Soma: A Life Worth Living?

sobic caught me seriously off guard and more ways than one I haven't considered myself a fan of modern horror games in a long time I think the YouTube phenomenon that was five nights at freddys slender hello neighbor and so on sort of left me with a bad taste in my mouth regarding them I prefer my horror creeping in psychological whereas this trend on YouTube brought about a generation of frantic jump scare ridden horror games whose most terrifying moments don't stick with you like anything in Soma stuck with me after playing some I decided to try amnesia one again and realized that there isn't a single jump scare in either game yet they're both utterly terrifying Amnesia's focuses on the gameplay sneaking around a gothic castle avoiding monsters and trying not to go insane and then convenient I'm with some relatively light psychological elements soma however is all about the psychological elements with its story transcending to an existential crisis for both the player and the protagonist Simon the centerpiece for the entire game is a survey that you take towards the beginning and at the end regarding the meaning of life when your consciousness and psyche have been uploaded into a machine mind I'm a big fan of choices and games that don't actually affect anything outside of the players mind and this is a great example of why as a more relatable example I'll bring up half-life 1 shortly after the disaster starts you'll see a security guard shooting zombies and you can either let him do his thing or kill him with the crowbar so you can get your first gun early the game doesn't keep track of your interactions with NPCs in any meaningful way but the context of the story differs greatly depending on your actions or to name a more current example the choices and Telltale's Walking Dead that don't affect anything there's still meaningful choices to the story nonetheless these two surveys and soma take it to the next level by asking you questions that relate to the themes of the game and putting two questions the game poses at the center of your mind is life any less meaningful in an artificial world or an artificial body do you still feel like yourself after a consciousness transfer can artificial life make decisions and for that matter can organic life make decisions these are questions that there isn't really a clear scientific answer to yet so we're forced to take a more spiritual or philosophical approach when asked them upon trying to find these surveys online I found a lot of forum posts where people were noting how much their answers changed between the two surveys which goes to show the efficacy of the game maybe it was because I had already been exposed to plenty of sci-fi about the nature of consciousness but my answers didn't change all that much I guess I already had my ideas about the subject decided before I played but the first survey still did an excellent job at setting the stage we put my predetermined ideas about life at the center of my mind and the rest of the game did everything it could to make me question my ideas I see humans and all organic life as incredibly complicated nuts apples for instance are designed to be carried away from their trees eaten and then have their seeds dropped off in a new location furthering the prominence of the apple tree while humans are designed to stay alive migrate to improve their living conditions and have sex and like the Apple all of these functions serve to increase our prominence following that logic I assume the humans have no more free will than Apple's we're going to do what we were always going to do I'm of the belief that you didn't choose to watch this video but you were always going to watch it all the things you've seen and witnessed in your life led to a mental configuration that would inevitably end up clicking on this video this may seem sort of tangential and irrelevant to soma but freewill is supposedly the thing that separates us from computers seeing as I don't believe in free will I see life is being equally meaningful regardless of the body your thoughts are coming out of and regardless of the authenticity of the world we're living in that's not a negative thing either I don't think life is meaningless for the people who like myself are living it for most intents and purposes I and every other human make choices on a daily basis or at least we feel enough like we make choices for it to satisfy what this all boils down to is that in my mind the computer with the humans mind in it has just as much meaning in life as a human body with a human mind in it so once I had plugged in my answers to the survey how did soma test and examine my answers to those questions there will be spoilers from here on our [Music] I always saw consciousness as a stream one that leads to the next and so on one of the big ideas sumit revolves around is the coin toss both in the beginning and in a few other key parts of the game Simon's consciousness is copy pasted into another body each time this happens a new fork in the stream of consciousness is revealed not created but revealed if we happen to be following the route through the stream that eventually wound up in the optimal body then we are the lucky one when this coin toss idea is first brought to attention the first question that came to my mind was did I win the first coin toss when Simon had his brain scanned and his memories implanted into an AI hundreds of years later I'd say yes the Simon who never left his human body died of brain damage a few months after the scan while the robotic Simon lived in a hellish nightmare for a few days however the robotic Simon had two more coin tosses ahead of him first the transfer from the dive suit body under the pressure suit body and secondly the most important one the transferred to the Ark a virtual environment where all is right in the world the fact that the stream of consciousness we controlled might have been the one that leaves the destroyed earth and lives in bliss among the stars means to me that it's worth sacrificing our organic body that was destined to die early albeit in a totally calm normal world again I'd say we won the coin toss but I definitely wasn't sure and I'm still not would it have been better to live with terrible headaches and the thought that I'm going to die in a few months is it worth trading that in for what is essentially a 25% chance at living a great life on a beautiful artificial world and a 75 percent chance at being left to rot scared and alone and a decrepit subaquatic tomb and an undying body there's no easy answer period this is the stuff that makes great horror for me like every other human I think about things a lot and it's always satisfying when those thoughts lead to a conclusion so soma gives us perfectly logical questions like the former that nonetheless don't have an answer we can rack our brain looking at the question from spiritual logical and philosophical angles and still not know what we believe in that's horrifying before I move on I'd like to clarify on a bit of terminology I'll be using from here on out Simon 1 refers to the organic Simon Simon 2 refers to the dive suit Simon who was born when we first wake up on pathos - Simon 3 refers to the pressure suit Simon who eventually goes into the abyss and Simon 4 is the virtual Simon who ends up on the ark the coin-toss idea leads perfectly naturally into the next problem were presented with after our first deliberate consciousness transfer from the dive suit body into the pressure suit body we realized that the time suit body is still alive and still has Simon 2 in it and that he's just as real as our current Simon Simon 3 I have to admit I did feel slightly cheated here sure transferring us from an organic body to a cybernetic one would definitely be a copy-paste and the coin toss logic would apply but I figured transferring myself into a different robotic body would be a simple cut and paste I either wouldn't be a coin toss and there would only be one continuity for Simon 2 as it turns out I was wrong there were two Simon's now and one of them was going to be abandoned by us to feel cheated and confused rotting all by his lonesome so that's the situation but what's the dilemma well should I kill him like the last question regarding whether or not we won the first coin toss there is no clear answer only this time we have to make a choice before I move on this is the person who up until now we've essentially been we understand his struggle with his new life his relationships with his old human friends his relationship with Kathryn your companion throughout the game and his hopes and dreams and now we just have to abandon him and pretend he doesn't exist I ended up choosing to kill him figuring it's a better faith and going slowly and saying like all of the other isolated human minded robots we've seen so far but what about Kathryn she was also eyes landed totally alone inside of her a robotic body that's completely unable to move but she didn't want to die and she didn't go insane as a result she was upset that I chose to kill Simon - and she knows more about being an AI being isolated handy thinks it has on you than I possibly could what if Simon too was still human what I still want to kill him rather than abandon him probably not and that's what's so troubling about this dilemma I said earlier that I believe a life is equally valuable and meaningful whether its mind is in the human body or robotic one but I still chose to kill Simon - surely all of the deathbed philosophizing and even life-saving problem-solving that a human Simon would have been able to do in that situation could have also been done by Simon - if anyone had the right to kill Simon - it would have been me Simon 3 but what if I lost that coin toss what I have wanted Simon 3 to kill me probably not so again I'm left with a question I couldn't possibly answer only this time I had to live with an answer I'd already decided on rather the first question about whether or not I won the first coin toss which I could ponder on for as long as I wanted even past the games ending having to act on beliefs that you aren't at all sure about is a beautiful and perfectly natural expansion of the horror brought on by simply not being able to know an answer what's even better is that eventually we meet the last human on earth and she asks us to kill her earlier I wondered if I would kill Simon too if he was human and in this moment I get to put that to the test I did decide to kill her - only because she asked me but it wasn't without a good amount of consideration first let's jump ahead a bit there was one section where we had to start up a prototype of the ark and run a diagnostic on a dummy a eye that was loaded into the prototype Ark the thing is the prototype art could only handle so much memory so I had to selectively enable and disable things like the moon a buoy a park bench temperature sensation and so on I can't be sure how self-aware the dummy AI that would be inhabiting this world was but I essentially had to play God deciding what aspects of this virtual world I should include to make his life as comfortable as possible there's another horrifically uncomfortable moment having to make drastic decisions on a computer terminal that would affect somethings entire life and now knowing how much of a life the thing had in the first place being forced to make decisions without understanding of the consequences this game does an excellent job of messing with your ability to understand and examining the limits of what you can understand another notable section of the game required that I figure out which crew member had an access code I needed and put their brain scan into a simulation so that we could coax it out of him the simulation had a handful of different environments I could load and personas I could load for Catherine to adopt while speaking to him over and over again the virtual man we brought to life vias brain scan would become disenfranchised and we'd have to shut the simulation down we probably created and ended a life about seven times or so before we found the right combination of stimuli to get the code out of him here's one way to think about it every time I ran the simulation I was creating a new outcome for this man's coin toss assuming I ran the simulation seven unsuccessful times one successful time and that the man's mind was uploaded to the ark once I was done this man's brain scan could have been followed by him waking up still in his human body but there was a seven in ten chance that he would wake up and one of the simulations where he went insane a one in ten chance he woke up in the simulation where he helped us and still died shortly after regardless and just a one in ten chance that he won the coin toss and wound up on the ark after doing so we ended the simulation one last time and I had the choice to delete his brain scan like in the last section I had to answer a question that I couldn't possibly know the answer to I chose to delete his mind scan rationalizing in my head that I have no idea how sentient he may or may not be as he's floating around on that computer with no simulation running although after writing all of this I realized how pessimistic I was being opting to kill or delete every sentient life form I had the opportunity to scary stuff let's jump to the ending this game has some awesome horror set pieces such as being captured by the enemy and having to stay near ocean floor lights with an ever-increasing distance between them to avoid an incredibly dangerous fish like monster but it eventually leads to the ending we're sitting in the control booth preparing to launch the ark into space to ensure some vestige of humanity lives Catherine and Simon three are going to upload the consciousnesses to the ark just as it launches and the upload takes so long that we're frantically staring at a - loading bar as the rocket gets ready to launch in the heat of the moment I and probably Simon forgot about what was guaranteed to happen Simon three would be stuck on earth in pathos - and only Simon four would get to exist in the ark only this time after excitedly shouting as the upload completes Simon three closes his eyes and when he opens them were still Simon three we lost the coin toss the power goes out I guess is a way to direct more power to the space gun and we fade out over Simon three shouting at Kathryn to not leave him as she's now offline - [Music] after the credits we wake up in the Ark showing a Simon forest perspective it's beautiful and fake but that doesn't really matter at least to me we walk out of a cave along a Riverside path in the forest and find a computer terminal where we fill in the second survey hopefully you put in answers that are positive about your new life in the Ark but it's impossible to ignore Simon 3 who's going to go slowly insane while Simon 4 enjoys his life of luxury when I was about a half-hour in de soma I was thinking oh I'm a human and a robots body and my mind is repressing that so I still think I'm a human you're not so clever game as it turns out it would only be about another half hour before that was common knowledge being discussed between Simon and Kathryn soma was much more clever than I expected while I consider myself a pretty philosophical person soma was able to mess with my head make me question my philosophy and doubt my own perspective on the world that's good horror [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Leadhead

Views: 108,726

Rating: 4.9116187 out of 5

Keywords: Soma, psychological, horror, existential, analysis, frictional, games, walking sim, puzzle, philosophy, philosophical, essay, discussion, survey, robot, ai, consciousness, self aware, virus, ocean, psychology, scary, horrific

Id: AOFbJWx78wc

Length: 14min 36sec (876 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 09 2019