Digital: A Love Story

50 Years of Text Games, by Aaron A. Reed
Connecting to a BBS—a bulletin board system, the primary way to find online communities before the mid-1990s—meant punching in a phone number and waiting for your modem to negotiate with a distant computer. [...]
It’s an experience very different from browsing the modern web, one which few people too young to have lived it can easily appreciate. Digital: A Love Story recreates it in loving detail, capturing the texture and flavor of BBS life remarkably well. But its author never experienced that life firsthand. In the year the game is set—1988—she hadn’t even been born.
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Analysis: Examining Digital: A Love Story
The story, set in an alternate version of the late 80s, begins with the protagonist receiving a modem and a dialer from his or her uncle. All game play consists of manipulating the virtual desktop, discovering the world of bulletin boards, sending messages and downloading applications and dialing more and more new numbers. Almost at once, we find ourselves exchanging messages with Emilia, a would-be poet who reads as an emo teenager, self-dramatizing yet maddeningly vague about her feelings and problems. An awkward semi-romance springs up, with Emilia hinting with annoying coyness at her feelings for the protagonist. Now, what is brilliant about this is that the game never shows us the protagonist's emails to Emilia, only her responses -- which makes the whole business both more relatable and less saccharine.
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