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I wish I hadn’t waited a month after finishing Digital: A Love Story before writing about it: I don’t think I had a lot to say about it when I finished it, but I had something to say about it then, or at least I had something to say in/after the VGHVI Symposium on the game that Dan led?

I guess what I remember is my uncertainty of how to approach the game. I see a choice of people with whom to exchange messages, and one sequence of those message involves increasing emotional closeness. And I that (or that plus my past history) put me in a BioWare state of mind, expecting some sort of romantic choice to unfold?

Which isn’t entirely crazy: the game’s subtitle is “A Love Story”, after all. But it’s a different sort of love story than I’m used to in games; a quieter one, certainly.

And one that, refreshingly, isn’t about love as conquest. In a major sense, the game isn’t even about you at all. (It just ain’t your story?) On which note, the picture the game draws of the player character is quite unusual: you don’t see the messages you send, you just see how other people react to them. So it’s a sort of picture drawn in negative space, in a negative space formed by subjective and situated reactions. A game that, in its own idiosyncratic way, goes farther towards defining you in terms of your relations than any other art work I can think of?

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