Erasure in ‘Emily is Away’

Few games are defined by what they withhold from the player, but Emily Is Away is a unique title that articulates itself by what is erased. Instead of what is present, Emily Is Away ensures that the player feels the things that are not, in fact, said by the viewpoint character. At the same time, this lack of ideological commitment poses issues that, unexamined, pose a core problem that I don’t think was adequately captured in the many discussions I’ve been peripheral to about Emily Is Away. This erasure, initially impressive, eventually backfires through a poorly handed scene about consent.

I’ve heard so much about Emily Is Away that, until recently, I felt like it was a game I didn’t really need to play. My podcast covered it in an episode where I was absent, but when you look at the aesthetic of the game, the trite description of “AIM simulator” feels almost dull and only partially descriptive. I remember crafting an AIM account in middle school under the now-cringeworthy name “VoldemortsChips” (I can’t, for the life of me, remember why “chips” was the distinguishing factor here). Creating an AIM account was clearly just my way of fostering greater connection with my school crushes, attempting to express myself and feel included in a way that wasn’t too obvious. That feeling of socially awkward pre-teen attempts at romance is what I think Emily Is Away captures really well.

I finished Emily Is Away in one sitting, which worked out in the game’s favor. I, and apparently many reviewers of the game, felt my emotional heartstrings tugged when finishing the final chapter of the game’s short runtime. But as I’ve completed the game, something hasn’t sat right with me. That is, I wonder how much of this game’s nostalgic aesthetic presentation masked issues with the writing and overall thesis that the game implicitly articulates. I’ve been the jealous, insecure person typing like the protagonist of Emily Is Away, so of course I can relate to them. But the parts I relate to aren’t emotionally healthy, and that alone is worth examining.

Responding to the Critical Conversation Around Emily Is Away

I encountered an astonishing review by Bruno Dias that completely eviscerates Emily Is Away, and like I did in my lengthy diatribe against The Last of Us, I’d like to spend some time working through the nuances of his critique. Since Emily Is Away is a game of which, as far as I was aware, received universal praise, retreading some of that critical ground is important to return to my issues with erasure in the game. Dias’ review is one of those marvels of writing that truly makes me feel like I both understand the game I just played better, but also like my assumptions have been deeply interrogated in a way that makes me distrust them.

One aspect of Emily Is Away that I didn’t give much thought to is the heteronormative nature of the story’s presentation, which is beyond surprising given my own queerness. As Dias writes, “a lot of squinting is required to read it as anything but the story of a boy’s crush on a girl.” Even though I opted to choose my own name “Flora” when playing Emily Is Away, I notice that there are echoes of male socialization that linger with me even now, several years into my gender transition, and the longstanding nature of defaulting into a male protagonist’s perspective, especially in games, still surprises me. 

I think that the intentionally evocative AIM interface sucks the player in through low-brow nostalgia, and by playing with the idea of having a crush that you’re talking to, surreptitiously enamors the player with Emily’s character in the same way as the viewpoint character. Since the relationship taking place through this chat room is so instantly gamified, I think it was incredibly easy for me to overlook the critical perspective of someone like Dias and try to “win” by having the protagonist’s feelings reciprocated. Ultimately, that approach to a game like Emily Is Away is quite toxic, even as it felt automatic and otherwise natural for me.

Supplementing Nostalgia As A Worldview

Dias describes Emily Is Away as “a sort of protracted full-body cringe” that harkens aspects of the early aughts that are better left in the past. The trick of Emily Is Away’s UI is that it seems to panderingly ask, “weren’t things simpler then,” while simultaneously failing to investigate the aspects of this era that might not be as rose-tinted as the game wants them to seem (Dias names Spelunky’s “airbrushing” of patriarchy and colonialism as a similar example). 

One aspect that I happen to disagree with in Dias’ discussion of Emily Is Away is that he claims the game has no point of view. Dias dismisses the AIM-specific UI gimmick as mere set dressing that is laser-targeted at one demographic that, if I were pitching Emily Is Away to a member of gen Z, wouldn’t land in quite the same way – if at all. These period trappings, in Dias’ view, actually work against Emily Is Away, distracting from what he describes as “severe problems” with the writing and story. I disagree with the notion that these aesthetics backfire, or at best attempt to cover up the blemishes in the narrative. I think there is intrinsic value to reliving parts of your past that transport you to a specific time or place, even if the naive question of whether things were simpler back then is ultimately a fruitless and incomplete one. In the same way that seeing a home video from your childhood can rekindle a treasured memory, but maybe not fully recreate the memory itself, so too does Emily Is Away open the door to what middle-school-me felt when she was building relationships on AIM. I think the “point of view” Dias views as lacking in Emily Is Away isn’t the point of the game; to me, the point of Emily Is Away is to evoke the lack of sophistication that so many of us who play games once (or still) felt. Hopefully that evocation gives us a mirror with which to reflect – or at least it did for me.

With Dias’ damning indictment in mind, I’m reminded of Secret Little Haven, a game that trades in similar chat room nostalgia, albeit one that has a more nuanced take on social issues like gender and interpersonal relationships. What makes Secret Little Haven such a success is that the function of the AIM-styled chat room is to be a springboard for Alex, the protagonist, to explore her gender identity as a trans woman. Because no adults are actively watching her explore this identity (at least not initially), the “point of view” that this game offers is that online spaces can be a facilitator of freedom and self-determination. Even Secret Little Haven’s title wants to say that online spaces are (relatively) safe spaces, at least they were prior to the explosion of ubiquitous social media that has contributed to LGBTQIA+ visibility. Emily Is Away admittedly has no such message.

Despite a potential lack of message or point of view to Emily Is Away, the aspect of Dias’ critique that floored me was how much I took for granted the prop-like nature of the game’s characters. That is, especially in terms of the game’s women, but in general as well, the characters are treated like plot devices rather than people. I distinctly felt the one-dimensional nature of Emily’s character when initially playing, but the game’s sour narrative turn midway through made me see her more complexly – like someone who has feelings, motivations, and is more than a chat screen. Upon further reflection, I think I was willing to give Emily Is Away a pass because of what can only be described as a scene that felt curiously concrete about consent. 

Seldom have I seen games tackle the issue of consent in relationships, and it’s debatable whether Emily Is Away handles any of this in the right way. Because I felt like playing the story once was enough, I didn’t take the painstaking route that Emily Short did, finishing the game a half-dozen times. I sort of assumed that the pathway I took through Emily Is Away was the definitive story instead of a branching one. Thus, when I read about the inevitability of things going south between the protagonist and Emily herself, I became more disappointed with the game’s writing as well as my own decisions as a player. 

Before unpacking the consent scene, it’s worth highlighting the “Nice Guy” archetype that the protagonist easily fits into. Because I was playing as the protagonist, I instantly felt like we were on the same side, or that our goals – gamified relationships – were synonymous. But the more I think about Emily Is Away, the more I recognize what Dias describes as entitlement and a desire for control that undermine any good faith I held for the viewpoint character during my playthrough. Since we see the protagonist type and then hurriedly delete awkward phrases and uncomfortable questions, it becomes easy to sympathize with the idea of putting your foot in your mouth, or at least waiting until you have the perfect thing to say before sending a message to your crush. I have felt the anxiety of an intense middle school crush and therefore want to spare the protagonist the same fear of rejection that I once felt; that alone becomes the point of Emily Is Away when I set aside the remarkable aesthetics. 

The “Consent” Scene

Until the dicey-at-best consent scene, Dias argues that the women in Emily Is Away are both generic and, worse, entirely defined by what a man thinks of them. Again, this discomfort inevitably arises when thinking about how easily charmed I was by this game’s initial chapters when first playing. I became so ensconced in the mentality of winning, as it were, that I didn’t step back to think about the male-coded perspective so enmeshed in the writing. I find myself guilty in this moment of what Dias writes when he says, “The protagonist’s feelings for Emily seems less related to who she is, or even to whom the player character imagines her to be, than to the simple fact that she is there.”

In taking for granted the potentially good natured personality of the viewpoint character, I found myself deeply shocked when the game takes a sharp turn in an unpleasantly handled exchange with Emily. While I wasn’t keenly aware of the branching nature of Emily Is Away’s brief narrative, the choices I made as a player did not feel like they fully reflected what happened when making my dialogue decisions. To this end, Emily Short, interactive fiction writer, takes this branching moment to task in her deep dive on Emily Is Away. 

Emily, the character, reveals to the viewpoint character that she is going through a difficult time – something between bad breakup and depressive episode. Emily asks if she can visit, and the dialogue options given to the player can go in a few different directions. You can reject Emily’s plea for company, to which effect she later reveals that she feels like the protagonist’s relationship with her has fundamentally altered since rejecting her request. You can accept her request, but drawing the boundary that she can only visit as friends; again, Emily later laments that you seemingly rejected her when she was confident there was mutual attraction between you two. 

The path I chose was slightly different: recognizing that Emily clearly needed comfort and support, but also implicitly playing into the dubious notion that this meetup will finally be the moment of bringing your relationship with her about – or at least the clearly coded romantic feelings the viewpoint character types and frantically deletes earlier in the narrative. This choice felt almost obvious to make (again, thinking of “winning” by “getting the girl”). 

I was alarmed and later horrified to realize that the choice I had made completely backfired, as though the viewpoint character had planned to take advantage of Emily in this vulnerable moment. The player can also choose to include alcohol and partying in their meetup, which as I explored in my most recent article on Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, is not something I’m eager to engage with as a person or a player. Here, I will abridge some of Short’s excellent discussion on this choice, because as she writes, there truly is no good ending to this interaction: 

The protagonist does at one point type, then delete, that [Emily] had wanted to hook up — but […] she may not have been sober enough to give meaningful consent. [We] don’t know whether the protagonist is being truthful and accurate [but that] Emily feels betrayed and upset about what happened between us and that years later she is uncomfortable even thinking about it. [In] the late game it continues to be all about the protagonist’s feelings and the protagonist’s sadness that they couldn’t connect with Emily any more — a state of affairs that retrospectively colors some of their earlier behavior as entitled Nice Guy-ism rather than awkwardness and genuine concern. “Doesn’t it suck how you never wind up with your crush?” is a pretty horrible final message if you didn’t respect her sexual boundaries. 

Again, Short’s review of the game speaks so clearly to many of my concerns as a player – concerns that I couldn’t make sense of on my own when this game is so otherwise universally praised. But the initial point above gets at the crux of what I both love and feel disgust about in Emily Is Away: when so much of what is typed is deleted, when so much of the information we have about what happened in this pivotal and gut-wrenching moment is given to us through an incomplete lens that may, in fact, be the viewpoint character creating sympathy for himself on behalf of the player, the erasure in Emily Is Away ultimately sours what could have been the intended wistfully pleasant experience.

Toxic Masculinity in Emily Is Away

The problem with a moment like this ill-advised scene that Dias goes as far as to call “unambiguously rape” is that it undermines the previously charming innocent awkwardness of a grade school crush. Those potentially redeemable qualities evaporate and instead can only be read as, in Dias’ words, “toxic masculine entitlement that leads to unironic usage of terms like ‘the friendzone.’” In showing us the viewpoint character typing and then deleting their messages, I think, the game fails to meaningfully critique what happens to Emily in this scene lacking consent. In fact, it goes as far as actually endorsing the main character’s point of view, suggesting that this scene is somehow Emily’s fault.

The reason the game seems to frame the issue of non-consensual sex as somehow blameworthy for Emily instead of the viewpoint character happens because it is presented as a surprise to them as well as the player. In making these choices about meeting up with Emily (or not), drinking alcohol (or not), there was never a clear indication that this interaction would later corrupt their relationship. It’s incredibly easy to feel disbelief and incredulity with the manner in which Emily confronts the player character about her discomfort. I, the player, clearly did not intend for non-consensual sex to occur. It’s as though the game wants to victim blame at the same time it wants to gut-punch the player for the choice they unwittingly made.

Emily Is Away is a game of cheap shots. But like cheap shots, many of them land, keeling you over. I still haven’t encountered someone who played this game and felt nothing, even if the writing has severe issues with male possessiveness and ill-formed desire. Games aren’t insightful simply for being provocative, but Emily Is Away is nevertheless a game worth discussing because of the polarizing reception to it – even if one pole is buried in the snow from which it was formed, protecting it from melting. Since so many of my gaming friends love this title, I don’t want to throw Emily Is Away out with the bathwater; rather, knowing the two sequels which exist, my next endeavor will be to interrogate whether the sequels inherently learned from the mistakes of this original attempt.

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