5:43am.
First Cycle, 2037.
The buzzing of a phone, the rustling of sheets, and then light.
So begins LOCALHOST, the latest game from developers Sophia Park and Penelope Evans. It is your “first day on the job in the last days before the singularity.” Your new employer is summoning you on your cell phone. You need to “format” and “prepare” some “spare drives for refurbishment.” You are told not to pay “attention to the “souls” inside those drives.” You are told that “synthetics will do anything to seem like a human.” You are told that they are “made” to be “that way.” You are told to ask “no questions.”
This description for the game, found on its download page at the indie gaming website itch.io, is interspersed with images, eerie neon pixel art of a “personal assistant gynoid model” suspended by a thick cable attached to the nape of her neck. She has only a face, a torso, and a single arm. She stares down and to the left: confused, pained, searching. She is there to serve as host for the souls—for four colour coded hard drives—that must be reformatted. That you must reformat.
Like “retirement” in the Blade Runner films, “reformatting” and “refurbishment” are euphemisms for the killing of an individual who has been deemed nonhuman. Only a person can be murdered; programs are merely switched off, deleted, erased. There is no spirit, no soul, to be violated, only mechanical parts and bits of information to be disassembled and repurposed and overwritten. The power of LOCALHOST is that you are made responsible. You are no longer a spectator.
This entanglement of the player is the special capacity of games as a medium. It is why I love games. But I hesitate to identify as a “gamer,” especially since the Gamergate controversy in 2014 when the “gamer” identity became so strongly associated with an appallingly misogynistic subculture. Though there are many negative stereotypes imposed on the gaming community that I do not consider accurate, toxic masculinity is not one of them. There exists a venomous and violent macho-exclusivity that wants to define, once and for all, who is a real gamer, and what is a real game. But this entirely misses the point of games, and serves only to perpetuate the stereotypes that prevent many from ever engaging with the medium.
This is why games like LOCALHOST are important. As an “interactive text adventure” or work of “interactive fiction,” LOCALHOST plays more like a multimedia choose-your-own-adventure novel than more “properly game-like” games, such as Call of Duty, FIFA, or League of Legends. You cannot “win” at LOCALHOST. You cannot “beat” it. There is no “competition.” It requires nothing from the player but to read and choose and click. And for $4.99, it is far more economically accessible than most triple-A titles today. But it is still a game. It requires you to play, to participate, to be entangled. Games like LOCALHOST are the sort of games that welcome “non-gamers” into the fold, that present the variety, the richness, and the depth of games as an artistic medium to those who might see them only as frivolous entertainment, or who might have experienced the hate of certain segments of the gaming community.
Our games cannot be separated from the social, historical, and political questions with which we are confronted in everyday life, and games like LOCALHOST bring these questions to the fore. They include some that I have already touched on here: questions of identity, of belonging, of humanity, of violence; questions of who counts and who is real. LOCALHOST demands that you look someone in the face and determine whether she should live or die—not something, but someone; not it, but she. It puts you into dialogue with another and requires you to choose, leaving the responsibility for a life to the inconsequential gesture of a mouse-click.
After plugging and unplugging one of the drives several times, her identity begins to slip away, flattened out by a new familiarity with the body to which she has been confined—torture of control; traumatic discontinuity. When you ask her about a prior remark she tells you to “disregard” it. “An obsession with the cycles of others is irrelevant,” she says. “How may I assist you?” But it is precisely this obsession that LOCALHOST awakens. The cycles of others are far from irrelevant. Particularity, carnality, history, motivation—each drive, each spirit, uniquely beckons us to answer, to become involved, to play. But the stakes of the game that Park and Evans have created are far from frivolous; this play is deadly serious.
The game has several different endings, depending on the questions you ask of and the responses you give to each of the four hard drives. The credits roll. And then, you can start the game again.
5:43am.
First Cycle, 2037.
The buzzing of a phone, the rustling of sheets, and then light.