SOMA and Personal Identity

King of Posters
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Personal identity is one of my favorite philosophical topics to think about. What types of immortality or perceived immortality are available to us, and why do we find them desirable? If your consciousness can be stored or transferred, is the copy really you? Do Star Trek characters die every time they use a teleporter? What constitutes the self in the first place? That sort of thing.

SOMA is a horror game by the same team as Amnesia: The Dark Descent, but it involves a different type of horror. There are some tense encounters with monsters, and parts of the game may be considered violent or cruel, but the real horror of the game is existential.

The game’s story is the type that you might expect to include a surprise twist, but it doesn’t really have one. You understand what’s happening to the protagonist early on. He doesn’t seem to catch on quite as quickly, and some see his lack of understanding as a weakness of the game. But I see him taking refuge in denial more than lacking intelligence.

And while the basic story is straightforward, the horror comes in as the game explores the implications. Is Simon helping to save humanity? Does it even matter whether he succeeds? Is he even Simon?

I’ve come across few video games as bleak as this one. In that regard, I consider it up there with I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.

Obviously, these ideas have been explored elsewhere and are not new. But SOMA presents them in an artful way. And it doesn’t hurt that other aspects of the game’s design are strong as well. The environments at times reminded me of a calmer, more contemplative Dead Space. I know that some people wished Frictional had gone further in that direction, eliminating all the monsters. (There are apparently mods that do this.) But despite some frustration in a few of the encounters, I think they are an important part of the game.

Although it didn’t get as much attention as Amnesia, SOMA is probably profitable by now. I look forward to seeing what the developers do next.

Finally, if you have already played SOMA, you might enjoy this AGDQ speedrun from January. Don’t watch it if you have not played the game and might one day, though.

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I really liked the Transmissions series


Videos and short stories unlocked as part of a promotional ARG that I don’t think is playable anymore

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This game is cool and I loved the ideas but I hated the execution. Protag is way too much of a dweeb.

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As a heads up, if you sign up for the Humble Bundle’s “Humble Monthly” deal you can get the first game from next month’s mystery bundle right now, which happens to be SOMA. So basically, if you wanted the game you could sign up for one month for $12, get SOMA now and seven or so other mystery games next month, then cancel and still get to keep them.

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I actually completely disagree with this!

I just finished the game tonight and loved it. I don’t know why there would be any frustration with the monster encounters; I never died once, although I did get hit a few times. The game is really, really good about telling you each monster’s capabilities without actually telling you, if you look and listen carefully. Which is what the game is all about.

I’ve never seen the “abandoned derelict station” environment done so well. All the little clicks and hisses were wonderful. This is a game that begs for headphones.

As for the dweeby protagonist, the VA in general was the thing I initially thought was most questionable and then halfway through came around to thinking was the best. These people are mostly nerds, and the last humans alive, banished to the bottom of the ocean. The script mostly avoids cliche and each of these people seems like a believable human, something I think is actually helped by the fact that the VAs are obviously not professionals. Simon and his main interlocutor never commit the plot-sin of just never telling each other what’s really going on, unless they have a motive to keep it hidden; they fill each other in on gaps in their knowledge quickly and efficiently so that they can be a better team. Though there is a kind of “audio log” mechanic (though contextualized better so that it’s not literally audio logs that people stand around recording and then dumping at convenient locations for no particular reason), the dialogues aren’t too on the nose with giving helpful puzzle-solving info to the player, nor are they all dramatically amped up to 11.

It’s a good game.

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I really wanted to continue playing this but what sounds like a minor annoyance ruined the game for me.

What bothered me was the way health is tied to how many headache inducing effects are added on screen at once (the screen gets more blurry, the character starts limping, etc)

The character becomes a real wreck at low HPs let me tell you. Just walking around with no monsters around made me feel nauseous. (Health doesn’t recover naturally) At one point I was save scumming constantly to avoid losing any health.

Somehow I seem to be the only person bothered by this and don’t know why

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The game is pretty good at giving you health-recharge stations after any segment where you could be expected to take damage.

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I think criticisms of the main character’s obliviousness are missing the point. SOMA is all about the horror of neuropsychological trauma. The consciousness transfers and the robots confused about their bodies, all of that is a science fictional extrapolation of real cognitive phenomena: Anosognosia. There are many disorders, usually caused by physical trauma to specific areas of the brain, that cause cognitive, perceptual, or performative deficits that the conscious mind is completely oblivious to.

I’ll give you some examples. After experiencing traumatic injury to the right hemisphere of the brain, one can develop a condition called Hemineglect. A patient with hemineglect will tend to ignore one side of their visual field without realizing it. When asked to draw a clock, the patient will draw a circle and two hands, but will only draw the numbers on the right side of the clock (If you’ve watched the show Hannibal, you’ll remember a great dramatic portrayal of this test). The patient will ignore objects in the left half of their visual field, eating from only the right side of a plate, shaving only the right side of their face, writing only on the right side of the page. The patient will be completely unaware of this deficit, and if questioned will claim that they did draw the clock correctly, and they did eat their entire dinner.

Anosognosia can occur with a number of other conditions. Many of them are even more foreign to neurotypical experience, some to the point that they’re difficult to even imagine. For example, a patient who has suffered damage to the V5 area of their visual cortex may experience Akinetopsia, also known as motion blindness. A sufferer of Akinetopsia is unable to perceive the motion of objects in their visual field. They may see a series of snapshots of the object in a given point in space as it moves, but they are unable to form these snapshots together into a fluid perception of its motion.

There are a number of other aphasias and agnosias, too many for me to write up. One man may repeat a single syllable to the rhythm of a sentence and be completely convinced that he said the proper sentence he’d intended. A woman may be completely paralyzed on the left side of her body and swear up and down that she can do cartwheels. When things go drastically wrong, the brain compensates. Sometimes, part of that compensation includes hiding the deficit even from itself.

In SOMA, when Simon continually looks for excuses to justify his strange body or his sudden manifestation of a flashlight or his ability to breathe underwater, he’s exhibiting a case of anosognosia. The brain is unable to process the strange circumstances it’s been squeezed into, so it does its best to ignore or rationalize them.

This kind of stuff is very real, and can be very frightening. We’re all potentially one stroke away from experiencing disorders like those I’ve mentioned in this post. SOMA is, in its way, about this anxiety. And I can’t think of another game that has ever even approached subject matter like this. I thought it was marvelous.

(Putting my Cognitive Science BA to use tonight!)

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I 100% agree. The entirety of Simon’s apparent stupidity (and the impulsive actions the player most likely takes as him, such as shutting down the WAU) is based on him being in a state of denial after major traumas. The game starts with his car crash and just before you shoot the ARK he talks about how much horrible things he’s (seemingly) gone through in just one or two days. The ending of the game (his realization the “he” will not magically awaken on the ark) hinges on Simon still not being able to understand his nature.

However, the poor voice acting for Simon doesn’t do this interpretation favors. I understand why they got an amateur to play to him (he is a layman from the 2015 among expert scientists from 2100), but the weak VA established early on can make you think the character is actually just non-chalant about finding out the world ended/he’s a copy of his consciousness/etc.

Like Cuba, I loved the atmosphere in this game and the execution of its ideas. I just wish the game had not been so close to it’s three obvious inspirations (Greg Egan’s The Jewel and Permutation City, Peter Watt’s Starfish). The setting, the entire plot, and the existential dilemmas are a patchwork of these three. I wish the game had done a little bit more on it’s own since the developers are clearly very intelligent and understand their subject matter very well.

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Again: I don’t think it’s a weak VA, really. His “nonchalance” is the defensive mechanism of a not terribly bright person dealing with almost incomprehensibly bad news. A huge part of my job is giving normal people really bad news; they do not react with wailing and gnashing of teeth. They react kind of like Simon. “Wow, that’s fucked up man. So what’s for dinner?” The enormity hits them later, but the game doesn’t last long enough for that. We only really begin to see it creep in in the final lines, after Simon launches the Ark.

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Frictional Games often posts straightforward discussions of sales, reception to their games, and the future of their company. There’s an update today in which they reveal that SOMA is now past the point of breaking even. They plan to work on two projects at a time going forward.

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I listened to an interview the other day that made me rethink my assumptions about hypothetically storing the contents of one’s mind in a computer as an attempt to survive death. I’ve always thought that this would be useless to the person being copied and would benefit only other people, who would be able to continue to interact with the copy.

But what if you make it a Ship of Theseus situation, replacing your neurons gradually with artificial parts so that you never lose your sense of a continuation of consciousness throughout the process? And if that were successful, how different would it really be from making the leap all at once?

Of course, the issue remains that if you can make one copy, you can probably make two. What if each neuron removed is not discarded but assembled in another body that could be switched on at the end of the process? Now which one is you? In SOMA’s terms, who wins the “coin flip” from your perspective?

By the way, SOMA on PS4 is is very cheap right now.

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Another informative update about sales and things. No details about the two games that they are working on now, other than that they are working on them.

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I should finish this

I got I’m-not-in-the-mood-for-this-to-be-challenging stuck in a hallway type deal with two of the you-can’t-look-at-them bad guys after an ocean segment after the station where you “meet” the woman?

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For anyone who has been avoiding this game because of the monsters, they just added “safe mode” to the PS4 version. (It was already present on other platforms, I believe.)

While I found some of the hide-and-seek parts frustrating, I wonder whether this new mode will diminish the experience. It might not make a big difference, as the central horror themes have nothing to do with being chased by monsters. I guess I might just have to use this as an excuse to run through the game again.

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Free for the next 48 hours.

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Someone reviewing unused content found in a ZIP file in SOMA’s installation.
 

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SOMA is heavily discounted right now, to coincide with the announcement of Amnesia 3 (which I guess is one one of the two games that they announced were in the works a while back).

I don’t remember whether I mentioned this in another thread, but I did eventually play through SOMA a second time with safe mode on and I think the game is better with dangerous monsters. Even though, as I mentioned above, I found some of the encounters frustrating. (I think I complained about them to @Bee at the time.)

This has nothing to do with SOMA, but over the past few months I’ve been trying most of the horror offerings that support VR on PS4. Each one has been disappointing for different reasons, and I couldn’t help thinking that it wouldn’t be that difficult to make some of those games scarier. I wonder if they intentionally hold back so that more people will play them, or if they simply lack the creativity to do more with them.

VR support is supposed to be coming to Dreams soon. I could see that resulting in some quality VR horror experiences.

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SOMA is 3 USD right now on PS4. Still their best game by far, though I liked Amnesia 3.

You can also get the first two Amnesia games for 3 USD (total).

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Oh shit, been craving a SOMA replay, and $3 is a small price to play to put it on my TV. Thanks for the heads up!

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