In my myriad careers as a video game player, I have waited tables in Diner Dash, manned trebuchets in Total War, driven cabs in Crazy Taxi, delivered newspapers as Paperboy and tilled fields in Farming Simulator. Play is work’s twin, and video games are characterised by their capacity to allow us to inhabit the vocations and occupations of others. In general, however, the people whose lives we dip into, playfully, are anonymous, or at least fictional. Literature has biography. Film has biopic. But the interactive biography (the biogame?) has been mostly absent from video games.
The closest the medium has come is perhaps in the realm of sports, where for more than three decades we have been able to assume the likeness and talents of superstar athletes, from 1984’s Daley Thompson’s Decathlon to any one of the thousands of footballers who populate each year’s Fifa. This is more aspirational role play than earnest biographical study, however. Tiger Woods was for years the cover star of EA’s flagship golfing series of video games, which in the manner of professional endorsements exclusively focused on his triumphs at the tee. The more sinewy fodder of Woods’s off-green breakdown was not only overlooked in games, but actively shunned: in 2013 the golfer’s lucrative contract with EA was not renewed.
Historical figures often feature in games. Genghis Khan, Gandhi and Napoleon all appear in the Civilisation series, but again principally as tokens, like the car or the boot in Monopoly, rather than figures whose historical lives can be accessed via the controller. The biographical form has been seen by many as incompatible with the medium, which is defined by flexibility and the agency of the viewer-player. How can you tell a life’s story if you have the power to change it? In recent years there have been signs that this attitude is changing. Last year’s That Dragon Cancer allowed us to experience the dreadful realm of a real-world family coping not only with a child’s terminal illness, but also with how their faith fits into the narrative.
In 2015, Nina Freeman published Cibele, an autobiographical game about her formative experiences as a 19-year-old starting a relationship with a boy across the internet. They play online games together, and engage in the familiar awkward lunges and parries of teen flirting. At one point, the boy asks Nina to send him some photos, and the action switches away from the virtual desktop to filmed footage of her posing in a T-shirt and underwear. In this provocative display of voyeurism, the game comes close to the truth of all biography: a panting invasion of privacy. But the power of the scene is not to titillate, but to communicate the trepidation and naive longing that Freeman (and countless other young women who have lived the scene) felt at the time.
Freeman, who lives in Portland, Oregon, is currently making a new autobiographical game, Lost Memories Dot Net, commissioned by the Manchester international festival. Once again, you play as a young girl in a tale set within the early days of the internet – jittery chat rooms and garish websites – which unfurls to reveal an intimate story. Last year, in the Telegraph, author and game developer Olivia White wrote “auto/biographical games are the future both for personal catharsis and general education”. Certainly video games could not replace the written autobiography, which more than any other medium has the capacity to allow us to understand the geography of a person’s mind. But, as Freeman’s work vividly shows, biogames can offer a compelling alternative, capturing the mood and aesthetic of a personal moment in a way the page cannot rival.
