'Confessional' Gaming Captures the Voyeurism of Exploring Someone's Desktop

What does it mean when you see someone else's screen? Unless you share a device with another person it rarely happens—and even then it's likely you have separate accounts. Our devices record our habits, our likes and dislikes, our histories, and the dreams we don't dare to explore outside of Incognito Mode. For someone to explore inside your desktop, then, is an act of extreme voyeurism.

This is exactly what two very popular indie games offer their players.

Cibele, by Star Maid Games, allows you to play a fictional multiplayer online game called "Valtameri" as the teenaged female protagonist, with interludes where you explore the files on her desktop. The game has attracted widespread attention and praise: its creator, Nina Freeman, has been dubbed "the punk poet of gaming," and Cibele has been praised as "a love letter to MMO [massively multiplayer online game] communities."

Meanwhile Emily is Away, developed by Kyle Seeley, simulates an old instant messenger chat client, and follows a tentative relationship between your character and the eponymous Emily. Released as free-to-play on Steam, it has gathered over 15,000 reviews (the community-assigned tags used to describe it include "story rich", "retro", "atmospheric" and, amusingly, "psychological horror"). A 5,000-strong "game hub" has also formed, where users exchange tips for unlocking bonus buddy icons and reaction gifs of men crying. They ask each other who the game reminds them of, and share memories from high school.

The popularity of both titles hinges on recreating a familiar experience: many gamers will remember playing MMOs or using AOL Instant Messenger growing up. But the effect is simultaneously nostalgic and uncomfortable, because the game's creator is somehow both present and absent. There is a sense that, though we're given a degree of player autonomy, these deeply personal stories have already been written. We are intruding on digital lives, autobiographies written in clicks.

I spoke to Nina Freeman, who wrote Cibele. Before her most recent offering, Freeman was known for designing vignette games exploring themes surrounding growing up and sexuality, including how do you Do it? and Ladylike.

"'Cibele' is a name I stole from a girl I admired in middle school and high school," Freeman told me. "Her AOL Instant Messenger name was 'Cibele H7.'" Freeman based the plot on her own life, but hesitates to call it an autobiography: the game tells a personal history, but through the subjective, quasi-real world of the online self. "They're always in some way 'authored.' I very much treat my own life as fiction," she said.

Though Cibele lets you fight monsters, the real adventure is in exploring Nina's desktop. The game's three acts follow her relationship with Ichi, a fellow player in the in-game MMO who Nina grows increasingly close to, culminating in an offline meeting where they end up having sex. What ensues will be so painfully familiar to anyone who has been in an online relationship that it seems beyond doubt it must have been based on lived experience.

As with Cibele, Emily is Away taps into a communal memory, one many 20-something players will share if they grew up around the internet. It chronicles a not-quite-romantic relationship conducted over AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), the chat client popular throughout the noughties. The challenge is to overcome your shyness, and to try to stay out of the "friendzone."

The game's creator, Kyle Seeley, explained his inspiration. "I wanted to romanticize that time when you'd come home from middle school and go directly onto one of those online messengers to talk to your friends," he said. "For me, AOL Instant Messenger was the first time I'd ever set up a profile of my own." The recreation is meticulous, and Seeley found he has to tell players very little about the game because they already know how to play it. "I had to go back and look at reference shots of the original, XP-era AIM, to make it as faithful as possible," he said. "At the start it feels like a fun nostalgia trip—players don't actually know that they're playing an emotional game until the very end."

Part of that nostalgia trip is an ability to customise the chat client. You can change the colour of the text and choose from a menu of buddy icons, many of them references to embarrassing old musical favourites (Avril Lavigne, Green Day, and Blink-182 all feature). Bios include overwrought quotes from Coldplay and Snow Patrol, the heightened emotion of which contrast with the awkward, shy interactions in the chats. It's a throwback to a pre-Facebook time when these sparing personal details were the anchors of an online identity.

As with the small yet telling details included in Emily is Away, narrative insight can be found in what Freeman refers to as the "digital ephemera" scattered around Cibele's in-game desktop. "It's kind of like our rooms, where we just gather and pile up stuff," she explained. "Although, on our computers I think there's a lot of curation. That extends to curating your image on social media, or being really able to step back and curate what you say if you're communicating online."

This sense of "curation" versus reality is what gives both games their tension: we're shown two protagonists, still very young and still working out how to present themselves to others online. The screen becomes a place to cultivate their adult self. In some instances during Emily Is Away, the answer you give to Emily is typed out but then retracted, and replaced with something non-committal instead of asking her out on a date. In Cibele, Nina's selfies, poems and old online profiles trace a self in evolution.

What unites both games is their grounding of coming-of-age stories in computers. The time each protagonist spends in-game talking to others doubles as a form of self-development. Virginity is lost. Hearts are broken. Life-changing decisions are made.

Relationships also develop, but prove difficult to maintain: does pleasure come from the presence of someone dear to us, or from the simple dopamine hit of an alert? Are we winning the game, or falling in love with a player?

In Cibele, we watch Nina allow Ichi to distract her from offline life, which occasionally intrudes in the form of ignored party invitations and visits from friends, and document her growing obsession in pictures. Slowly Ichi colonises her desktop, until Nina is a version of that boy-crazy cliché, the girl who sits by the phone waiting for the object of her affections to call.

Emily is Away, meanwhile, baits the player to be braver, to confess their feelings. it celebrates the pause before composing a message, the virtual intake of breath. But in the end the awkwardness of the medium forces the player to give up and politely sign off.

These portrayals of two hesitant, flawed teenage protagonists are what give both games their emotional heft: Freeman said, "It was really important to write in how aggressive the Nina character was towards the end. And to show the sexy selfies and the lame things that she was saying, all her insecurities… For me, honest writing is about showing both the good and the bad."

That Cibele never entirely stops feeling uncomfortable is testament to its power, and much of that discomfort comes from the experience of intruding on someone's screen. When the iCloud accounts of Hollywood actresses were hacked last year, the act of stealing photos from someone's phone was more interesting than the photographs themselves. Our culture is fascinated with access, intrusion and intimacy mediated by technology. Cibele even shows you selfies Nina takes wearing a neon pink bra to send to Ichi—the games bring you inside the highly personal, emotionally charged space of someone's computer, an experience akin to hacking.

It feels like "confessional" gaming, perhaps more confessional than literature can ever be, because it allows you to retrace the author's actions. "I've noticed a pretty wide variety of reactions from men playing this game," Freeman said. "Anything from 'I felt creepy playing this' to some who just, because there's a lot of anxiety around looking at stuff on people's phones and computers, find that it's a bit too much for them to get into the game."

The games imply that every device holds a piecemeal autobiography, one we may never have intended to write. Our screens are a medium for self-fashioning, and we forge our fractured identities across social media and old email accounts. (Seeley entertains the thought of the Emily sending a LinkedIn request to "connect" ten years later as a sequel, a prospect potentially even more heartbreaking than the original game…)

But in both games, the limits of these subjective, personal worlds are exposed. Cibele, especially, proposes that the characters may have based their relationship on personality traits which they cannot practise in offline life, making the outdoor scene where they meet—notably the first scene in the game to take place outside Nina's darkened bedroom—all the more jarring.

Daylight intrudes, and reality bites.