![]() ![]() A lot of people have contacted me after completing Cibele, saying: ‘Oh wow, this happened to me when I was playing World of Warcraft as a teenager. “For my generation online relationships are basically a normal part of life. It’s a clever approximation of how we now socially multitask online, seamlessly moving from one window to the next.įreeman says that in our era of Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, this idea of the internet as just another romantic space is prevalent and natural. In Cibele, the player can swap between playing Valtameri and chatting with other characters via simulated instant messaging, email and chat forums. When she discovered Final Fantasy XI at the age of 14, it was a way of meeting up with friends – but also forging new relationships. Together they devoured games like Super Mario 64 and Legend of Zelda, sharing the stories as they unfolded on screen. As a child in the sleepy coastal town of Ipswich, Massachusetts, her favourite thing was to visit her friends Melanie and Brittany, hide out in their basement and play on a Nintendo console all day, until their parents kicked her out for the evening. He was really great, too.”įor Freeman, video games have never been the solitary, isolating pastime of common stereotype. The voice actor for Blake was actually not Emmett, but a young man named Justin Briner who we worked with remotely. Our roommate at the time actually filmed it – it was nice to be able to create that portion of the game with people I feel comfortable around. Filming the intimate scene at the end was a lot easier for both of us, since we know each other so well. “So he had a good idea of what he was getting into. ![]() “Emmett has worked with me on a number of personal games in the past,” she says. “He got in touch with me and he was like, ‘It’s cool that you’re making this.’” To make things even more complex, his role in the game is played by Freeman’s partner, Emmett Butler, who also worked on the project. “He does know the game exists,” she says. “It’s about what it’s like to have these intimate interactions through an online game what it’s like to be the girl who is sending pictures to her lover over the internet and talking to him on the phone and longing for this physical interaction that feels almost out of reach.”Īlthough the character of Blake is fictitious, he represents the man Nina met, but is no longer in contact with. “I wanted to explore the journey that these two went on together in the digital space,” says Freeman, who refers to the Nina of the game in the third-person. It’s a short but complex and self-reflexive experience a game-within-a-game about the ways in which multiplayer role-playing adventures like Final Fantasy XI double as social arenas where players meet, flirt and gossip. As you fight monsters in this synthetic adventure, you hear Nina talking with Blake on the phone and see short film sequences, showing her taking selfies and emailing them to him. When you start Cibele, you find yourself accessing a simulation of Nina’s own computer desktop from the time of the affair, complete with folders full of her real photos, poems and live journal entries but if you click on a specific icon you enter a role-playing game called Valtameri, a fictitious take on Final Fantasy, where you meet Blake, who leads his own in-game clan of fellow players. Watch a video trailer for the game Cibele
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