If they key art for the game can spoil a plot twist, I certainly can.

SOMA is a game that’s hard to talk about without getting into specifics, and there’s nothing more insufferable than talking around something in an attempt to “avoid spoilers”, and thereby talking a lot without really saying anything at all. So there’s that.

On its surface, SOMA is a scary haunted house game set in an undersea research facility where you have to find a way out of the nightmare you’re trapped in, both literally and metaphorically. But really, SOMA is a game about consciousness. And if it weren’t more about that than running from monsters in a dark dank creepy maze at the bottom of the ocean, it would not be a very interesting game at all. In fact I would be just as happy to think and talk about the version of this game with no monsters at all. The monsters are not the point.

Some things a thoughtful person will ask themselves as they play this game include: Is putting a broken-but-still-living thing out of its misery an act of mercy or cruelty? Does this machine feel pain, and is that pain different than “real” pain I would feel guilt for inflicting on a person? Does a form of intelligence not based in traditional human biology have the same right to exist and propagate that we do?

But the biggest questions are about what it means to be human. In a future where consciousness can be transplanted — where our minds have the chance to continue after our frail human bodies, and the earth they occupy, are no longer sustainable — it’s up to us to decide if that’s an action worth taking.

The designers employ a clever trick to force us to confront this directly. At several points in the game, the player comes across kiosks with seemingly benign survey questions about what it feels like to be taken from your original body; about what it means to be untethered from the physical anchor we’re used to.

The questions don’t change over time, but based on the actions you’ve taken and what you’ve been through between these points in the game, you may find yourself reevaluating your responses. It’s tough to say you don’t want to go on when you’ve fought so hard not to give up. What may seem like sweet release viewed from the outside might be a torturous end when it’s your turn. Deciding between a false reality and none at all isn’t much of a choice.

If you could live on beyond your body by putting your mind into a mechanical host, would you?

Would it be better or worse to upload your consciousness to a simulation (like in The Matrix) and leave bodies behind altogether?

How do you think you would feel different in either of these situations, given that you are 100% aware of what’s changed?

It’s so great when friends get together like this.

This piece from the NY Times on how phones keep us disconnected hovers around a topic we see covered a lot (and that I keep coming back to myself, here), but references several studies that make it hit harder than your average thinkpiece.

In 2010, a team at the University of Michigan led by the psychologist Sara Konrath put together the findings of 72 studies that were conducted over a 30-year period. They found a 40 percent decline in empathy among college students, with most of the decline taking place after 2000.

Across generations, technology is implicated in this assault on empathy. We’ve gotten used to being connected all the time, but we have found ways around conversation — at least from conversation that is open-ended and spontaneous, in which we play with ideas and allow ourselves to be fully present and vulnerable. But it is in this type of conversation — where we learn to make eye contact, to become aware of another person’s posture and tone, to comfort one another and respectfully challenge one another — that empathy and intimacy flourish. In these conversations, we learn who we are.

The studies make it seem undeniable, but the interpretation here isn’t simply about people having short attention spans or being shallow. There’s a more poignant spin that we’re just afraid to expose ourselves and be open, and the less practiced we are at that, the easier it is to retreat to the safety of the mediated conversation over the one right in front of us.

How often do you turn to the phone when you should be engaged in conversation? Why do you think you do this?

When other people do the same thing, what do you think of them?

Do you think your ability to have a meaningful conversation is improving or suffering over time? Does this have anything to do with the technology in your life?

Do you even want to change this trajectory, or is this an acceptable evolution of how we interact for you?

[Note: photo taken from artist Eric Pickersgill’s series of group photos with the phones removed for effect. Lovely project.]

Or ignore this post and try a truly controversial topic: Is Scorsese overrated? (Yes, I know I’m asking this in the caption to a shot from Coppola.)

The Godfather and Goodfellas are classic guy movies. We quote them we reference them, their influence is undeniable (even though the latter is a bit over-rated; that’s right, I said it). The Sopranos changed television. Though we know the characters are criminals, we find an admirable dignity in their way of life, we excuse their actions because we’re seduced by their brazen individuality.

When The Wolf of Wall Street appeared in 2013, Scorsese told a story similar to that of Goodfellas, only set in a different kind of criminal enterprise. The same rise to power, the same brotherhood of exploitation and excess, the same kinds of mistakes leading to the same ultimate downfall (though in both cases, a sort of escape from true justice). And yet, Wolf made me viscerally angry. Despite any praise for craft, I sort of hated it, walking out that day. And it always bothered me a little that I couldn’t quite explain why I felt so disgusted by the Wall Street version of this story but entertained by the Mafia one.

Then I read Maria Konnikova’s piece in The New Yorker that basically spelled it out for me (though this excerpt only touches on the larger reasoning).

[P]sychological distance doesn’t require time. Under the right conditions, it can flourish in the moment. The psychological distance provided by “otherness” mimics the distance provided by time. It’s not a phenomenon unique to the mafia. It’s easy to glamorize warfare when there is no draft, or to idealize anyone whose life style seems risky and edgy without putting you, personally, at risk—spies and secret agents, rebels without a cause, the beatniks of Jack Kerouac’s “On The Road.” As long as there isn’t an easy-to-recall, factual reminder that brings us down out of the clouds of romanticism, we can glamorize at will. The lives of serial killers offer those concrete reminders: they lurk in neighborhoods like ours, threatening people who could be us. The mob is more abstract: it’s a shadowy, vague “organization” whose illicit dealings don’t really impinge on us. Abstraction lends itself to psychological distance; specificity kills it.

We grant mobsters dignity because we enjoy contemplating the general principles by which they are supposed to have lived: omertà, standing up to unfair authority, protecting your own.

Mobsters are far enough removed from most of our realities that we can see them as fictional, as other, and not feel personally offended, harmed, or threatened by them. Bankers, on the other hand, very recently did direct harm to most of the country. They’re too real to admire; or at least, they should be if you’re any sort of moral person.

What qualities are admirable in mobsters? Are there any that would actually apply to your life, or do they only serve as an escapist fantasy?

Do any of those apply to the popular idea of bankers as portrayed in culture? Are they actually that different, or as this article suggests, just degrees of separation from our actual realities?

If you had to be one, which would you want to be? Or rather, which would be the most fun on the one hand, but which would be the most practical life decision? How would you feel once you’d gone down that path?

Not every show can make the ad the story and still be so profoundly meaningful.

Emily Nussbaum is one of the best people writing about television, and in a recent New Yorker piece on the relationship between shows and advertisers, she examines the faustian deal between creators and the brands that want into their shows.

There’s a common notion that there’s good and bad integration. The “bad” stuff is bumptious—unfunny and in your face. “Good” integration is either invisible or ironic, and it’s done by people we trust, like Stephen Colbert or Tina Fey. But it brings out my inner George Trow. To my mind, the cleverer the integration, the more harmful it is. It’s a sedative designed to make viewers feel that there’s nothing to be angry about, to admire the ad inside the story, to train us to shrug off every compromise as necessary and normal.

She acknowledges the need to pay for art somehow (“Perhaps this makes me sound like a drunken twenty-two-year-old waving a battered copy of Naomi Klein’s “No Logo.””), but on a deeper level, asks if we’ve given up too much of the art’s integrity in the process.

Do you perceive product placement as it happens? Does you perceive it as a violation? A distraction? Or an easily ignorable part of watching television?

Understanding that the creation of entertainment, and TV in particular, has to be paid for somehow, is this an acceptable trade-off?

If so, what do you think the effects are on you as a viewer?

If not, what other arrangement would you prefer between you as a viewer and the makers of television (and potentially, willing sponsors) to finance the production of the shows you enjoy?

Early Kindles succeeded at being both revolutionary and revolting at once.

In Aeon magazine, writer Craig Mod reflects on his initial enthusiasm for digital books, and how that enthusiasm has cooled, sending him back to the physical versions for a whole host of reasons.

It was an incredible user experience, full of perceived value, delightful in its absurdity. Most importantly, using the device in these ways felt like an investment in the future of books and reading. Each Kindle book I bought was a vote with the wallet: yes – digital books! Every note I took, every underline I made was contributing to a vast lattice collection of reader knowledge that would someday manifest in ways beautiful or interesting or otherwise yet unknowable. This I believed. And implicit in this belief was a trust – a trust that Amazon would innovate, move the experience forward unpredictably, meaningfully, and delightfully. This belief – that Amazon was going to teach the old guard new tricks – kept me buying and reading and engaging.

…

From 2009 to 2013, every book I read, I read on a screen. And then I stopped. …It was a stark reminder that pliancy of media invites experimentation. When media is too locked down, too rigid, when it’s too much like a room with most of the air sucked out of it, stale and exhausting, the exploration stops. And for the intersection of books and digital there’s still much exploration to be had.

In his case, it’s not the lack of willingness or enthusiasm for the idea that has turned him off. It’s the lack of momentum on exploring even newer possibilities.

What differences have you perceived in your digital reading vs digital reading, in terms of reading experience, or how you engage with the material?

What are the most meaningful strengths of each format? Do any of these make you a die-hard advocate for one or the other?

If in another 20 years they were to stop physical book printing outright, what would you miss most? What would we lose as a culture?