-churning choices concerning their fate. From the beginning of the play experience, all death is at the considered discretion of the player. Moreover, not only is killing progressively more and more optional, but killing takes place in scenarios where the consent of the subject is often a key factor. Ethics are deeply implicated in the bodies we interact with.

You need electrical power, but if a robot thinks it’s human, do you have the right to un-plug it to use the socket? In this world even broken machines claim to feel phantom limbs. Players are usually heroes in games, with unquestionable motives, but in SOMA, as a brain-scan in a mechanical suit, what gives the player priority to live over the other rusted and amorphous bodies around you?

6

More often than not, those subjects and objects around you are in pain, and wish they didn’t exist. When the last living human asks you to kill her, many players refuse, and many more grant her final wish, when another party asks you to kill the mad AI at the heart of SOMA many commit to killing off what amounts to the last sentient life-form on the planet, others, myself included, refuse. The game forces no particular answer and draws no consequence from these acts, the implications are all in the mind of the player, and the implications are many:

The way we perceive time, the necessity of continuity in identity, the relative value of information and flesh, and indeed the value of existence in suffering are all openly questioned by this game on visual, tactile, narrative and mechanical levels.

Your accomplice, your partner and narrator in the game, is a brain scan running on a portable computer in your pocket. Every time you turn her off, she ceases to exist until you turn her back on. She remembers past conversations, but not the intervening time, she muses on what time means to her, a collage of disparate moments with no sense of the movement between them. And what do we think of her plan to save everyone using brain scans and simulation? What do we feel about the prospects of this salvation when we learn that many people have killed themselves trying to keep their own identities continuous outside and inside the virtual Ark? Isn’t it tempting to kill yourself right at the moment you are copied in order to jump straight into virtual paradise, and avoid any troublesome dopplegangers? Maybe it would just feel like going to sleep and waking up in a different place? Or maybe continuity is a lie, and every time we re-load the game, we become a different Simon.

At a heart-wrenching moment we do indeed copy ourselves into a new robotic suit, one that contains someone else’s dead body, but what really punches us in the gut is the voice from the other room – our voice: “what happened? It didn’t work, I’m still here!” Our point of view has been switched to the new body, but our old shell is still alive, and haunts us. In order to get a future copy of ourselves into heaven, we must leave this older copy behind in purgatory.

7

At the end of the game, we load another copy of ourselves onto the Ark, the satellite, and send it into space but our perspective does not switch to the new copy, instead we are left behind, all alone. The magic trick of montage fails us. The game offers us as deep affective sense of continuity by giving us a continuous first-person camera view, but at the last moment, it all unravels and we are left sitting in our chair with the controls in front of ourselves – both in reality and in the game. We lost the coin toss – we know that one of us is happy, one of us is in hell and we are alone. We now know what the copy we left behind feels like, and keenly we sense that the only difference between that bundle of polygons, that mechanical suit, is the position of our perspective on one side of the helmet rather than the other.

First person games make strong use of the cinematic longshot – the feeling of immersion that comes from a long continuous scene where we come to identify with the screen. The genius of SOMA, however, is its ability to get us to both hate and empathise with life beyond the frame, to feel that there is more than our own perspective on this world, and that left to its own devices this game might go on living and feeling without us.

On a wider level, I think this game asks us how alone we are in any world – are we one body or many, shedding and replacing cells every day. Are we spread over the traces we leave behind or do we all die alone? Is life suffering, and what suffers? Fun questions like that – it is a game after all.

But more specifically, I think it also asks us what it means to play a game, to feel a game, to feel through a machine and consider the capacity of a machine to feel. The player oscillates between feeling at one with the world and also alien to oneself.

It prompts us to both extend our sense of self and body, and at the same time reflect on our fear that we are nothing on our own.

Merlin Seller