About a week ago, my girlfriend suggested I watch her play a video game she'd found online. She had a feeling it would be fun to play through together, and that it would engage my aesthetic sensibilities while we played. She was very right on both accounts :)
The video game is called Simulacra. You can play it on a laptop, as we did, but it can also be played on a phone. Without having done so myself, I would highly recommend that option, much as I'd recommend watching UNFRIENDED on a laptop. I'll explain why shortly.
Simulacra hails from Malaysia, where a small programming team worked on this game and a shorter predecessor, entitled Sara Is Missing. In this expanded followup, the missing girl's name is Anna. The player, as an unnamed interloper, finds her phone and begins looking through it for clues about the owner. Everything seems perfectly ordinary, except that no one has seen Anna since the last time she contacted them on her phone.
Yet this isn't a digital space any of us would know. Simulacra offers a fully-imagined, elaborately-visualized ecosystem of Apps and digital infrastructure. Taking place in 2017, its world is nonetheless speculative, tweaked just enough to require a learning curve for its computer-savvy audience. As for the outside world, I'm not entirely sure where the game is meant to take place. Everyone speaks English, though the actors are mostly people of color. Perhaps it's a lightly fictionalized Malaysia, or perhaps it's LA, where several of the actors live in real-life. Maybe it's just some nowhere-space of globalization -- that liminal online space we all inhabit now -- where money, sexual attraction, and social status fluctuate with the day's events.
In the world of Simulacra, everyone seems to be employed in the digital economy. Amusingly plausible website names like "BunnyHop," "BigFour," and "Phresh Ideas" proliferate. The men, as they present themselves through text message, appear terrible without exception. Communicating in a mix of 'clever' references, sexual propositions, and hair-trigger aggression, they speak as if they share some wretched hive-mind consciousness. It's our bad fortune that two of them will prove integral to solving Anna's disappearance: Greg, her inconsiderate boyfriend; and Taylor, a dorky suitor who expects you to laugh at all his witless jokes.
(Their voice acting, it must be said, can verge on the amateur, especially in Greg's case. But if their words don't convince when spoken, the written messages exude plenty of beta-male believability.)
Even before the genre elements announce themselves, this is already a compelling alt-history of the present. In making digital life just unrecognizable enough to seem strange, Simulacra re-sensitizes its users to the terms and conditions we've all accepted without reading the fine print. Its gamespace is constructed as a vertical rectangle...in other words, a phone screen. Through this gamespace, we are given access to a fictional assemblage of apps, user profiles, and interpersonal relationships. It may seem strange to occupy the role of impostor, but this positioning only heightens the feeling of a pre-existing reality just outside the frame. Phones contain the world, but they also imply that world's miniaturization. They open outward, endlessly, as a way to overcome their own physical smallness.
Let's pause briefly and consider the phone as a reconfiguration of the cinematic space. Cinema began in aspect ratios like 4:3, echoing the tools of photography that birthed it. Then, as technological development progressed, spatial grandiosity took hold. The widescreen frame allowed for dioramic detail, permitting one's eye to roam across a series of landscapes. And while televisual language has long since recuperated this expansionary effort of cinema, for now it pays to remember the hubristic impulse behind the shift from square to rectangle.
We are at least a decade into the smartphone era. If personal computers posited some nexus between cinematic depth-of-field and hyperlinked infinity, smartphones have further compressed the interface that crystallized this digital relationship. Strangely, in this long transitional period, the rectangle form has not been replaced. Efforts to return to the square, i.e. the Apple Watch, always struck me as weirdly form-less, like some over-literalization of the pixels that constitute digital space. I don't need to be reminded of those pixels. The rectangle form still feels most natural and intuitive to me, even as I recognize that cinematic rectangularity was itself a rupture, a willful break with equilateral tradition. Does that make me the nostalgist?
Anyhow. Returning to Simulacra, there is a double uncanniness involved in its mystery. Not only are we piecing together an unknown person's life through digital shrapnel, we are also constructing an alternate reality through what the phone normalizes for us. Ridiculous App names like Jabbr and Spark soon become second-nature, just like Tinder and Twitter before them. It's as if, in the few hours it takes to play Simulacra, we are reenacting our own decade-long acculturation. Toggling between text message, emails, Apps, and photo/video galleries has become totally normal to the presumptive player of Simulacra...if, that is, they're under the age of 40 or so. I can't imagine this game being navigable to anyone over a certain age. Much like UNFRIENDED, the game's formal radicalism suggests an age limit: you must be this young to play this game (or, to watch that movie).
But where UNFRIENDED couldn't help adhering to narrative linearity, this new articulation feels both hyperflat and fathomless. Freed from cinema's chronological demands, Simulacra replicates the network experience, where each node on a grid connects to other nodes that are themselves gateways to infinite access. These nodes can be websites, but more often they are people: strangers, lovers, family, or the endlessly shifting acquaintanceships we make online. What the game gets intuitively, in a way that can barely be articulated to Luddites, are the micro-rules of such an etiquette. The unanswered texts at the end of a taxing conversation with one's parents. Pregnant pauses in a troubled relationship. That mix of coziness and emotional turmoil in a long-running text with your best friend. Anna's life would seem ordinary if it weren't for the fact that she'd gone missing. This is the great promise of countless mystery stories, the lurid search for secrets inside familiar reality. Simulacra distinguishes itself by taking this voyeurism online, where the possibility for immersion in a stranger's life is more complete than ever. We can pick up this phone and text the people Anna knew, generating new clues even while we're perusing her old text messages.
In the films of Hitchcock and De Palma, breaches of privacy often happened from afar, mediated through cameras, binoculars, or peepholes. Simulacra suggests this distance has shrunk to the space between your thumb and a phonescreen, and that, correspondingly, so has the space between superego and id. Obsessive curiosity, once a (nominal) state of exception in the social world, has become the norm. In broadcasting personal information, the private is made public; conversely, strangers remain unknown to us only if we wish, only if "Facebook stalking" isn't the more tempting option. Deregulated, this libidinal economy tends toward overconfidence and, in some cases, spectacular collapse. (The "public meltdown," with its confusion of intimacy and assembled audience, might serve as an emblematic metaphor for this entanglement of Self and Other.) The dichotomies are collapsing, a process both facilitated by and embodied in smartphones. As the primary tool for divulging our psychic reserves (and exploring those of others), it is their shape that conditions us, their whispered suggestions that we follow. At time of writing, Simulacra represents the fullest deconstruction I've seen of this particular device, and as such, I propose it to be a key text in the emergent post-cinema canon.
Some caveats worth a mention: it's disappointing that Anna's disappearance becomes mostly pretext by the game's end. As this alternate phone-reality unspools, we're given more opportunities to interact with Greg and Taylor, two rather loathsome men whose mere presence on Anna's phone feels intrusive. Greg's boundary-pushing machismo is the flipside to Taylor's nice-guy ingratiation, and since Anna herself is the structuring absence, it falls on these unwelcome interlopers to fill the gap. Whatever narrative drive this choice provides, the effect is somewhat enervating. And while the game's resolution does venture into some eerie and suggestive places, I can't help feeling that the early moments of Simulacra are its strongest. Long after the story resolves, what lingers is that uncanny familiarity of a phone (and a world) which is not ours, but could be. Simulacra explicitly engages with the hyperreal in recognition of the many ways that 'reality' has changed. There is a prominent citation of Baudrillard; there is an equally prominent citation of Black Mirror. Whether or not you find meaning in those signposts, it's the gamespace itself that most persuades.
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