Forgetting You, But Not the Time: On Emily is Away (2015)

Emily is Away (2015)

(some spoilers)

Late last year I saw an article about this game called Emily is Away in Wired. The headline caught my interest: it said the game was AIM-inspired and set in the 2000s. Generally, I don't like reading too much about games I think I might play in the future; I wrote about how pre-set expectations changed my experience with Gone Home before. So I didn’t read the article. But I saw the game get articles in other publications as well. And I saw that Emily Short had written about it, and I made a mental note to definitely give the game a shot at some point. (Her review is here). But even though I’d avoided reading articles about the game, I still couldn’t avoid reading all those headlines, and though I can't find it again, I'd seen one article/blog/forum post/Youtube title which said the game was about getting friend-zoned. Remember expectations? Yeah, there they were, being pre-set.

So I played it. Short description is that Emily is Away is a free game by Kyle Seeley about two high school friends, you and Emily, as you both transition into college. The whole game takes place in this mock-up AIM interface, and it’s set in a specific time period in the early 2000s, with references to Snow Patrol and Harry Potter and Muse to take you back. You'll be chatting with Emily, and at different points in the conversations which take place every year or so, you’ll be given a trio of choices of what you can say to her.

I went back and read Emily Short's post on it after I'd finished the game; she wrote about possible issues of consent, which also raised an eyebrow for me in my playthrough. It wasn't egregious, but there were some possible implications. Look at her article for that. Lots of other people that've written about the game focus on its nostalgic rush and its on-point classic instant messenger facsimile, and I can see why, because those both stand out, so instead, I’ll focus more on the game's storytelling.

The game starts with you choosing a screenname and icon for yourself. Then Emily signs in, you greet her, Emily compliments the icon you chose, you two talk about Coldplay, and then Emily asks you if you’re going to Travis's party that night. And in response, you can say:

1) maybe, i havent decided.

2) ugh, Travis is such a dick.

3) depends on if youre going

Here's the thing: I didn’t know if Travis was a dick or not yet. This was the first time he'd been mentioned. And, after having made only inconsequential choices so far (do you want to say hey, hi, or howdy as a greeting?), the game was suddenly asking me about this Travis guy, and I got hung up for a moment. I was used to games setting story choices up for me. That doesn't always mean the choices are easy to decide between, or that I know everything I'd want to know to make a choice, or that I know exactly what's going to happen as a result. But it does mean, I generally know how the game wants me to approach decision-making. I know Bioware wants me to role-play. I know Telltale's The Walking Dead will throw at me some morally grey dilemmas. But I didn't know yet what was going on with Emily is Away.

Just before playing Emily is Away I'd been playing these games from this company called “Choice of Games.” The put out choice-based, interactive fiction, and a lot of their games I've played so far put an emphasis on role-playing, allowing you to tailor an avatar in the game that is specifically who you want to be: the type of person you are, your background, your gender, and your sexual preferences even (a bunch of these games have romance story threads). So early choices in these “Choice of” games will try to gauge all of those things. You might be a burglar trying to escape from the scene of the crime, and your choice of approach will change your starting stats. You might be asked about your upbringing. Or you might meet an acquaintance, whom you can greet as a lover or a friend, and that'll set your relationship with them. In Emily is Away, then, this question about Travis's party, was it some version of that? Maybe my choice would be setting the type of person Travis was, or maybe the game would look at the choice and judge my own character instead. I wasn't sure. I didn't know Travis, I didn't know Emily, I didn't even know my own character yet, and I didn't know what type of game this was. Maybe it made sense that the game would be looking at my answer to set up the rest of the story, because that early on, I barely knew enough to even have questions about the plot.

There are lots of stories out there where the storyteller intentionally doesn't make it immediately apparent what's happening at the beginning. Some might do it for a sense of mystery, some might delay it in favor of showing some action first, and sometimes it's because there's so much to explain that it needs to be parcelled out over time. There's a real skill to properly handling necessary exposition -- about the setting, the characters, the circumstances they’re facing – and how to balance and intertwine it with the plot. Sci-fi and fantasy type settings need even more introduction to their more fantastical worlds and their technologies and societies and cultures. Emily is Away doesn't worry much about world unfamiliarity; it takes place in the near past, in a time period which most every player out there would've lived through, and for a good chunk of the people who'd be attracted to this type of game there's a communal experience here, for those who grew up in the same time frame and mindset as the game and game author. But it's not just the world; Emily is Away never really cares to do any exposition about anything else either, not even its characters. And I couldn't settle into a groove with the game, because it kept asking me to make choices about things I didn't know about. Stories can get you invested with a question of “what's going on?” but here, my lack of knowledge about the world wasn't pushing me forward; it was pushed in my face.

A lot of that has to do with how the game is set up; because of the way the game is set across multiple conversations and with the time skips in between, a good chunk of each yearly conversation has to deal with the characters catching up with what happened with each other in between.  But then you get questions like the one about Travis's party, or Emily will ask you what plans you have for the weekend, and I have to pause and think.  In books and in movies, one of the keys to good dialogue that I've seen taught a lot is that both participants should have a goal in that conversation, something they're striving towards throughout.  But what's my goal in Emily is Away?  What's Emily's?  There should be a sense of what goes into the choices a character makes, but Emily is Away was a bit too abrupt for me to figure things out.  Their conversations make sense for people that know each other well, that have a pre-existing relationship -- they feel true to life, but I was confused as someone having to make decisions for one of them without the context.

I can think of other games, like Half-Life 2 say, or Chrono Cross, that just throw you into the deep end and don’t try to explain things to you at the start, but they still work; they’re still using fairly conventional storytelling methods, and you get a good sense things will get explained later. Indigo Prophecy/Fahrenheit by Quantic Dream is another game that starts off without explanation, but it's also a game that emphasizes choice and which has some story branching, so it's a bit closer to where Emily is Away is. (skip the rest of this paragraph if you don't want spoilers for the beginning of Indigo Prophecy.  Or play the 2005 demo if you can get that working!) The game starts off with the protagonist, in a trance-like state, stabbing someone to death in a diner bathroom, then snapping awake, confused and distraught, with a dead corpse at his feet. The camera pulls back out the door, past a bunch of diners, and settles onto a cop near the front. And the screen goes back to just you, covered in blood. You're now in control. What now? Hide the body? Hide the knife? Out the window? You might not know how your protagonist got there, but the protagonist seems as confused as you are, and the game is telling you: now's not the time to ask questions, now's the time to figure out how to get out of there before you get caught!

Indigo Prophecy/Fahrenheit (2005)

Indigo Prophecy (and Half-Life, and Chrono Cross) gives you enough of a constrained space for the player to move and look around in, and enough direction about the situation  for the player to know what they might want to do next. Indigo Prophecy also adds urgency, with the cop that'll make his way to the back of the diner pretty soon. The game doesn't put you in a situation where your lack of knowledge about the world is challenged, or where your character's knowledge and motivations are unclear -- or if it is unclear, it's generally apparent that it's intentional. There are lots of stories that have this issue at the beginning, where the protagonist you're controlling knows more than you do. That gap has to steered around and be filled at least somewhat as the story goes along; the reader can only be confused for so long. That's why so many games start off with amnesiac storylines, or the protagonist entering a new unfamiliar region; because it's a much more straightforward set-up that removes some of those issues. And that's why this sudden choice about Travis, even though it seemed pretty insignificant, still stood out to me, because it's running towards the gap and asking the player to fill it in themselves.

Emily is Away seems to lean heavily on shared experiences and cultural expectations to help you with this. Like Travis: I sort of felt like I was supposed to think he was a dick, because, I dunno, because those are the types of peoples that throw parties? That doesn't seem fair. But again, the friend-zone label from the headline was still in my head, and I could imagine this pent-up jealousy between this protagonist pining for Emily, and this dudebro Travis guy who threw killer parties and wore sunglasses indoors and really was kind of a dick. And I could also imagine Travis being an okay guy too depending on what type of story this was trying to tell, and it was just my character who was letting that jealousy cloud their judgement. But I didn't really know, and the game doesn't seem interested in giving you more to go on, not even later. There's a presumed history between these characters that never gets told or even hinted at, only their general attitudes. Everything has to be divined only from the words they type, and that's also what makes its storytelling approach have to be different.

Emily is Away can't use any of the tricks books or films can lean on to elaborate on these characters. There's no narrator, no inner monologue, no body language or voice acting or facial expressions to pick up on. When you strip away all of that, well, we know how hard it is to detect sarcasm on the internet. All you have are the words that appear on the screen, and the short little trio of choices you're intermittently being given. It does do some clever stuff, though, not just with typos but also the parts of your responses which your character deletes and rewrites, and the “Emily is typing” indicator. Especially well done is the ending part which sort of redeems the whole premise of this even being a choice-driven game in the first place.

But the beginning, getting to choose an icon and screenname at the start, set up some false expectations for me: I thought I would be playing as "me," and I could pick what I'd have typed in every situation, but it became pretty clear pretty soon (but after the Travis choice) that I'd have to pick some stuff I'd never say, and later on my character would do stuff outside of my control in between conversations. There were stupid, un-healthy choices that made me want to grab this fictional kid and shake them. The gulf between the character and me kept widening. That can work; I can think of The Last of Us’s ending for one, which did play with this well. But if I couldn't play as me, what types of choices was I supposed to make? My attempts to generally steer the protagonist away from obsessing with Emily in my choices seemed to take me away from the most intended path through the game, and I could see in my playthrough where some of story branches seemed like they were being hastily bent back on narrative track.

Even at the end, these characters still felt indistinct. I could at least figure out how Emily felt throughout (her feelings aren't subtle), but I didn't even know what my own character was thinking, really. That can work in a short story, or set up a different way, but it didn't feel quite right when I was also trying to make choices for them. It did feel like the game was leaning heavily on the player projecting onto these characters as opposed to making them more distinctive and defined, and I wonder how this game would translate to people that don't share the same cultural and generational backgrounds as the game's.

I'm not even completely sure, though, if it's right to try to approach Emily is Away as a conventional “story.” Trying to judge it as a piece of storytelling, looking at its dialogue and characters and plot that way, the game doesn't quite work. But if we take it as what it seemed more interested in being, as a sort of time capsule, as a series of IM conversations? It's pretty much just as inane, just as impenetrable, just as faux-bored and try-hard and over-sincere as a conversation between two young sorta-adults would be. And there are glimpses, glimpses of this character you're (sort of) controlling, in the later chapters when the drama starts picking up, when the online “friendship” gets challenged a bit, in the margins of what your character is willing and unwilling to commit to screen. Emily -- hazy, far off, out of reach Emily -- was, to me, actually a bigger problem than the inscrutable main character, because I get that that was sort of baked into who the main character was. I think Emily was left intentionally generic, waiting for the player to fill in with their own memories and regrets of the-one-that-got-away, but I don't think it quite works here, even though I can see how that could work, in an interactive setting, in a way it never could in written word or film.

But Emily is Away isn't a short story or a film. You could categorize Emily is Away interactive fiction, and I wouldn't disagree, but the thing is, the story isn't too deep, and it isn't particularly interactive in the way you might expect a "traditional" game to be either. By which I mean, for what is ostensibly a choice-based game, its choices don't matter all that much; they don't affect the story arc a lot, and a few too many of them focused my attention on the undefined protagonist instead of on where I think the game might've wanted it on more, on figuring out how to talk to the girl. But then there are the other interactions that really drive the game: poring over the AIM icons, fiddling with the text and background colors, and the tap-tap of your keyboard as you type out all the messages and wait with bated breath for the words from Emily to appear. I think you could remove the story choices and Emily is Away could still work, but you couldn't remove the rest of the interactivity and still get the same effect. Emily is Away is a computer program replicating another computer program, with the same sounds, and graphics, and keyboard input, and that allows it to hearken back into IM culture in a way other media can't. And the storytelling might have issues, but then that doesn't seem to be the focus. Emily is Away doesn't want to present you with its own stories -- it wants you to transpose onto itself memories of your own.