Emily is Away takes place in a recreation of the AOL Instant Messaging chat client, a game that conjures nostalgia for the pre-social media days of overwrought away messages and grating sound effects. It's a simulated conversation, a chat bot with the structure of an adventure game. It's also one of those rare games that completely stopped me in my tracks.
For a few years during high school, most of my intimate human interactions occurred over AIM. I know I wasn't alone in this; all of my social circle used AIM as a pre-social media hub, and I imagine it was much the same for many communities during the chat client's heyday.
For my part, I found it to be a medium perfectly suited for a teenager's intense, elliptical conversations; AIM was a place where messages were lost as often as found, where words were deleted or regretted as often as they were spoken honestly, and where you could set a notification to let you know when that person got online.
Emily is Away, developed by Kyle Seeley, brought a whole lifetime of those buried memories back for me. You begin by choosing a screenname and an avatar, then commence talking to a friend from high school—Emily—revisiting old technology and an old relationship as the two characters begin to explore adulthood.
You talk about your shifting music tastes, catch up on life, and share anxious remembrances, noting how time and distance have frayed a once-intense relationship. The game does a remarkable job of recreating both the aesthetics of, and the emotions associated with, those high school AIM chats I had nearly forgotten about.
You interact by choosing from conversation options and then typing random keys; each keystroke of yours associates with a keystroke of your character's, and as you pound on your keyboard (I mostly just hit the home-row keys over and over) you see your digital persona write, make typos, delete, deliberate, rewrite, then, finally, hit Send.
It's a process that imbues the conversations with texture and tension, implicating you in unbearably intimate moments.
Emily is Away does something special in its brief run-time. When we're first learning about our feelings, we always think that we're the only ones who feel the way that we feel. By capturing and reawakening such a specific moment in our technological and emotional development, one tied so closely to that period of time for me and many others, it reminds me that we were never alone.
