Ratings and Reviews by EJ

Welcome to the Universe is an homage to/parody of Alter Ego, a 1986 choice-based game. Alter Ego was created by, I believe, a psychologist, and purported to be able to accurately model the player’s personality and life up to that point and show them what the outcome of their life choices might be, as well as allowing them to experiment with other life paths and identities. Alter Ego’s claim that it would “change your life” was a little tongue-in-cheek (because you can model the outcomes of making different choices, get it?), but it was earnestly meant to be thought-provoking and somewhat educational, claimed to be rooted in a deep understanding of human psychology, and was perhaps even intended to provoke empathy for others in bad situations, in a “there but for fortune” kind of way. A contemporary review called it “consciousness-raising.” Of course, it also made a number of normative assumptions about the player, and in a game that’s supposed to be so all-encompassing of the human experience, there’s a particular kind of discomfort that that causes for a player who finds that the array of choices on offer hasn’t taken into account the possible existence of a person like them.

You may wonder why I’ve spent a whole paragraph of this review talking about an entirely different game, but I think if I had not already been familiar with Alter Ego—not only the game itself, but the way it was marketed and received—I would have been pretty baffled by Welcome to the Universe. The latter game is framed as the creation of a fictional academic, Dr. Balamer, who believes in the importance of “life-changing video games” and their ability to provoke empathy by drawing on universal human experiences. His earnest ambition to connect humans by creating a universally relatable game produces something that is both obviously filtered through the perspective of a middle-class, suburban, white American man (witness, for example, the schoolchildren arguing about the merits of their hometown based on the presence or absence of particular chain restaurants—can a town really be said to be good if it doesn’t have an Applebee’s???) and frequently absurd (featuring heated arguments about Parisian dentistry and a placeholder for an incident involving “goop” that somehow leads to you declaring yourself the “goop master” or “goop servant”). I won’t spoil where exactly this goes, but my read is that Welcome to the Universe affectionately mocks some of Alter Ego’s grand ambitions and gestures towards universality while ultimately affirming the impulse towards human connection that underlies it.

I found this pretty entertaining (the high point for me was probably (Spoiler - click to show)the mid-game survey that asked you if you thought the game should add an incident involving a stranger in an unmarked van and then asked you if you thought it would be fair if your character died if they interacted with the stranger in any way, a reference to an infamously jarring episode in the childhood section of Alter Ego where your character can be kidnapped and murdered). But at the same time, I’m not quite sure if there’s much of a point to this mockery of a specific aspect of a specific game that didn’t exactly spawn a host of imitators. On the other hand, maybe it’s just a monument to someone’s complicated feelings about an ambitious but flawed game, and maybe that’s all it needs to be.

There is one aspect that I felt might rise to the level of a commentary on choice games in general rather than Alter Ego in particular. Alter Ego was a game that gave you choices of actions and determined your (or rather, the PC’s) qualities based on what you did, and that has remained a popular model for choice IF (see the whole Choice of Games oeuvre—in fact, Alter Ego’s latest incarnation seems to be in Choicescript). Welcome to the Universe, on the other hand, allows you to choose what you are (a traveller or a homebody? Cool or uncool?), and determines your actions based on those qualities. It inverts the usual framework, perhaps calling into question how much choice we really have in what we do versus how much our actions are the inevitable result of who we are as people. (Of course, this has particular relevance to Alter Ego’s claim that you can create a perfect replica of yourself but then see what happens if you make different life choices, and a little less relevance to the majority of choice games, in which you’re not supposed to be playing a character who’s Literally You. But on the other hand, I’ve often heard people lament that they replayed a game planning to make different choices this time, but couldn’t bring themselves to do it….)

There’s also something there about the inadequacy of binary choices to really capture the range of human experience, but this falls a little flat when you consider that most games don’t have purely binary choices, including Alter Ego itself.

All Alter Ego considerations aside, I didn’t consistently love the experience of Welcome to the Universe; the humor was a little hit or miss for me, and also I don’t really like playing as Literally Me in any game and so I didn’t and then I felt like I’d undermined the intended experience of the ending. (This is a me problem, I know.) But it’s definitely unique, and it gave me some ideas to chew on, and I appreciate that.