Mindmap

My previous mindmap from 247G, for the 4 E’s of narrative, can be found here (use your Stanford email): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MzRrYiTKnE_5F3Nz23BZX12oU-vTUmqd/view?usp=sharing

Writeup

Game Summary

I played Emily is Away by Kyle Seeley. I played through the entire storyline in about an hour, then researched the possible story trajectories afterwards. The game was released in 2015, targeting millennials who grew up with early-2000s messaging apps like MSN Messenger with its nostalgic interface. The game is available on PC/Mac/Linux via Steam at the following link:

• https://store.steampowered.com/app/417860/Emily_is_Away/

In the game, you play as one of Emily’s high school friends. The game proceeds in chapters, each set one year apart, as snapshots of your sporadic conversations with Emily as you attend different schools and deal with your own lives. In each chat, you catch up about each others lives through asking questions. The main conflict of the story is the tension of your complicated and inconclusive entanglements with Emily. Throughout the game, it slowly comes to light that you and Emily had (or still have, depending on your choices) feelings for one another. Despite that, you and Emily still lead new lives and have new friends and partners. In the end, there is no satisfying conclusion. Either you and Emily awkwardly grow distant or you bury your feelings.

Subgenre

I’d argue that Emily is Away falls within a category that is somewhere between a visual novel and Interactive Fiction. Due to its unique interface, it utilizes visuals in a way that a classical Interactive Fiction wouldn’t necessarily look to do. Yet, I don’t think it’s fair to call it a visual novel because it distinctly lacks character sprites. As a result, the player experience is a unique mixture of the two genres’ conventions. From the visual novel side, it uses a specific visual style to invoke nostalgia from the player. At the same, the story is delivered in a way that feels similar to an Interactive Fiction because it leaves a lot of space for players to fill in the gaps. I think one of the biggest strengths of the game is how the unique affordances and design of the game compliment its forms of narrative.

Delivering Narrative

Emily is Away delivers its narrative through primarily through the enacted narrative form. And although it doesn’t precisely align with Jenkins’ original definition, I would like to extend the idea and say that the game also utilizes evocative narrative, just that it alludes more so to a cultural phenomenon rather than a specific piece of IP. There’s snippets of embedded narrative as well, but the effects are miniscule and I would argue that it exists to supplement the game’s evocative narrative.

At its core, the game’s main gameplay loop creates enacted narrative by mirroring what the player’s character is doing. In the game, the player physically uses their keyboard to type out the messages that will be sent to Emily. This mechanic lets players advance the story through their actions so it feels like the player is truly the one communicating and trying to form a real connection with Emily. The affordance of letting players physically type with their keyboard creates a strong sense of player participation and more deeply immerses the player in the narrative. To add additional immersion, the player’s character even sometimes makes a typo and they need to input more keystrokes to delete and type the right message; sometimes they add additional details to the message beyond what’s written in the dialogue. A more immersive player experience promotes the aesthetic of narrative, but the additional details add tiny pockets of discovery to give the player a more varied experience.

Later, this mechanic is additionally used to imply the player character’s thought process. In one of the endings, the player character cannot bring himself to confront Emily. In the chat box during the final chapter, the dialogue choices are the questions that he really wants to ask, but he ends up erasing the whole message to ask an uneventful question instead. By embodying the character and typing vicariously, the player builds a stronger empathetic connectionwith the character and experiences the narrative aesthetic more thoroughly.

Jenkins’ original idea for evocative narrative was that it should reference a story that the player already knows. I’d argue that, for the ideal target audience, the game applies evocative narrative by alluding to the culture of communicating on an early 2000s social media app. For players who have a nostalgia and fond memories of using these apps, the layout, UI, and texting conventions immediately set the mood of the game. When these players set a profile picture that is a sign of the early 2000s and reads their friends’ dramatic monologues on their profiles, it should remind them of their own experiences on the platform — including their own experience with texting friends or lovers that they fell out of touch with.

The profile customization is also where bits of embedded narrative are scattered to supplement the evocative. In the chat with Emily, the player can always click on the bottom left button to see her profile. It changes along with the trends but also her mental state. If the player reads the profile before starting the chapter, they can build a mental model of what Emily’s mental state is before reading the dialogue.

Criticisms

My main criticism is that the story operated on the assumption that the player would be inherently romantically interested in Emily. I played through the game with the goal of trying to maintain a long-distance friendship, hoping to establish a mutual support system. I tried my best to pick all of the options that validated her anecdotes, like what a friend would say. However, the game never considered that as a possible mindset for the player. One example of this was when, in Chapter 3, I picked the dialogue option to encourage her to come visit and explicitly denied going out and told her to not bring alcohol. However, my character betrays the playstyle that I wanted to go for in between chapters. This was incredibly frustrating on a gameplay level because it flattened the narrative complexity the game would have had. At a bare minimum, the game design takeaway is that I will avoid insinuating any playstyles that I do not encourage.

Not only does this frustrate me on a gameplay level, it reinforces a singular viewpoint that reduces women to exclusively be the object of romantic affection. It really exemplifies anna anthropy’s point from the Zinesters reading: that games from the 2010s era are made by men and for men. I think designing games and plots with these biases in mind is what perpetuates toxic cultures in gaming. In my game, I will try to examine biases in the themes I’m trying to convey and ask myself the question: is there a choice or mindset that I assume the players will hold?

Conclusion

In conclusion, Emily is Away draws empathy towards the gradual dissolution of relationships when separated by time and distance. It accomplished this by having the player enact a correspondence with Emily in an interface that evokes nostalgia for messenger apps of the early 2000s. The game successfully created a bittersweet mood with its endings. In the end, my character was unable to say all the things he wanted to, and his relationship with Emily hangs in an uncertain place. It’s happier than ceasing to communicate altogether, but it leaves a small amount of dissatisfaction as well.