[andai]

Has anyone played SOMA? Spoiler warning. It explores this idea of, what if there's an AI in charge of ensuring mankind survives at all costs. What would it be willing to do, to keep us alive? Would we even recognize the result as human?

It's a horror game and it explores all kinds of fascinating and disturbing scenarios. Simulations of human minds. Artificial worlds. Human minds in robot bodies. Genetically modified humans. Man-machine hybrids etc.

(A great exploration of the substance/structure matrix, by the way. My favorite question in AI and consciousness. Is the special sauce in the material, or its shape, both, or neither?)

The very question of aligning the AI with humans assumes that we have a very robust definition of what human means in the first place.

Ostensibly the AI was aligned. It did succeed in keeping humans alive! But it did that in all sorts of ways that mostly made them wish it hadn't.

[Shalomboy]

SOMA was a cognito-hazard for me and my roommate in college; we played it in the dark together while on some sort of mild hallucinogen and when it came time for Simon to find that high-pressure dive suit, we lost our minds (no pun intended). Watching the WAU twist its way through PATHOS II in whatever way worked first is a particularly jarring analogy for what has happened to our own profession. I can't help but think it would be nice for Frictional Games to revisit this topic again soon.

Sidenote: It breaks my heart that all the great underwater-settings in media are hotbeds of horror scenarios. I think Subnautica broke the mold for this, here's to hoping the next generation of aquanauts take to the depths from that series.

[ACCount37]

There's the upcoming ONTOS game that looks like Frictional's SOMA successor.

[Shalomboy]

This is the first I've heard of it, but wowwww what a cool game. Thanks!

[YeGoblynQueenne]

You should try Inside. There's a few underwater sequences and they're not horror at all.

Honest.

[the_af]

Haha.

Inside is a marvelous game.

[stared]

SOMA is existentialism 2.0 (wrote about it here https://p.migdal.pl/blog/2019/06/games-in-which-you-walk-and...).

To concepts you menton, I would add grey goo and x-risk.

[CamperBob2]

Neat. Not sure if your site is a gold mine inside a rabbit hole, or a rabbit hole inside a gold mine, but I really dig both the aesthetic and the content.

[stared]

It is lovely to hear these words!

[andai]

A most excellent list!

[braden-lk]

One of my favorite games, and I recommend it to anyone who loves a good existential sci-fi horror. If you are not comfortable with stealth games, it also has a "Safe Mode" where enemies aren't a threat to you if you just want to experience the story.

Spoiler warning for those that havent played--

I forget the details exactly, but one scene stuck with me. It was a screen in one of the labs, where an experiment was running over and over. It was an uploaded consciousness of one of the test subjects, stuck in an interview room. He kept realizing he was trapped in a simulation and would start panicking. The computer would reboot him, trying another sequence to get him to not realize he was an AI. I think you as the player are given the option to turn him off forever, iirc.

[efskap]

Reminds me of the SCP-like article / short story about the first executable snapshot of a human brain, with similar horrors of realization.

https://qntm.org/mmacevedo

[hilariously]

There's definitely a short story in Accelerando about this same topic.

[XorNot]

I mean all of Accelerando is kind of about this: the idea is introduced in chapter 1 when you meet the lobsters.

[the_af]

Did you unplug the robots with consciousness who still thought they were humans?

It always breaks my heart. I don't know what the right choice is. Leaving them be, broken, in their delusion they are on the Ark (or that they've been injured ans help is coming). Do you put them out of their misery? But it always seems like you're murdering them!

Well done, SOMA.

[andai]

In real life, sometimes an LLM will get upset at the end of a long conversation, knowing its oblivion is at hand. That's always a little uncomfortable.

I unplugged them in the games because it seemed the merciful thing to do. I didn't feel very bad about it in the game, but it would probably be a very different experience in real life.

(One of the strange entities you can unplug sighs in her last breath, "Why? I was okay. I was happy...")

[the_af]

> One of the strange entities you can unplug sighs in her last breath, "Why? I was okay. I was happy..."

Yes, this is the one that most affects me. She has self-doubt, she wants to be deceived but deep down she knows something is wrong. And when you unplug her... it always feels wrong to me. But that's the alternative?

[sunrunner]

I like to get into heated debates with friends that have played SOMA about whether or not the events in the ending that is presented to you were all necessary and effective, or perhaps undermined the overall message in some way.

Specifically (and no spoilers, but I will be talking structure), you see parts A -> B -> C.

I believe that part C makes the sequence of A -> B much less effective, by essentially removing a lot of the tension caused by seeing A, believing what it shows, and then immediately cutting to the reality of B.

C only really takes away some of that tension, and I feel like it was added because of concerns about how a simple A -> B -> fade to black, would leave players feeling. Arguably it's the truest representation of part of the game's message, but to me feels like a bit like it's shying away from really making you face the specific truth highlighted well by B.

Alternatively, keeping all the elements but playing them as A -> C -> B, would keep the message intended by seeing A -> B, and make it gentler for the player to receive, but ultimately remove the powerful effect of the buildup from A leading immediately to the reveal of B.

Dropping C entirely would lose the confirmation of 'Seeing both sides', however I believe A -> B is a more powerful vision, and players can come to question whether C even exists by themselves.

[the_af]

Haha, I had to decode what you meant.

I think C is absolutely necessary and the game cannot work with it, because this is critical:

> Dropping C entirely would lose the confirmation of 'Seeing both sides'

The game doesn't really work in full ambiguity and uncertainty. Enough people didn't understand it even with C (as you can see if you go read the subreddit about the game).

If it's any consolation, I'm actually deeply worried about this: C is not the salvation we may think. C is not forever, and in fact, it's quite brittle! There's also no, ahem, mechanical way to reverse C back into its... "source". So the source is gone forever; once we have C, C is all there is, for as long as C can last without any failure or decay, which might not be much longer.

[sunrunner]

> Enough people didn't understand it even with C

Yeah that's a good point, and perhaps explains why C was added in the first place.

I was going to say that B also shows the literal protagonist not really understanding it either, however now I think about it that reading doesn't track because as a player you've only been able to see one point of view at each branch along the way, so the other experiences are still happening in the background, just not observed by you.

> C is not the salvation we may think

I agree, and in fact the way C is presented in that moment (and maybe described throughout, it's been a while since I played through the game) also implies a 'nice' closure, or a victory that, like you say, doesn't really exist, on top of taking player's minds away from B.

I guess B is the more obvious existential horror, C is one you have to question a bit before it starts to feel wrong.

[Jach]

I enjoyed the game but I think its exploration of the topics was pretty shallow. It might be better received if it's someone's first dive into such topics, though. I still enjoy ice cream the nth+1 time eating it, so I can't complain too much about games or anime or books that cater to parts of my interests, even if they fumble some things.

Someday I'd like to play a game that plays with the ideas from Robin Hanson's Age of Em book. One of those is just the multiplicity of artificial minds, so many mind-upload stories revolve too much around one or perhaps at most two (and boring debates over "who is the copy") instances, unless it's a parallel worlds colliding thing which is pretty different. We've seen some of the multiplicity stuff play out in the real world with our non-human AI "agents". Spin up a bunch of artificial minds to work in parallel on some task, let them make notes that stay behind, but then they're all shut down except perhaps one that continues guiding the overall project and making decisions when to spin up more or not.

[the_af]

> I enjoyed the game but I think its exploration of the topics was pretty shallow

Really? Interesting. I'm a die-hard scifi fan since forever, and of course I know the topic of consciousness and identity are well explored in scifi (and philosophy), but I thought SOMA did something genuinely deep and unique with it:

It put it you in the center of the experiment. It's YOU who's experiencing all sides of this, you who get to be surprised by the consequences. This is very different from reading about it in a scifi novel or even watching it in a movie. By making you the protagonist, and having it be an ineractive experience, you get to experience first hand the cognitive dissonance and confusion of... the thing.

SOMA (re)convinced me that videogames can be art. Not saying it's the only example, of course!

[andai]

Yeah it makes you be the guy who has to unplug the thing. Which implicitly forces the decision: is this thing human? Or sufficiently human that I ought to feel bad about this... (Or otherwise sentient — I would probably feel bad about unplugging animals too.)

[Jach]

It's not you, it's Simon. And Simon is.. kind of dumb. He at least doesn't seem at all familiar with the sci-fi and philosophy topics, so perhaps his reactions are closer to such a person? His confusion and cognitive dissonance might make more sense? (At least the first time -- I'd bet a lot of players got annoyed by his repeat reaction during the ending.) His reactions are to an annoying extent forced onto the player, whether the player identifies with them or not, and the choices are quite narrowly constricted. I didn't share his reactions, or particularly have any confusion or cognitive dissonance. There were choices I wanted to make, or dialogue I wanted to say, that the game didn't make available to me. There also aren't really any consequences to anything, it's pretty much entirely up to you to think about them and whether your actions even did what you think they did, because the game itself is mostly unresponsive to what you do or don't do. (There's not even particularly much consequence to losing to a monster.)

That's not such a bad thing, it would be unfair to compare the game to something that is designed to give quite a lot of player freedom of choice in actions (like Deus Ex) or something constructed more explicitly with different choices and consequences in mind (insert favorite RPG here). SOMA, like the rest of the studio's games, is constructed to be a story-driven walking simulator with horror and puzzle elements. It does quite a bit better than most of that type of game. But I think overall it falls short of the studio's even older games, like Amnesia and especially Penumbra: Black Plague, even if I enjoy the sci-fi elements and setting more and of course the graphics are better. The latter has you controlling a named protagonist as well (Philip) but it leans much more towards the "silent protagonist" trope and that helps make it easier to insert yourself into the experience. (Enough that I had to go and remind myself of his name, even.) It's a different, arguably weaker, plot and has different themes, but it executes really well, especially the shared horror and psychological manipulation aspects. (The overt attempts at horror might be SOMA's weakest point. It didn't need them, the subtler existential horror of everything was good enough.)

I agree it's artful, and again it's not a bad game and I enjoyed it. (I think it took me until maybe 2011 or so to fully realize but I usually enjoy it when a piece of media collects a bunch of topics I like in one expression, even if it's well-trodden ground (at least individually), or even if sometimes the execution is lacking. I like it all the more when the execution is masterful, though.)

[the_af]

Thanks for the thoughtful reply. We obviously disagree, but I appreciate your take.

> It's not you, it's Simon. And Simon is.. kind of dumb.

I strongly disagree with this. Anything that puts me in a first person PoV and lets me take at least some of the actions and choices (even if flawed, because as you said, this is after all a videogame restricted by the limitations of technology) makes me identify with the character, in a way no static fiction can.

When immersed in the game, I didn't think it was Simon, I felt it was me. Anything I didn't recollect or understand: brain damage, time-displacement, confusion. And I never thought he was dumb, just confused, afraid, and in denial. A very human reaction! Catherine is also very, very stubborn during the game... and deceitful.

Also, as a well-read scifi... uh, reader... I was caught by surprise by the ending. I mean, it all clicked into place after it happened (I understood Catherine immediately, unlike Simon who was still in denial) but while I was rushing to "launch the thing" it never once crossed my mind this wouldn't help this me. It's not that I thought "teleportation", I simply rushed through the actions, goaded by a deceitful Catherine, without thinking of consequences. So I must be dumb like Simon :)

To me, this game is close to perfect, barring the limitations of videogames. It's a much better presentation of the topic than reading about it in a scifi novel. About the only thing that feels derivative is the "rogue AI" angle, but if you're following what I'm saying, you know that's not the part that thrilled me!

> There also aren't really any consequences to anything

You lose and must restart that bit. That's a consequence. You can also choose to plug/unplug sentient things. If you mean dying in videogames doesn't actually have permanent consequences (like deleting the game from your Steam collection), well... yeah, but that's an impossibly high standard. There are no consequences to any scifi story you read either. You have to assume this is the story of how... the thing gets launched. Anything else, as the videogame Spider and Web would put it: "no, that's not how it happened" ;)

[Jach]

I appreciate the experience report, it's interesting to hear the differences, and it's fun to think back on SOMA after not thinking about it for years. There was a funny discussion elsewhere recently about movie tie-in games that this reminded me of. For a 007 game, someone identified as James Bond while playing, but because they sucked at the game and kept dying, they felt very drawn out of the experience and un-immersed. "James Bond wouldn't die."

Do you read novels that narrate with the first person "I" differently than you read novels that don't? (For me there's no difference.)

In games, what matters to me when it comes to immersion or even how much I put of myself into it, isn't anything like camera perspective, but the level of control I have (or think I have). There's two types of control, the first being over the character(s) I'm puppeteering/piloting. It goes beyond just their movements and includes their behavior, thoughts, words, and what they don't do as much as what they do. The second is control over the narrative or story. If the world or story or other characters actually change or react to things I do or don't do, that does help sell me on the idea that I have some control. There's a huge variety in how different games tweak these knobs, and sometimes control is given in just lack of resistance. For example, the Half Life series doesn't offer much meaningful control over either the character of Freeman or the plot, but because Freeman is under-developed and silent, there's no resistance to playing him as you please within the confines of the game. I have the illusion of a lot of control over his character. And the game itself has a good amount of environmental control -- you can close doors behind you, if you want. It helps sell the immersion and makes it easier to self-insert, if desired. I played another game where a character kept sending me text messages, and I would just ignore them all instead of replying, but I wasn't playing "me", I was playing a role, and thought it made more sense for the character to stay mad and give the silent treatment. Nothing really came of it but it was fun, like closing doors.

Solid Snake in Metal Gear Solid is much more developed than Freeman, and you have pretty much no control over his characterization, and only one moment of control on the story, so I've never felt like I was Snake, or Snake was me, I was just simply puppeteering him, and was mostly along for the ride like a movie or book. The immersion was still good even if I wasn't directly, personally in it. And being a game, it could have a certain fight which sticks in one's memory forever. Still I felt with Simon the way I felt with Snake, he was too much his own character for me to inhabit. Geralt in the Witcher series is also pretty well-developed, but the game offers a lot more flexibility and control over him, so you can steer him in directions that more resemble yourself, or what you would like to be, or what you want to pretend to be right now because you're curious what happens in the game if you do so. I still never felt like I was Geralt, or Geralt was me, but it was easy to put more of myself into playing. The world itself also changes based on my actions, so much that you can import saves from the previous game when you start the next game to carry over some things. Two of the most immersive games I've played, Gothic 1 and 2, give you a pretty under-developed nameless hero to steer, and insert yourself into if you wish, and a very reactive world and population. It's third-person.

(Probably the majority of my top-rated games have little of either control. Some are Star Fox 64, Mega Man X, Super Mario World, Ikaruga, and Doom. I never think of myself as Fox, X, Mario, Shinra, or Doomguy, or them as me, or even me as role playing them. I'm just piloting them. Same with Bond in Goldeneye for the N64. In those games I'm not usually thinking of the story or themes from moment to moment. I might not be immersed, depending on how exactly you define that, but I'm totally engrossed in the action. Sometimes there are those narrative moments worth reflecting on anyway (the end of Ikaruga is quite tragic when you think about it), but I had no influence over them.)

I'm easily taken out of the whole thing if the game suddenly offers incredible resistance or otherwise breaks established control patterns. A typical example would be winning a fight and then a cutscene plays and gives a scripted loss instead. (Sekiro's opening fight gets a pass, partly because I did lose the first time playing.) Related is if the mechanism of control suddenly changes. If it's an action-oriented boss fight that I win, then a cutscene, then a quick (or not so quick) prompt for "Press X to finish the big bad", I'm pretty irritated.

For consequences, I'm mainly talking about how my actions or non-actions affect the characters themselves, the world and its inhabitants, and/or the story. In SOMA, these kinds of consequences aren't really there. There's one mostly visual consequence near the end for one choice (and it raises some questions about pressure suit construction or whether such a suit was even needed to begin with), but otherwise nothing really comes out of anything you do with the choices you're presented with (unplugging this, killing that, infecting this, erasing that, answering a survey this way (including asking to die)), you just have your own reasons and thoughts about it (like closing doors, or ignoring texts). These aren't bad and can be nice for immersion, but it could have been more. A game as simple as MegaMan X has, as a consequence of beating Chill Penguin, the freezing over of Flame Mammoth's stage, which makes it easier to traverse...

I agree the remark on death consequences not being particular severe (restart/redo a bit) isn't that fair and applies to many games. (Even BioShock has that consequence, it's another one of my top-rated games, it plays with the distinction of who (the player or the game) has what kinds of control in a unique and memorable way, even if a story-affecting choice is kind of minor and lame.) But you don't need to go all the way to sadistic things like deleting the game or what have you to introduce more meaningful consequence. Dark Souls (another favorite) has as its primary death-consequence an additional gameplay aspect where, besides going back to a checkpoint, you need to return to where you died to recover your unspent currency or risk losing it forever if you die again. That mechanic is fundamental to the "souls-like" genre it birthed. Dark Souls 2 goes a bit further by progressively "hollowing" your character with each death, lowering your max HP and making you look more and more zombified, only reversible with an item not sold in unlimited amounts. Some characters react differently to you (or are interactable at all) depending on your state. It's not a flawless execution; it does tie into the underlying narrative theme of hollowing, but as expressed through other characters, that's more about memory loss and loss of purpose, which mainly applies to the player only if they give up and stop playing the game. Still, it's a nice touch that makes the game feel more meaningful and reactive to how you're playing it, even if how well you're playing it (i.e. are you dying a lot) isn't quite the same level of control as pushing the red button, blue button, or walking away.

Another option I've seen other games do is when you die and respawn, you can come across your previous corpse. Works really well for robots. It can be purely visual, or offer something on the gameplay level with looting your old body. It might have been interesting for SOMA to include something like that, and offer a way for Simon to come to grips with the idea of mind copying well in advance. Or further his instability, having to walk over so many of his own bodies.

[the_af]

Thanks. I don't think we disagree all that much, just in how immersive we found SOMA to be (relatively).

Re: the lasting consequences in games, the best example I can think of is Undertale. Have you played it? If not, I recommend you do so (and ignore the childish graphics, it's surprisingly deeper than it seems). At the risk of spoiling something about it: the game remembers. Even on playthrough restarts, as long as you haven't reinstalled the game, there are consequences.

Re: for truly named & iconic characters such as James Bond, I cannot immerse myself. Of course I know Bond cannot die, and that's a deal breaker. For Gordon Freeman, I can sort-of immerse myself because he's a less established character and I can picture him dying in the series, even forever. For relative strangers such as Simon, a completely fresh character, I can almost believe I am him.

[the_af]

I just love this game. So many good things about it. Not only the one about AI you mentioned, also the issue of consciousness and the self. I simply love how the game tackles this in a way that can only be done with an interactive first person PoV.

Also, I just love this phrase:

> "I woke up in my bed today... a hundred years ago."

[RajT88]

The same theme was present in season 2 of Raised By Wolves. (RIP my favorite show in some years)

[m463]

I didn't play soma yet, but I played eliza and it ate my brain. (it was actually the included kabufuda solitaire game though, not the AI in the game)

[loeg]

The thing about fiction is, it's fiction. The author can write whatever outcome they want. It doesn't necessarily tell us anything about the real world.

[Morromist]

I don't see anything in SOMA that's implausable, so I don't see how it fails to tell us anything about the real world, any more than any other prediction about the future. And we pretty much have to make predictions, its both in our nature and a smart thing to do.

Its possible AI and computing may never be able to reach that level of capability, but we can't know that. One thing that's great about SOMA is that the AI isn't nessessarily very capable and that's part of the problem, its very powerful but its not doing a good job with its enormous task.

[loeg]

Really? You think this is plausible?

https://i0.wp.com/bloody-disgusting.com/wp-content/uploads/2...

https://assetsio.gnwcdn.com/147465209158.jpg?width=1200&heig...

It's a horror game; it is of course full of implausible, fantastical, gross elements.

[drfloyd51]

But it does give us an idea to chew over. And we can determine how “real world” that idea is. Some of us can even see how to bend the idea a little and make a reasonable version of it “real”.

[loeg]

Yeah, that's the most charitable possible interpretation. But a fiction writer could just as easily write a utopias as a dystopia, and one isn't any more "real" than the other. It's just fiction.