Emily is Away and (Literally) Me
Whenever I have to create a character for a game I’m about to play, rarely do I make myself. I’ve made Panda Shepard, the steely space marine from my latest Mass Effect replay who’ll do anything for her crew and always does the right thing. I’ve made The RZA, my saintly Fallout character who roams the wastelands and helps people out when she can. I’ve made Corpus Spongiosum, my lizard man in Skyrim who occasionally steals but otherwise has a heart of gold. But never did I make Garth Ginsburg, the cowardly fat ginger who wouldn’t last a second in any of these fictional worlds. I like escaping into a role, I like being the good guy, and I like making decisions through someone else’s eyes. Even if they’re making the same decisions Garth Ginsburg would.
However, a few weeks ago, I started Emily is Away. It’s the first game in the Emily is Away trilogy, in which you go through stories by interacting with lovingly-recreated-but-legally-distinct social media platforms in the 2000s during high school and college. The first game takes place on fake AIM, and out of laziness, I made my name Garth Ginsburg and used my frequent internet username, Uncle Jam. (My main AIM name back in the day, as I had a few accounts, was big__orange. It didn’t occur to me to use that name in the moment, but even if it did, I don’t want any Trump connotations ruining my good time. I have red hair! That’s it!)
When I made this decision, I was unaware of the “lovingly recreated” aspects of the game, and upon hearing the old Windows start-up sounds and picking my AIM icon, I was immediately sucked into the game’s orbit. I wasn’t playing as a character. I was playing as myself. Or at least an idealized and probably inaccurate projection of myself.
The trilogy had, shall we say, a rather profound effect on me.
I’d like to make two points before we go any further. The first is that I am a straight white male, and though the games do not gender you or define your sexuality, I’d argue that they’re mostly told from the perspective of people who are attracted to women, particularly men. It was very easy to graft myself onto these games, but others, no matter their place on the sexual spectrum, may have a harder time. (And from some writing I’ve seen, they very much did.)
The second is, well: SPOILERS. I’d go so far as to say that they particularly matter here. So if you want to play these games, go do that first. The first game lasts around forty-five minutes, the second around two and half hours, and the third around five hours. Or you don’t care about spoilers, in which case, honestly, good for you. Also, there’ll be an explanation for all the songs.
Content warnings for sexual assault, suicide, mental health issues, and emotional abuse.
Emily is Away
Much of the story of all three of the games can change depending on the choices you make and the dialogue options you pick. So what I will describe below is not the story of Emily is Away so much as my story.
The game is divided into five chapters. In Chapter 1, I started off by talking with “my” friend Emily. We talked about how a guy named Brad keeps sending her messages, and about a party that “our” friend Travis was throwing. Ultimately, we decided to attend. In Chapter 2, we were both starting college, and Emily was having problems with Travis, with whom she had entered a relationship after the party. I talked her through her issues, and the tone was still friendly. In Chapter 3, they had broken up, and I invited her to campus to visit. I didn’t set any boundaries for what to expect, as I didn’t read our relationship as a sexual one. However, in Chapter 4, it’s revealed that we had sex, and Emily feels like I took advantage of her heartbroken state. We talked through the encounter and parted on good terms, but in Chapter 5, I tried starting a conversation with her, and she clearly didn’t want to talk to me. So I left the chat, and the game ended.
Let’s address an important point up top: When you read that above paragraph, more than a few red flags about consent may have been raised in your brain. Again, when I made the decision to invite Emily to my campus, I wasn’t aware that I was choosing to have a sexual encounter with her. Part of this may be some barely believable naïveté on my part, but up to that point, I was intentionally choosing non-flirtatious dialogue options, and I had only referred to us as friends. I wish I had I had a more compelling reason as to why, but I didn’t. It was because I didn’t like her taste in music. (In real life, I’m not that shallow! I swear!)
Since I made these choices, I thought our boundaries were properly established. As a result, our hook-up felt like a decision the game made for me, not one I consciously made myself, as if it was suggesting that I couldn’t possibly have any other motive other than sex. It’s the biggest flaw of Emily is Away by a fairly wide margin. Potentially, and rightfully, a fatal flaw for some.
In my real life, besides being younger than the characters in this game and being off AIM well before the end of middle school, nothing like this ever happened to me. However, there were certainly shades of it. I did have a female friend I was close with in high school visit me on campus. However, the intent wasn’t romantic or sexual, and it never went down that path. (One time, she came up so we could go see The Roommate together with some mutual friends of ours in the shitty movie theater in the nearby shopping center. Another time, it was for a Blue Valentine screening on campus. It’s hard to get more platonic than that.) I also visited her in her apartment in the city plenty of times, but I was happy with whoever wanted to go where because it’s hard to overstate how much her friendship meant to me at a very pivotal moment in my life.
(Also, for the record, I went to college a short train ride outside of NYC. Plenty of my high school friends wound up in or around the city, and having them come to campus was easy to arrange. It certainly wasn’t the big deal the characters in Emily is Away made it out to be. In hindsight, that was probably another contributing factor to the nonchalance with which I invited Emily to visit.)
The need to maintain a friendship after high school ended and college began was the element I connected with the most in the first game. There are a few massive flaws and paradoxes with my personality, and one of them is that I value my friendships and connections very much, to the extent that I still consider people I haven’t talked to in years “friends,” yet I’m terrible at maintaining correspondence and lines of communication. I miss people dearly, but something stops me from reaching out. A therapist will have to tell me why someday, other than the obvious point about social media being a toxic shitscape people who value happiness should avoid at all cost. (More on that later.)
In playing Emily is Away, I wasn’t recreating an experience with an old friend. I was living out the fantasy of being someone capable of maintaining even a tiny semblance of a relationship with everyone I’ve ever lost contact with, even if only through AIM.
Then, however, came the sex. While this narrative turn stopped the correspondence simulator I was enjoying in my head up to that point, as well as the shock I felt at how much of The Roommate I remember, it was still successful in forming a different kind of experience.
After it was revealed that we hooked up and I knew that Emily was uncomfortable with what had happened, I, of course, felt terrible. Despite the line of consent being needlessly blurry thanks to the contrived nature of the story beat, it made me think about relationships that ended even when I did keep in contact. I’ve never had a falling out with any of my friends, but I wonder all the time if there are people I’d still be close with if I communicated better. If I didn’t have the impulse to give people a hard time, or if I knew then how to say things differently.
Emily is Away doesn’t give you the option to communicate with Emily precisely how you want to. It is, after all, just a video game that puts limits on what you can and cannot say. If there was better communication between Emily and myself, maybe the whole scenario could’ve been avoided. As it’s just a video game, I could look up whether a different outcome was possible. (The answer: Yes, but no matter what you do, the relationship will be over in the end.) However, in real life, I have no such recourse. Just endless doubt about every interaction I’ve ever had.
Ultimately, Emily is Away makes a case for clear communication and consent. Unfortunately, it may have done so unintentionally.
Emily is Away Too
Emily is Away Too, which from here on in we’ll refer to as Emily is Away 2 because it’s slightly easier to type, once again takes place in AIM during the 2006-2007 high school year. However, it’s a more thoroughly recreated digital experience. Not only can you post cringy lyrics in your AIM profile, but you can also visit Youtoob, a fake early version of Youtube, where you can watch era-appropriate content and listen to era-appropriate music. It also introduces a shocking new development: A second person you can talk to!
Once again, Emily is Away 2 is told in five chapters. In the first two chapters, you get to know the two friends with whom you’ll be chatting: Emily and Evelyn. Though both are more nuanced characters than what I’m about to describe, broadly speaking, Emily is a Death Cab kid and Evelyn is an Against Me! person. Evelyn’s the extrovert who yearns to experiment, and Emily is the introvert who’s more reluctant to do so. Both are eerily reminiscent of people I knew, and as a result, both felt plenty real to me.
Emily and Evelyn are also dealing with toxic romantic partners, and they both seek your advice. Eventually, it leads to a nightmare scenario that still exists today: Having to juggle multiple important relationship talks at once with two parties that both expect prompt replies. The game doesn’t make it possible to appease both, and one of them will sign off, angry at you for not being present enough in their conversation. I chose to spend more time talking to Emily, as her issue with her then ex-boyfriend seemed more concerning and possibly dangerous, and Evelyn walked away angry with me. However, we eventually reconciled, and the advice I gave Emily worked out (thank god). Eventually, Emily and Evelyn met in real like and became friends, and I never entered a romance with either.
The important aspect I left out is the level of your honesty with both. Mainly, Evelyn and Emily ask you similar questions at various points in the game, some surface level, some less so. The idea is that if you chose to pursue one of them romantically and lie about, say, the music you like to get a better shot with her, eventually, your dishonesty will be discovered once the two meet in real life. (In real life, it is of course possible to like more than one genre of music, as I very much did in my later days of high school. But I don’t remember how well the game deals with that nuance.)
Luckily, knowing the effects of playing as myself in the first game, I decided to pursue that line of thought more aggressively in Emily is Away 2. I decided to stick as true to my high school self as possible. That means my music, my movies, and, as much as I could remember it, my worldview. Overly huggy, overly juvenile, overly embarrassing high school Garth Ginsburg. That’s who I’d be, unless there was another consent issue like in the first game or a situation that required maturity, in which case, I’d allow my adult brain to take the wheel.
I think this played a lot into my decision to not pursue either of them romantically. Emily reminded me of too many people I knew in high school who I considered friends, close friends in some cases, but with whom I never felt a particular spark, romantic or otherwise. And it wasn’t just the music this time either, but the way Emily talks online and the personality she displays and the so on and the so forth. It wasn’t anything specific so much as a general vibe that’s hard to communicate in an overly long blog post form.
As far as Evelyn, though I just spent an entire paragraph explaining how I wanted to play as my high school self, she reminded me of too many people I didn’t like in college. Evelyn herself is a very endearing character, mind you. However, she also has shades of the kind of socially aggressive people you meet at college parties, and I have many vivid memories of walking away from conversations with those kinds of people wondering what the hell just happened to me. Evelyn’s a cool person, but too many red flags for me.
Hovering over all of this, of course, is the lingering tension of me being months away from turning 30 and not feeling comfortable with the notion of pursuing a high school girl, even a fictitious one. But more on that later.
Sure enough, however, adult brain had to kick in once Emily told me about her boyfriend. (Note: I played this game weeks ago, thus I might get a detail or two incorrect. I’m confident in the broad strokes.) Essentially, Emily wanted to break up with him, but when she broached the topic, he threatened to commit suicide. Upon this revelation, 29-year-old Garth took over. I told her to tell him that while she’s concerned for him, she also needs to say that what he was doing was not okay and that he needs to respect the fact that they’re broken up. Communicate clearly and set up boundaries.
Luckily it worked out and nobody was hurt, and while I like to believe that high school me would’ve given the same advice, I don’t think I was emotionally intelligent enough to handle it yet. (I wish I could remember Evelyn’s issue, but the scene where they’ve both telling you their problems is so chaotic that it’s been lost in my mind.)
It may seem like this episode broke my immersion, but oddly enough, it didn’t. It just led to a different kind of catharsis. Giving a young person the tools to avoid toxic relationships felt unbelievably gratifying, particularly in the medium of video games, and particularly in the summer of 2021, where game studios big and small are reckoning with years of abuse and repugnant behavior.
What did break my immersion was a nitpick. A nitpick that plays a large roll in an important story beat, but a nitpick nonetheless.
As I said, I was drawing on my own life experiences and high school perspective. I was telling both parties that I was a hip hop kid and sharing the kind of advice that I would’ve like to have given. As a result, I was deeply immersed in the experience, and I thus became laser-focused on any and all inaccuracies. The real-life version of myself never talked like the one in Emily is Away 2, for example. I didn’t add extra letters and I didn’t use emojis. (I still don’t.) But I could let stuff like that slide for aesthetic era-related reasons.
Apparently what I could not let slide was the handling of the climactic moment when you essentially choose which problem you’re going to solve. A key experience in not only AIM, but all online chat interfaces and texts, is having to wait a long time for a response in the middle of an important conversation. Everyone on the planet has experienced that nervous feeling in their gut of waiting for a response. The constant checking of phones for that notification and the constant refreshing to see if a reply has been posted. Granted, that feeling may have been new to some in 2006/2007. But I had experienced such a scenario in the years before then, thus when Evelyn started yelling at me for ignoring her, my response in real life was something along the lines of, “Well, sorry, but go fuck yourself.”
It should be noted that Emily will do the same thing if you choose to prioritize Evelyn, and more importantly, it didn’t turn me off from the experience. The game did nothing wrong as far as my experience is concerned, and just the fact that I was bringing this much emotional baggage and memory to the table shows that on some level, it was working. It just didn’t cross a certain emotional threshold.
The next game very much did.
Emily is Away <3
Emily is Away <3 (or Emily is Away 3 for here on in) ditches fake AIM for Facenook, a recreation of late 2000s era Facebook. You can write statuses at certain moments, you can start poke wars with your friends, and you can do most of the stuff you could do when most people my age first created their profiles. (Also, I’ll probably just refer to it as “Facebook” from now on because I already know I’m going to end up writing that instead of “Facenook“ a billion times, and I want to save myself the editing work later.)
Narrativly speaking, Emily is Away 3 also has the most moving parts out of any of the games so far, so the story summary I’m about to provide may be a little sparse. Based on said description alone, you may not understand why this game hit me so hard. Or you might if you were there to live it.
The bulk of Emily is Away 3 takes place in 2008. You join Facebook and your first friend is your best bud Mat, followed by the other kids in your immediate friend group. One of those early friends is Emily.
Soon after, we talked about her falling out with her best friend Evelyn. She’s shaken from the experience, and she feels guilty about how it all went down. But I talked Emily into reconciling with her and gave her some advice on how to go about doing so. During this process, we bonded, and I entered into a relationship with her.
Time flies. Rumors swirl about Mat hitting on other girls and cheating on his girlfriend, and eventually, he gets dumped. I talked with Emily about everything that was going on with him, and along the way, I filled out some Facebook surveys and listened to Emily’s fake Youtube playlists. Your usual high school couple stuff.
Eventually, as we were preparing for prom, Emily friends a guy named Jeff and they start posting on each other’s walls in a way that same may construe as flirtatious, particularly on Jeff’s part. After some Mat assisted Facebook stalking, I concluded that Jeff wasn’t really a threat, and upon talking about it with Emily, she told me that she was helping him through some difficult mental health issues. We went to prom and had a great night.
In the final chapter. Emily starts having doubts about the relationship. She sees the casual relationship Mat’s started with another girl, and it makes sense to her. On top of that, college is approaching, and she’s confused about what she wants. She said that she wants to try being non-exclusive, but I told her that I’d rather just fully break up. (Little bit of adult brain kicking in there.) We said our goodbyes, and upon seeing Emily change her relationship status, Mat invited me over to play some cheer-up video games. We then went to a party at Evelyn’s, and the game ended.
In case it wasn’t clear by now, the Emily in each game is not the same Emily over and over again. This Emily, the Emily of Emily is Away 3, is the most nuanced Emily so far. She’s still an indie rock kid, but she’s branching out and getting into dancy electronic stuff. Moreover, she has a much more nuanced worldview than any of the Emilys thus far. Not only is she capable of understanding her flaws, but she’s also able to articulate them and, in small ways, address them. She feels bad about the way she treats people sometimes, and she wants to get better. To use the ol’ tired cliché, she contains multitudes, and she’s eerily reminiscent of girls I had crushes on not just in high school, but college and beyond. Of course, that’s me bringing a lot of my own shit to the table as far as defining Emily’s character is concerned. But again, I’m playing as me, and I know many adults who aren’t capable of the levels of self-awareness that she is.
And me, I, Garth, am 29 years old, playing through a high school romance. Armed with the experience of the previous games, I told myself that if a situation’s about to become sexual or I’m put in a position where I could cause serious damage, I would once again summon adult brain. I’d pursue consent, I’d balance honesty with compassion, and if the game put me in a position where I had to do anything manipulative or predatory, I’d shut it off and walk away. Luckily, the game never really heads in a sexual direction (to my memory), and all the conversational scenarios are well above board. Certain chats have the option of becoming mildly toxic. But whether or not it goes there is entirely on you.
Now, If there’s something I’m worried about with my little description, it’s that I made the breakup seem like it came out of nowhere. The truth is that it does and it doesn’t. Towards the end, I noticed tiny but notable changes in our conversations. A certain kind of increasing detachment and a move away from intimacy towards superficiality. Moreover, a large part of the breakup is that Emily has been feeling confused for a while, but doesn’t really communicate that until the final conversation. The more emotionally immature may read villainous intent into Emily’s decision to stay quiet on her issues with our relationship. But even in adulthood, most breakups have shades of this very interaction. Two people are who they are when they get together, but then new experiences and information changes them without them necessarily knowing it and blah blah blah.
This, to me, is one of the elements that make Emily is Away 3 so powerful, particularly when it comes to its portrayal of Facebook. It perfectly captures the illusion of linearity social media forces upon many, if not all, personal interactions and conflicts.
Let’s take the Jeff situation.
Jeff, I feel, was clearly going after Emily. I know this because not only am I a fellow straight boy that understands other straight boy behavior, but I’ve also been Jeff, and I’ve also been subject to Jeffs. Throw in memories of jealousy and bullshit and it’s easy to make Jeff out to be the enemy. But you never meet Jeff in real life outside of the confines of fake Facebook. When Emily told me about his mental health issues, the light flicked on in my head. “Oh yeah,” I thought, “Jeff is a person.” (Or more accurately, a character who felt like one.) I didn’t pry any further into their interactions because, at that point, I felt like it was none of my business. Jeff’s just clingy. That’s all.
When Emily and I broke up, I couldn’t help but wonder how much, if any, of her uncertainty over our relationship was caused by whatever conversations she was having with Jeff. Or anyone else for that matter, as she does say she’s been talking to her friends about us. Maybe it’s entirely on him. Maybe he had nothing to do with it. Either way, the game gives you plenty of the kinds of doubts that can drive you insane. Doubts that feed on posts that seemed innocent before the breakup, which all of the sudden look anything but when viewed through a different lens. Doubts that may never be put to rest until a healthy conversation can be had with your ex. Or maybe never at all.
If you only look at fake Facebook, the story seems clear. Emily became interested in someone else. (*Toxic dude voice*) This Jeff guy. But you know that it’s not that simple. Maybe.
For a more complicated example, let’s look at Mat’s breakup.
In the beginning of the game, Mat’s dating a girl named Kelly. The relationship seems to be going well, but then Evelyn messages you and says that Mat hit on her. As I’m not a gossipy person, I didn’t tell anyone, and Kelly breaks up with Mat on her own. When I asked Mat what caused their breakup, he says that she wasn’t really feeling it anymore, but there’s also an implication that it had to do with his interaction with Evelyn.
The more we talked, the more we came to the understanding that Mat can be unintentionally manipulative or flirty. He comes to understand that there’s a fundamental flaw in the way he interacts with people, and though he takes this revelation hard a first, by the end of the game he becomes a much more sympathetic and caring person. It may be easy to dismiss Mat as a dick. But it wasn’t that easy for me, as my best friend throughout high school and beyond had the exact same flaw.
(The day before I wrote this section, I was in a car with him describing these games. Once I told him about the whole Mat kerfuffle, he said, “That was me” without even having to prompt him. He also said that the experience of reliving all the memories these games make you go through sounds “traumatizing,” and that he probably wouldn’t partake.)
Even beyond naming myself Garth Ginsburg, even beyond doing what I felt younger Garth would do, aspects like this make Emily is Away 3 feel truly alive. It’s not just because of the surface-level nostalgia of seeing old Facebook icons again. It’s because it taps into insecurities and dilemmas that remain true well after high school.
We’ve been talking about social media distortion for what feels like forever and a week. Yet, Emily is Away 3 addresses these questions in their purest form, before the days Facebook turned ugly. (Assuming you think it was ever any good in the first place.) You think you get a picture of someone based on their social media posts. But what if that person has a different relationship to social media than you do? What if what appears to be a linear sequence of events based on someone’s wall is anything but? What, simply put, isn’t there?
If you go to my Facebook wall, all it is is these days are ratings for the art I consume and links to various shit I’ve written on the internet, here or elsewhere. (Also posts or behavior that’s designed to give my best friend a hard time.) The ratings are simple. They're not only a way for me to talk about art, something I’ll love to do until the day I die, but they’re also a way for me to interact with Facebook while still maintaining a distance from it. I don’t want to lose contact with those who are still there, but I also don’t want Facebook to consume all of my time and energy. Thus I’ve effectively turned my Facebook into a de facto blog, and ratings are a way to give a quick opinion without the effort of writing a full essay.
Ego be damned, I like to think of my Facebook as a port in the storm. Your racist anti-vaxxer uncle’s posts bringing you down? Come to my page and chat about movies or music or whatever. Or don’t. Allow my shit to take the spot where your radicalized aunt or a targeted ad is supposed to be.
(I also made the decision to not have Facebook, or any social media apps, on my phone. Hence why I don’t have Instagram. Also by some measure of extreme unfathomable luck, everyone on my feed is cool and posts cool stuff. I don’t know how I did it.)
But what do others think when they see my wall, or whatever we’re calling the wall these days? Maybe they think I’m a snob who takes movies and shit way too seriously. (Which… fair.) Maybe they think I’m dull. Maybe something in between, or that I don’t really give enough to make any real conclusions other than I have a weird obsession with my best friend. (Which… also fair.) I’ll have no real way of knowing, and as I get older, the only thing that matters to me is that I don’t seem like an asshole. But I think about how I come off every now and then, and it bothers me. Less and less these days, but a small part of me still cares.
Emily is Away 3, in a way, made me wish I had these thoughts sooner. Much like everyone else walking the Earth, my early Facebook posts are probably mostly made of nightmares. I’d know for sure, but I’m too afraid to look.
However, there’s another aspect to all this that made this game hit even harder.
The only audio the game provides you with is old monitor noises and the occasional computer start-up music, website songs, or music from fake Youtube links. Thus, on the advice of a friend, I made a playlist of all the stuff I was into in my later years of high school. Mainly, the back half of 10th grade on up. And of course, I took the advice too seriously and made a playlist that’s seven hours long. (To be fair, at some point I just started dropping full albums into that fucker.)
There’s music I discovered before high school that I still love to this day. Many of my favorite albums, for example, and stuff that forever altered the course of my life. But for this playlist, I only wanted to add songs that I listened to in those high school days and have only sparingly returned to since. These songs generally fall under four categories.
Moody/emo underground hip hop. Usually from Minneapolis, but that wasn’t always the case. (Atmosphere, Doomtree and the Doomtree related artists, Sage Francis, Brother Ali, Cage, and more.)
Militantly leftist political hip hop. (Dead Prez, Immortal Technique, Lowkey, and more.)
Indie rock, primarily, but not necessarily, from the art rock/indie scene in New York. (The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, TV on the Radio, Animal Collective, and more.)
Miscellaneous stuff that is, percentage wise, dwarfed by the three categories above. (Fela Kuti, Amy Winehouse, Gorillaz, The Dresdon Dolls, shit tons of jazz, etc., etc., all the music.)
As I hadn’t listened to most of these songs in years, I was unsure how I’d feel going back to them. Turns out it was a mixed bag, but in a good way. The songs that held up stirred my emotions just like they did when I was in high school. The songs that didn’t fell by the wayside, or sometimes they allowed me to laugh at myself for the embarrassing shit I used to find deep or engaging. (Most of those were in categories 1 and 2.)
Not only that, but they allowed me to immerse myself further through sheer interaction. As I am an old man who hasn’t yet gotten the memo on streaming services, I still use iTunes. (Not even the new app either. My computer’s so old that if I were to upgrade the operating system, it would apparently brick my computer.) There were times when I wanted to stop the music so I could focus on the task at hand. An important heart-to-heart with my girlfriend or some heavier shit going on with my friends. Thus, I switched tabs out of the game to pause my music, then jumped back in. Just like I did to countless people in high school, and honestly, most of my life since I’ve had MP3s and laptops.
Then came time to embed the songs in the body of this very article, and I found myself in a familiar spiral. Should I pick the ones that I think would make me seem like I had taste, or should I go full high school cringe? Do I go for a narrow lens and focus on a particular sound, or do I try to cover as much ground as possible? What am I trying to say with the songs I end up picking? How do I come off?
In the end, it doesn’t really matter. The ones I ended up picking may reveal a lot about who I am and who I was, but it’ll still only be a snapshot. And even then, maybe you’re wrong. Maybe there’s a point to the songs I picked. Maybe there isn’t. Maybe I decided based on what thematically fits the content, or maybe I said “fuck it” and chose at random because I’m trying to get this article done quickly and I have other stuff I want to work on.
If you ever want to know for sure, all you have to do is cut through all this and ask.
Despite the flaws of the Emily is Away trilogy, the cumulative effect of these games, particularly the third installment, sent me into a bit of a tailspin. Setting aside all the stuff in my life going on in the late 2000s that I’m not going to talk about here, and a lot of stuff that it turns out I wasn’t over but just got good at not thinking about, a trilogy that highlights the ways in which you connect with the people around you is a hell of a thing to spend after a year and a half in quarantine, most of which for me was spent in total isolation.
A year of isolation has, of course, done wonders for my personality. As of writing this, I’ve gotten into separate fights with all three of my remaining alive parents, one of which got pretty severe. (My father married my stepmom when I was six, and my mom and stepdad when I was five. In my head, I have four parents.) I’ve been quick to overreact, my joking rants become genuine ones without me realizing it, and nowadays, my impulse during every argument is to go for the jugular. I feel a sense of profound disappointment that I wasn’t able to return to the world of the living with the congeniality and warmth I was hoping for. I did not return a new man. Instead, I came back irritated and crestfallen.
Most of my nights in quarantine I was able to handle. But there were more than a few nights when the loneliness became more than white noise, and to a certain extent, I still feel it lurking behind most of my thoughts.
But to be perfectly honest, that sense of isolation began well before quarantine.
Over the years, my friend pool has shrunk, and I’ve felt comfortable with longer and longer stretches of zero communication. Part of that is certainly the nature of my creative work, and part of it is the calm that’s come with not having to pretend like I am in any way interested in going to the party anymore. But a lot of it, to put it in a way that I don’t have to spend much verbal energy on, is simply me.
Even in quarantine, I didn’t reach out to old friends. Most of that is probably my own bullshit. But some of that assuredly has to do with the nature of social media.
Many reviews of the Emily is Away games are quick to use the word “nostalgia,” mostly in the context of hearing the old AIM alert sounds and getting into poke wars on fake Facebook. But the real nostalgia it has to offer is a glimpse into a time before social media was tainted. Where you talked to your friends all day at school, but the conversation never had to end because you could go home, hop on some software or a website, and keep that sense of affection going. Now I don’t need to tell you what it’s become. Or maybe what it always was.
To me, Emily is Away is a series about the highs of social media, but also the chasms. It explores a space where relationships and friendships are formed, but also a space where ravenous hatred or casual indifference destroys lives and inflicts irreversible sadness.
Most of all, it’s a series that shines a light on a dilemma that I’ll probably have to contend with for the rest of my life: If I delete all my social media accounts, I’d be a much happier person. But I’d also sever many of the remaining connections I have left, possibly forever. Given that I’m in need of some sort of attachment, I simply cannot afford to do that. So here I am, in constant need of my friends online and in a constant need to escape from the only means I have of talking with many of them. Maybe I need another means of escape. I don’t know. Maybe I just need to make another video game character.
