I heard it or I read it or I saw it somewhere, I don’t remember where, but it was a writer, I think, and they said that when it comes to art and literature you’re either an individuals person or an ideologies person—you’re compelled by artworks that deal in the microcosmic, the personal and the acutely interpersonal, or you’re compelled by artworks that are more sweeping, and serve as macro-analyses or exegeses of the political, social, and cultural gravities that move everybody’s lives. Soma is a good acid test. If you finish it and you think it’s a game about identity, maybe technology and the Ship of Theseus-type philosophical question of whether a person’s personhood begins and ends with their mortal life, you might be an ideologies guy. If it’s the dialogue between Catherine and Simon that artistically speaking makes your bull run, or those scenes of ultra thalassophobic terror where you’re walking on the sea bed, descending to the abyss, then it could be you're an individuals kind of person.

So much as they might be personified—and I suppose, in this case, this personification is a bit of a paradox—videogames are an ideologies kind of feller. It’s their nature. Videogames comprise mechanics, systems, rules and laws. If we’re talking about a rubric or a dogma or an ideology, all of which are similarly composed of mechanics, systems, rules, laws, etcetera, it’s arguable that the videogame is naturally—or maybe preternaturally, superlatively—enabled to recreate or reflect upon or otherwise capture and subject to scrutiny those rubrics, those dogmas, those ideologies. The problem however is that videogames are often so systematic and so mechanical that they are only able to illustrate perfect visions of ideologies. Think about SimCity, or more recently Cities Skylines 2, wherein certain esotericisms of the games’ respective code bases resulted in a large number of homeless people appearing within players’ cities. In both cases, these swells in the homeless population were regarded by the game makers and by players as imperfections within the system, as bugs, as glitches, and they were summarily ‘fixed.’ Both of these games simulate and symbolise ideologies related to capital, democracy, enterprise, social welfare, policy, and so on, but if the results of those simulations drift outside utopia—when the ideologies in the game result in a lessening of the player’s success—the simulations, the symbols, are considered defective.

It’s connected also to the wider culture of gaming and the psychological, emotional carcinogen that is the modern mainstream game: you’re supposed to be able to do what you want, you’re supposed to feel good, and you’re supposed to have fun, so when one of these ideology simulators deviates from effectively and holistically delivering onto the player those experiences, that deviation is treated as deficient, even if—purposefully or inadvertently—it makes the simulation more accurate to reality. In other words, although the videogame by its formal composition seems to be an ideologies kind of guy, often, in practice, and when it comes into contact with the player, groomed by decades of assuasive and fellatory gaming culture, it is not able to accurately describe an ideology or its results—or rather it can describe these things only in the most theoretical and optimistic terms, i.e., if, in The Sims, I adhere to the tenets of a wholesome, capitalistic, modern Western life, and get promoted at work, buy expensive things, start a family, and have lots of friends, that will always represent success in the game, even if, in reality, it might make a person deeply unhappy, and a lifestyle contrary to all these ‘victory states’ might instead bring them fulfilment.

Considering the title, even, I think Soma is presented as an ideologies game. It’s driven, in part, by some compelling (though sophomoric) existential questions: what is a person? What happens when you die? Are you your body? Is a computer that is indistinguishable from a person in every way still a computer? But so much as the central characters do agonise over these problems, and some of the game’s visual or dramatic flourishes are metaphors for these questions also (the oozing WAU gel keeps everything alive regardless of its physical or state of consciousness, as if machines are able to understand life in binary terms only; the soul, to a partial extent, is separate to the flesh, and in the game’s finale ascends to an idyllic ‘heaven’ where it is has no corporeal form, while the body remains on Earth), more captivating than any of these philosophical quandaries are the people pondering them. 

At the end of the game, you don’t feel bad because, it turns out, the soul is indeed replicable, and divisible from the body—you feel bad because Simon, poor Simon, is stuck in Pathos II, alone, scared, and doomed to die that way. Similarly, both the central characters are drawn to Pathos II and the Ark project for personal, highly emotional reasons. Simon volunteers for the experimental brain scan not because he cares about any questions about the nature of being, but because he doesn’t want to die. The reason that Catherine is able to pioneer the Ark project is precisely because she’s unburdened by philosophical conflict. She doesn’t get on with people. She can’t make friends. She’s lonely. And that enables her to more effectively view people in terms of synthesis and data. It’s her individual characteristics, not an objective, at-remove ideological belief, that compel her. Her actions and attitudes serve to characterise Catherine as a person, flawed and all, rather than embellish an ideology or an accompanying treatise—it’s consistently true in Soma that the characters do what they do because of themselves, and not because they exist in the text as animate metaphors for something macrocosmic.

There are mechanics and systems in Soma—there is a way that it has to be played—but in combination these help you to access, and in turn illuminate, the personal drama within and between its central cast. Similarly, videogames by form might seem ideal for creating and effectuating systems, and in turn, recreations or shadowplays of ideologies, but not only are these representations of ideologies often limited or absurdly utopian, videogames are also, by their nature, are also, potentially, capable of capturing and making illustrations of the personal, the human, the individual. The problem is that this ability that games might have is perilously underexplored—everyone’s still obsessed with mechanics, inputs, balance, gameplay. But as in Soma, where the essayistic overtures and horror game systems actually serve to more greatly effectuate a personal story, there must be a way, surely, for videogames to do this more commonly—though the history of the form and the overwhelming majority of games that exist today would imply that systems, rules, and the exploration of mechanics are priorities for game-makers and players alike, and that the more mechanical and balanced and ideological a game is the truer it is to the platonic ideal of a videogame, actually, this isn’t at all true.

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Ed Smith is one of the co-founders of Bullet Points Monthly. His Twitter handle is @esmithwriter.