SOMA and its beautiful questions

This text is nothing but story spoilers for Frictional Games’ SOMA. I’m writing this to get my own thoughts out there, and hopefully other SOMA players can get something out of it.

I’m not kidding. If you’ve not finished SOMA but plan to, don’t read any of this.

ANY OF IT.

All good? OK let’s do this.

I just finished SOMA. It was a rollercoaster of emotions for me. Not always intentionally, I think. I thought the stealth sneaky bits were trite at best and horribly frustrating and dull at their worst, just absolute momentum killers, and if SOMA had exhibited the same confidence in game design that it did in the narrative department it would have been a far better game for it.

This is a game that asks some very interesting and difficult questions of the player and gives you enough space and time and context for those questions to linger long after play sessions are over, a game about loss of self and the definition of sentience and existence, yet is dumb enough to feel like it needs the threat of physical trauma once in a while to prove it’s still a video game. Or something. I sincerely wish the game shipped with a “just give me the story” difficulty level that all but excised the sneaky bits. The story here far transcends the pedestrian game design, and it sucks to think of players possibly being turned off by the frustrating enemy encounters.

But the game part here is almost a digression. I really want to talk about the story, or rather the questions it asks and how it does it.

Subject matter aside, SOMA represents a masterstroke decision in how to handle moral dilemma or philosophical quandaries: It completely resists the urge to gamify. SOMA’s world is one where the loss of self is hour-to-hour and life as we know it has effectively ceased to be of importance. Any moral choice you make is defined by your own compass alone rather than one arbitrated by game characters. There’s no Mass Effect style Paragon vs Renegade here, no point system or alternate good/bad endings. It’s just you, who you are, and how you can live with yourself. Given the subject matter of the game where the virtual is seen as of equal importance to the physical you as a player, depending on your point of view, may find yourself feeling the impact of such quandaries far stronger than if you got a glowing halo in the top left corner of the screen. I know I did, and choices I made linger in the imagination.

I believe the core question SOMA asks is “What kind of life is this”.

I’m sure all people have asked themselves hypothetical questions about what they would do given a certain circumstance. Which sense would you rather lose? If you’ve been in a coma for years, should we pull the plug? How would you cope with being paralyzed neck down? Read the horrifying The Butterfly and the Diving Bell; people have dealt with these questions all the time but I think the answers will always be intractably personal. Personally, I don’t think you can or even should try to convince someone to change their world views on subjects dealing with self, value and quality of life. SOMA tackles this issue head on, and every moral problem asked of you comes down to where you stand not only on how you yourself want to live, but how you will deal with having to stand by those obligations faced with the fates of others. It’s grim.

What kind of life is this? Is it truly alive if all it really is is a set of rules perturbed by stimuli? What determines the value of sentience? How sentient must something be to be alive, to be worth protecting? What’s more valuable, a naturally born insect or a simulacra running on hardware? Who gets to determine which trumps the other? Is complexity the key word? If so, are we subscribing to intelligent design, that the painting is too intricate to be faked therefore it is sacred?

Eventually discovering who I was was strangely comforting. My first instincts upon waking up in Pathos II was that the whole thing was a simulation applied to a simulated version of me intended to research a cure for the original Simon. I didn’t buy the reality I was finding myself in, especially given David Munshi’s explanation that he would create a simulation of me and bombard it with impulses. I’m still not convinced this isn’t true. SOMA’s basic reality remains debatable. It could be a dream within a dream within a dream within a dream.

Considering this, I left Carl Semken to burn under the power cable, and I don’t feel bad about it. For one, I didn’t see another way to solve the puzzle and I felt the game was forcing my hand. Later I discovered this was not true, but even with that in mind I still don’t feel bad. Given the WAU’s propensity to keep everything alive forever, in whatever pained and crippled state it was in, I feel electrocuting Carl into oblivion was as merciful as leaving him behind in that dark corridor, forever calling for help. At the time though, I was still not sure any of it was real at all. A thought process that would come to haunt me.

Taken at face value, discovering I was Imogen Reed’s headless corpse in a diving suit packed with structure gel and a cortex chip made me laugh out loud. Yeah dude.. You’re a dead lady and circuitry now. If SOMA was trying to teach me a lesson here, it succeeded: Any future discussion of self/true self fell under Imogen’s shadow. No matter how you define who you are, physically Simon was a collection of parts taken from others, built on a primitive snapshot of a brain-damaged man a hundred years’ gone. It’s made clear when he discovers his diving suit self that his previous idea of self was a mental projection, so being confronted with Catherine’s broken machine self and her cavalier reveal that Simon is just as “wrong” was the point where I stopped considering the “real reality” of things and just went with it: Even from the best of angles, the reality I was currently inhabiting did not obey the rules I expected it to, and I felt obliged to accept it as true. I wasn’t a dead lady and circuitry. I simply was.

The principle of continuity really bothered me. When I understood the reasoning behind murdering yourself to preserve the “truth” of your scanned copy I stopped sympathizing with any of the suicides on Pathos II. The idea as I understood it, and apparently as it was sold to the crew, is that once a scan is created it will diverge from yourself the moment you and it receive different input. This would make the two of you different. Therefore… One has to die to preserve the truth of the other? Huh? What gives one set of stimuli precedence over the other? If anything the idea of continuity as described here put me more at ease with the idea of multiple me’s. I wanted the WAU to revive every suicider just so I could give them a firm slap in the face.

Faith unchecked is a horrible thing, an existential and moral coping mechanism at best, a destruction engine of morality at worst, with a ton of nuance between. I felt the continuity amounted to a death cult incapable of asking itself bigger questions than “what happens to the real me”.

It was interesting, though, to see suicide understood as honest self-annihilation, with no real hope of heaven or hell. Simon later asks Cathrine, What do you think? Is there a heaven full of redundant copies of the same people? Is there someone up there who’d call me an impostor? I think the suiciders fully believed there was no such thing as an afterlife beyond the ARK. Preserving the continuity was the atheist’s misunderstood pathway to heaven. It’s bizarre.

When the second Simon copied himself into the pressure suit and I was faced with possibly killing him, it was an easy choice for me. Not because I felt he should die to preserve the continuity, but because he would wake up alone, without Catherine, without the omnitool to get around, in a shit-heap of a place filled with monsters and exactly zero hope in sight. I’d been him for long enough to know his hopes, his personality, what he’d been through.

I don’t believe life is sacred at all costs. I believe nobody should suffer, spiritually least of all. So I pulled the plug.

The possible sentience of the WAU did not appear deeply explored in the game. If there was ever an indicator that it wasn’t simply exhibiting emergent behavior given new-found capacity and decision-tree-skewing stimuli I didn’t spot it. Nonetheless I refused to kill it, given the chance. Why was this such a difficult decision?

Throughout the game we see bodies embedded in structure gel. I was under the impression that these people were stuck in a kind of hellish limbo, perhaps akin to a perpetual sleep paralysis, forever staring into the cold darkness of Pathos II. For a long while, my understanding of the WAU was shaped by this idea.

But two things changed this. For one, realizing that the second Simon was a successful WAU experiment, while the roaming revenants were failures. This was not the WAU creating “guards” for itself. It was the WAU attempting to perpetuate sentient life and failing repeatedly. Secondly, and most profoundly, is when Simon is himself embedded in structure gel and experiences it as being back in Toronto with his girlfriend, who professes to love him forever.

It’s important to remember that the ARK was a reverse engineering of a WAU experiment, the vivarium. The WAU was already on the same page as Catherine and her team, but wasn’t communicative about its intent. What makes the ARK holy and the vivarium an abomination? I honestly couldn’t tell you. When Simon returns to Toronto he is linked into the WAU’s network, probably along with every other wheezing half-corpse on Pathos II. What kind of life is this, right?

The thing that finally dissuaded me was Johan Ross’ language approaching the WAU’s heart. There was a strong element of fanaticism to him, constantly talking of abominations and the “ugliness” of the WAU’s creations. Given my own journey through the game, I didn’t feel I knew enough about the WAU and what it was doing to simply kill it. Why exactly mustn’t it be allowed to continue? “Humanity will suffer forever”, what humanity? There’s none of us left!

As far as I knew, the WAU was creating as close an approximation of heaven as it could, and humanity aside it had assumed dominance over organic life in the Atlantic. When everything is turned on its head in the way SOMA presents it, you can’t make broad assumptions on right and wrong anymore. Even down to the definition of what a life is. I wasn’t convinced, so I let it live.

I wish I hadn’t exposed the rat to structure gel. It broke my heart leaving it like that.

Finally, losing the coin toss as the ARK left was something I was fully prepared for. Perhaps because I’ve played The Swapper and watched The Prestige, the idea of being “the one in the tank” felt like a natural concluding horror. The third Simon hadn’t fully grasped this possibility, even after being copied twice already, so it annoyed me to see him break down the way he did. “Those fuckers up there aren’t us” made me cringe, while at the same time feeling genuinely awful for him. The fate I hadn’t wanted for the second Simon was now visited on the third, and the swift fade to black followed by credits just cemented the potential unending grimness of it.

All the same, I’d left the WAU running. If I were Simon I’d go embed myself in the gel and join the vivarium. I thought of this as the credits rolled.

And so we come to my favorite questions in the game.

Early on, the player is made to go through an ARK passenger evaluation questionnaire. A set of multiple-choice questions with no right or wrong answer, dealing with loss of self and perception of reality, ending with a question essentially asking you if you’d rather die than live on in a “fake” reality. This questionnaire is revealed in the post-credit sequence as a prototype for one running in the ARK simulation itself. When I first encountered it, I tried to answer them as honestly as I could. When I encountered it on the ARK, I found myself fully informed by the reality of what the ARK was and what living inside it meant, yet my answers remained identical. In my opinion this is a masterstroke piece of narrative design, and highlights SOMA’s reluctance to gamification. All they did was make me think about something, in detail, in two sessions separated by dramatic and conceptually traumatic events.

I’m probably an easy target for SOMA here, being that I’ve already pretty much fully subscribed to the idea of transhumanism as man’s new evolutionary path. Much of transhumanism tends to revolve around perpetuation of the physical self in some form, though, and SOMA instead asks you to consider the idea of the soul as a quantifiable unit, the importance of complex response to stimuli, and wether the two couldn’t trump a physical existence altogether.

The final image of the ARK unfolding and drifting off among the blackness of the stars as the fourth Simon and third Catherine embrace in a simulation, the cracked Earth left behind, is going to linger for a long time.

My hat’s off to you, Frictional. I can’t wait to see what you do next.