You are, for the purposes of your games blog, about to play 1986 life simulator Alter Ego, which takes you slowly through an entire life via a series of short text scenarios with multiple choices. Your responses are generally requested in the form picking a mood and action from lists. After a first choice of picking the male version of the game rather than the female one, you are initially greeted with a set of questions to determine your alter ego’s personality.
The personality test pretty much resembles the kind of thing you get at work a lot, with a couple of extra meta ones like asking if you will answer honestly and if you think these questions are a waste of time.
Mood: CURIOUS
Action: ANSWER THE QUESTIONS TRUTHFULLY
You get a pretty familiar outline of your characteristics. You are serious and introverted.
You are playing this game as a new parent to a baby born prematurely. Your first scenario tells you that you are in a warm, dark, comfortable place and it’s almost time to enter a different world. It asks if you would like to take a little more time before coming out.
Mood: JUST ALL ROUND EMOTIONAL, OKAY
Action: HESITATE AND PICK TO COME OUT PEACEFULLY NOW
You are taken on to a bunch of questions from the perspective of a baby. These make play out of uncomprehending descriptions of a dog as a ‘furry man’ and similar, but soon get onto stuff like saving up saliva to drool on people in revenge for unwanted attention. You recognise the tendency to present babies as fully formed adult minds trapped in the body and perception of a newborn. As a new parent you have been aware at all times of your child’s personhood but have tried hard to avoid exactly this tendency, acutely aware of its heartbreaking implications. They make it difficult for you to enjoy the comedy. The psychology elements work a little better.
You click your way through a lot more scenarios, from the serious to the amusing, from the mundane to the slightly less mundane. You get informed after a fridge investigation scenario that the wrong choices could have led to death by poisoning. You make it to childhood. You do not make it further, as you fail to choose to run away fast enough from a stranger in a car, and your alter ego is abducted and killed.
Mood: AMUSED/FRUSTRATED
Action: START OVER
You failed to take the hints that there was at least as much Choose Your Own Adventure as The Game of Life in there, and were punished accordingly. Alter Ego is more complicated than either, of course, with its interactivity allowing for a lot of variables in play. The reviews at the end of each life section do not ring completely true but nonetheless suggest satisfying cumulative consequences to choices. The way that so many of the scenarios are about such minor matters and can peter out to nothing, but it’s never clear when something more significant will leap out, gives the whole thing a rather lifelike feeling to its rhythm. You haven’t even got onto a good proportion of the game and are slightly in awe at the scope of it and how well it still works given that. You learn that its framework is strong enough to have gone on to directly support its own section of modern interactive fiction.
You start over on the female version of the game, after an accidental disk swap has shown that you are not confined to the one you nominally started in. Though up until now you have started from the beginning, you can pick which stage of life to jump to.
Mood: IMPATIENT
Action: JUMP AHEAD TO ADOLESCENCE
You want to get in on that sweet, sweet dating sim action, which this type of gameplay inevitably makes you think of. In fact, the way that Alter Ego has an overlay of psychology on entertainment also reminds you of the framing of the original series of Big Brother, and just as there’s a line through from that show to Love Island and the disposal of any pretence to be anything but contrived for maximum enjoyment, there’s a parallel line visible from specific parts of Alter Ego to Love Island: The Game. Back to playing, you soon get your dating reward and your alter ego is going steady with Josh, who is very trustworthy and moderately good-looking. This can flow easily through to marriage in the next stage of the game, a New Year’s Eve friend-kissing incident notwithstanding (Josh, babes, I was so loyal).
You make your way through more questions and possibly by coincidence run into a series of questions close together about interactions with people from different minority identities.
Mood: MIXED
Action: GRATEFULLY PICK OPEN-MINDED ANSWERS
You consider that for a game in 1986 to include a scene where a friend comes out to you as gay was no small deal, at a time when there wasn’t exactly a lot of mainstream representation. And it lets you choose for your alter ego respond in a sympathetic and generous way. You try to keep that in mind when the next thing is the game’s assumption that it’s a bad choice to offer the friend too much advice about something that your alter ego obviously doesn’t know much about. Ditto for the scenes with a Jamaican classmate whose parents make food which is weird and unfamiliar to your alter ego, and the newly-arrived Chinese classmate who your alter ego initially can’t communicate with. You can see that the game’s clumsy guidance towards generosity has positives which didn’t have to be there. You take to that better than some of its advice as a result of other scenarios that you should (essentially) get out more and have fun, which your past unrebellious teenager really objects to. That’s because that’s more personal to you, though.
Your discomfort on others’ behalf still gets at something, which is that the more the game tries to provide the freedom to choose your own life experience, to be all-encompassing, the more the gaps in the imagination of its creation come through in the options that it doesn’t present. Second person can do great things, and you hope that it’s worked for this post, but as a reader or player it can’t make something about YOU, or even about a YOU that made some different choices. Alter Ego is a huge distance away from achieving that, and yet, considering everything then and since, its achievements are still quite something.
[This post originally appeared as part of the less chart-based predecessor to Super Chart Island]