Honestly, commertials bother me but I'm happy that you're getting sponsored. You make good videos so it's nice to see that you can get profit out of it
I never saw Simon as an idiot but as an average person with false hope. Like many of us we latch on to the best outcome instead of the possibility of the most horrible situations. He is told it was a copy but doesn't accept it. There was nothing to return to, another option, or something else to do. It was only this and when you have 1 option you would hope for the best.
I agree! You see him panic when Catherine threatens to leave him alone, and whenever she's mean to him he makes amends very fast - I think he's just terrified of being alone and he does cling. My heart bleeds for him
The thing to remember is that Simon isn't "an average person." He's an artificial construct *imitating* human neurology according to a non-human's guess to what that's like. His mind is deliberately obfuscating the reality of his situation.
@chuth2768 Well no, he's a scan of a human brain fairly close to when that human died of a terminal disease. WAU doesn't have to guess anything about the scans, only the relationship between body and mind.
I think a lot of people forget that Simon was scanned after he sustained severe life threatening brain injury. Having a bit of trouble with brand new big concepts is pretty understandable for someone recovering from brain damage. He was also full of a lot of desperate hope when he was scanned that mindset probably carried over.
The way i interpreted idea behind "blowy" is that you have to choose between killing a robot that by this point you know it's a scanner of a real person, OR "killing" an object that's not conscious of itself but you attached yourself to it because it was useful to you, and it was kinda cute(even Simon express this). I believe the idea is to show how the value we give to life is relative. How we sometimes might give more value to an inanimate objects that we have history with (and in this case and object that we anthropomorphized) than a real human being that we just met.
@@MertKayKay For me it was more of a perception of sentience. When we unplugged the robot at the beginning, we didn't know a person was in it, when we make electricity go through the other robot we only had an inkling. Now when we get to blowy, we know that full people can be inside machines, and when we attack blowy, I found myself wondering if blowy didn't speak because it wasn't sentient or if it just didn't have a voice module to express it's sentience in a way we could understand. I think about that much more than the end, the wonderings of our perception of experience and sentience and feelings and thoughts in others, and those that others have in us.
@@jamiehart2191 If you kill the other robot, Blowy (or K8, model number in the game) gets angry & avoids you, & never helps you again. I tried both & didn't like either.
If I recall there's actually two people in that robot, it's a guy called Javid Goya and a silent backup copy of Terry Akers, who he thinks he's having a nice chat with.
This game literally gives me what feels like PTSD when ever i see that last part of Simon being left behind. No exaggeration, my heart clenches, breathing gets hard, and i get extreme anxiety, i become scared too. The crazy part is that it lasts only seconds. This is the only piece of media that does this to me. Idk what this means. Lets just say i would hate to be in Simons situation in real life.
The funny thing is that if SOMA were a movie, that's how it would had ended, with no glimpse of the Simon in the Ark (unless it was a Hollywood movie, then it would had the happy ending only and totally forget that Simon and Catherine left behind in the deep ocean)
I'd use the comparison for this game and "I have no mouth and I must scream". Both are existential horror seeped in death and the decay of earth, with identity and choice being at the forefront of each experience. While IHNMAIMS isn't transhumanist per say, there are a lot of parallels through AMs treatment of the five characters you can play as, with death never being a true way of escape, and the idea of the mind being forced to live and relive it's own trauma through a computer simulation. Neither games ending is truly happy either, just a slightly lighter than true black.
@@MertKayKay if you're looking for transhumanist reading/listening, you should try the audible original "We are Legion (We are Bob)" by Dennis E. Taylor. It's about a man - Bob - who joins a club to freeze his head upon death only to find he's being used to manage an interstellar search for a planet to colonize.
@MertKayKay Harlan Ellison, who wrote the original short story, voiced AM in the game and helped write it. Worth watching a playthrough if you don't want to deal with 90s point and click
Actually, i've never seen that note telling Simon about the vivid nightmares, i've replayed this game atleast a dozen times and explored every inch and that has always slipped unnoticed. how real is reality when we can't even pick up on all the cues of things not being... 'real'. what a hellish reality we could be very well trapped in, unable to see further. oh and someone did climb the omega gun in adjacent side material to SOMA, basically when *spoilers* catherine dies and everyone goes back to Tau, someone starts putting together a plan to climb it. well once things go very sour, the woman in the story starts climbing the whole way up, having little in the way of bearing as she ascends from the abyss foot by foot. eventually she makes it to the surface the moment before sunrise and with the freedom to choose her own fate. takes off her suit and waits to succumb to the toxic atmosphere, smiling content as she watches the clouds break and the sun rises.
As someone who never allows themselves to catch a thought in their brain in silence (yes I am listening to this during chores because who would clean up all alone with their thoughts running?!) the thought of being all alone, just conscience no body just thoughts floating around throughout infinity...absolutely terrifies me😭
I really wish the ending had been the digital copies living at the bottom of the ocean survived and decide to do their own thing along with people surviving on the spaceship.
when I played Soma it kinda reminded me of Prey (2017), not just because of the whole twist at the end but because of the walking around an abandoned facility and seeing what everyone left behind. Both games also give you moral choices to make that have little to no impact on the gameplay, they're just there to make you think really. They're also both seriously underrated
This game and what remains of Edith Finch were both games that gave me serious existential dread about how easy you could lose something or someone you love, and I think it really gave me a feeling that 2020 was going to be a bad year because of something big that was going to happen and it also gave me the thought and feeling the world was going to end throughout the summer of 2019 it definitely was an eye opening experience
Catherine is very interesting in this because whoever she was as a human, we only really know her as the person she was copied as. Obviously at the very end of the game when we find her murdered corpse and the last logge from her and her old ark team she was adamant that her ark project be launched as quick as possible and ended up being killed because the others wanted to wait longer for one reason or another. We hear first hand she was determined and unswayable in her goals, and she seems to have always had that streak to her seeing as Data chip Cathy was scanned well before the very end of her human days. I think by the very end of Human Catherine's life she had accepted the fact that her project was the only possible thing left that had a chance to continue on in some capacity, everyone left alive on Earth was in the station under water, time was destroying it little by little and everyone who was still alive and scanned tended to kill themselves because they knew there was no future; they couldn't live down in the ocean forever when time was destroying the facility little by little, everyone they loved was dead- no food fresh supplies, the ever present threat of being imprisoned under the ocean with an increasingly unstable strcucter around you and piling up dead bodies and science experiments going rogue . There was just nothing, nothing to live for, and nothing that supported continuing to be alive. I think Catherine realized this at some point and at the very least her scanned form was heavily imprinted by this nihilistic mentality in some unconscious way (or maybe she fully acknowledged it and just accepted it for what it's). She just has a goal and that's the most important thing to her. She needs it to be done and done as best as it can be done, and she doesn't want to acknowledge any extra problems by anyone else because they pale in comparison to her ultimate goals. She doesn't want to keep talking about how things work with Simon because he doesn't ultimately need to know because that doesn't *matter* he' he'll never have an opportunity to actually better himself or get over it in any meaningful way, or do anything else meaningful with his existence even if Catherine did take the time to explain things and allow him to get over it, because nothing was ever going to be left for him or her to do, but launch the ark and sit around until they power off or get destroyed in some capacity.
Idk if the gameplay will be to your liking, but I think you will enjoy the story of the zero Escape series. 1. 9 hours 9 persons 9 doors 2. Virtues last reward 3. Zero time dilemma They are available on steam. Each of them is a visual novel with a lot of endings and decisions. In betweem you will also be placed in Escaperooms which you need to solve. I loved it and the topics discussed in these games seem to interest you.
Oh btw It is stated why Simon is there as a scan- he is a legacy scan used as a example to what AI should be. Essentially- he is a template of human brain on which all newest AI in world of SOMA were built. Not literally turning Simon's brain into AIs, but as a... showcase how human brain works so people can program AIs in "it's image". And if you listen to one of the logs in Delta (or Omicron) you can find that Simon agreed for his scan to be used for science while he was on his death bed. And you technically meet another robot that you unplug before the one in the powerplant control room. In the room before a vent section is the first "WAU butthole you finger" and there is a voice that tells you to not touch it, after you touch the "WAU flower" the voice is gone. My thinking is that the scan was probably built into the control panel you just touched, WAU isn't above putting scans into industrial equipment (Dunbat as an example) And WAU's "Magnetic Shriek" aside from being a gesture of self preservation might have been "allowed to kill" because WAU was already on it's way of "resurecting" people. The law was baypassed because it had a way to return the human to life, even tho this state of living is extremaly dubious and stress inducing for the creation
Completely agree, this story most likely wouldn' t work in any other media. For me one of the strongest moments definitely was the last living human on Earth. What a bizzare, sad and frightening idea for a scene.
Perhaps the most impressive thing about this game to me is how thorough and singular it is in keeping up this one specific kind of horror without wearing it out. It slowly ramps up the existential questions and dread with carefully placed scenarios and moral dilemmas for a multi-hour experience keeping it fresh. Only a single episode (And another that sort of references it briefly) of Black Mirror is all that’s necessary for it to make a point about the horrifying implications of consciousness through technology. The amount of editing and workshopping layout design to make it not a complete drag must have been astounding on top of all the other work that goes into making any game
I've thought about Soma at least once a month since it was released. Wonderful video on it! I have never seen Black Mirror(because watching new media is inordinately hard) and the whole 'cookie' thing is absolutely terrifying! Certainly has a way to make you appreciate the life you have.
The White Christmas episode reminds me a lot of the short story collection Axiomatic by Greg Egan, particularly "Learning to be Me" and "Closer" (also a bit of "The Cutie"). All very creepy sci-fi stories with existential questions.
Before the video even gets started I want to tell you that I don't play video games, I don't really know what makes a game good/bad/etc., and yet I still love watching your videos. You are so entertaining and I always feel invested in what you're talking about.
The media I compare the most to Soma is the 2009 animated movie 9, which is about little homunculi trying to stop a robot that's intent on eradicating all life. Each homunculus is based on a fragment of a living person's soul, personality included, and the robot uses souls to create more robots because it was taught to stop warfare. This is a drastic simplification of the plot, but thats the general gist of it. Very similar to SOMA except a weird SciFi wwi era Germany kind of setting.
You don't have to kill Carl btw. You can go into the door control room and pull the power from there instead. It opens the door and lets the monster in, but Carl gets to live in peace. I also did not realise this when I played the game for the first time. Funny how I felt way more guilty after I found that out, even though the thing I should have felt guilty about was the fact that Carl was suffering at all.
Okay, but this game literally manifests my thoughts about life, death, and the value of both. I've never had a way of conveying the way that exact copies of an original would not be any less valuable or even inherently real, not in a way that ever manages to get that point to actually click. I think from now on I'll require all of my potential friends to play this game haha. This is the kind of existentialist/empathetic horror that has filled my head since I was a pre-teen. It's difficult to explain to someone just how that impacts your ideas of the worth of your own life. How that changes how you empathize with others, with things that aren't human, when you can't remember a time before. I can only live my life like I am the first versions of Simon or Catherine. Hope that something about my experience of the world will help someone else down any possible line. I think this way of thinking about the world made me more optimistic than I was before. I know that when this perspective clicks for a lot of people it's existential horror. It was for me too. But so is any major realization. It was for Simon, for all Simons, even the one who did end up in paradise. I am willing to work for the possibility of something beautiful, something that will only exist if I keep living, even if I can't see it. I think that's beautiful enough to keep going.
I havent played soma and I probably wont. But the videos about it are so interesting! And yours is soo good! Specially with your type of humor :) Keep it up, love your content!
man soma is great, i could never pass a part where the monster chases u downstairs so i had to watch a playtrough but still damn the story is so good :-)
There's this video game - I can't remember for the life of me what it was called - but the whole concept was you were the last human not in this digital 'afterlife' scan, and the planet or ship or whatever you were on was doomed, so you had to go through the game and find the scanner to save yourself... only for the scan to indeed take a copy of your brain... but leaves you, yourself, in reality. Because, yeah, scanning your brain wouldn't take your soul with you, so... what's the point? It's literally this game but ...not! Because the ending - you see and hear your 'copy' make it safely into paradise. It was pristine and white, the room, however. And your copy was physical and you could HEAR them in the other room...
27:00 This is why the writers are absolutely genius. This is the Three Laws of Robotics, warped and bastardized in such a way no one would have thought of. It's a horrifying thought.
I find that Brooker often relies on his characters being sociopathic, stupid, or both plus unfettered for his stories to work - but JESUS is White Christmas terrifying. (Black Museum also gave me a full on panic attack.)
THANK YOU for this video. It was very interesting. Especially because I liked the game (and Black Mirror) too. And there's just something in your way of talking that makes it never a bore to listen to. And, I too, try to bring up game talk in conversations about anything other than games. Unfortunately, I have next to no friends that share my love for games.
Loooove this video. Soma is easily one of my favorite story driven experiences I've ever played and I think genuinely changed me as a person when I played it. It's a super easy comparison, but I also find I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream to be perfectly similar to Soma in a way that tickles my brain. Especially the game version, as it has a really haunting atmosphere, but the short story I think is a more concise way of exploring the themes of a Hell of our own making.
thanks for the great video! i haven't played soma myself, but i've tried listening to podcasts discussing the themes before and had a hard time following along. your explanation and thoughts made me feel like i understand it better than i did before :)
This reminded me of two pieces of media, in different aspects. The thing with the multiple Simons reminded me of the movie "The Prestige", which I believe everyone has seen and don't mind spoilers, as it was released in 2006 and stars High Jackman and Christian Bale, but I felt the same dilemma in it. When Angier was making and killing clones, which were nothing more than versions of himself, split in that second and destined to different paths, one to go on with life normally and one destined to doom. Angier understood to some level what was happening and what he was doing, the suffering he was putting "himself" through, but at the same time him as a being never actually felt it, the following surviving clone always a copy of the previous one that had also not experienced it, never fully understanding while simultaneously not being, but also being the one that died in that tank. It is a very interesting and deep concept wrapped in magic show packaging, would recommend you check it out if you haven't. The situation with WAU reminds me of the very disturbing "I have no mouth, and I must scream". I hate body horror and the worse part is probably the doom of inescapable suffering that both "SOMA" and "I have no mouth, and I must scream" bring, being unable to die even when it would be for the better. In case you don't know, the bones of this short-story-turned-point-and-click-game is that there is this all powerful AI that controls the lives of the last 5 remnants of humanity. I would highly recommend checking it out, even if it is very disturbing. Like with the cookies in "Black Mirror", the AI it can even warp their perception of time. Like WAU, it plays with those real human lives, experimenting on it, the difference being that AM is cruel, acting out of malice. AM knows exactly what it is doing and the suffering it is causing, it just tortures them for funsies. But regardless of intent, I think what WAU and AM do and what people do with cookies can evoke the same feelings, of that hopelessness of impending doom, in a lonely, lifeless and constricted environment, without even the chance of reaching freedom in death. Euthanasia and mercy killing are complicated subjects people have very different views on, but for goodness' sake just take the people stuck in body horror media out of their misery, I do feel bad for those fictional characters.
If you want a bit of extra horror, when Simon discovers his legacy scan, Cath mentions that it was a foundation for artificial intelligence research, and copies of his scan were eventually given to students at colleges who were learning about the subject. This means that there were countless confused, scared Simons that existed throughout the years that were brought to life suddenly and studied, experimented on, and used, until it was killed without any second thought after their use was gone. Students poked and prodded at them for homework, or even just messed with them for fun - we all know what college kids are like. It just gets more and more horrifying the more you think about it Also for the love of all that you care about, play Outer Wilds if you haven’t. It’s the best game ever made in my humble (read: objectively correct) opinion, and while it isn’t horror - though parts of the game are pretty terrifying, and the DLC, which is as good or better than the main game, has some heavy horror elements - I think you’d absolutely love it
Wow that realisation made me stare into space for a few minutes, thank you Zach! Poor Simon - and poor Simons :'( I definitely want to play Outer Wilds! I bought it full price back in March and then just never played it. I'd love to try it sometime. Your glowing recommendation has inspired me :D
There is so much I could ramble incoherently about this topic, because it's my favorite existential thought train, but it would be literally all over the place as I excitedly stammer out different ideas. One thing though, within the question of Theseus, as we grow, our cells are slowly replaced with new cells. To which, approximately every 7 years, we are eventually fully replaced. So, are we the same person from then? Are we the same person we were yesterday? A minute ago? Does modifications, say through medication, change who we are? Oh, and also, if we one day figure out teleportation, would it really only be making a copy of ourselves, and destroying the original instantly? As for other media, Ghost In The Shell, the original animated movie goes deep. Finally, just a fan theory, but I think Simon was the headless body and made a new Simon, and Catherine knew this, but had in convo realized the Simon she worked with was gone, and had reused the archived Simon.
Hilariously, you should play Stray (the cat game) if you want more games dealing with transhumanism. Another really fun game exploring the idea of transhumanism + deep futurism is ECHO (2017). Asides from Lindwall, I did my best to spare everyone while playing SOMA, mostly because death is permanent and I can't actually verify them wanting to die. There's always a chance to come back to be sure and assist someone to pass on later, and I like to think that's something that Simon's newfound immortality would give him time to do. Just because the life is in a new state of existence doesn't necessarily mean it's beyond saving. I think my view on things like this might be affected by being chronically ill in the first place: everyone always assumes the ill and handicapped deserve to be put out of their misery. The truth us we can thrive and be happy with appropriate pain management and resources and with Catherine as an example (for better or worse), I think it's something worth exploring. Simon has all the time in the world to figure things out. It's pretty bleak but I like my bleak little hopes.
here's 2 things I think of when I think of this game: 1) Jacob Geller's video about What is the Soul? and 2), connected to the theories presented in that video, how I now view the 10th Doctor's human clone in Doctor Who series 4. I used to think that a clone of yourself, no matter how perfect, was not, could not be, a perfect clone of yourself. They may walk and talk like you, pick up your mannerisms, hold the same beliefs, but they're not *you*. Like in Westworld (the show), it doesn't matter if they make a copy of your body, what matters is your *core*, which can be transferred from body to body. But now...I don't know. Human10 has all of the same memories and emotions as the Doctor, the only difference is that he has 1 heart, and a completely human body. I know that's 1 youtube video, and 2 *long* TV shows, but that's all I've got to offer as examples of similar media.
For similar media, I always think of the movie Advantageous (2015) (currently on Netflix US). It deals with the idea of moving your mind from one body to another. The book Permutation City (that I haven't finished) also explores the "create a digital copy of yourself" idea. I'll go ahead and recommend the movie The Final Cut while I'm here.
I don't play videos games and I love your videos because they allow me to discover amazing (or less amazing depending on the game) stories via a media that's completely foreign to me. I especially love this video, existential horror is something that always strikes a cord with me.
I think you asked for related books. First thing I thought of was "Sphere" by Michael Chrichton. It's not quite the same theme or plot, but it is an underwater science-fiction horror that has some mind manipulation. It's a pretty quick read or if you prefer there is also a decent movie with the same title. The film "Moon" is another to check out. Great video! I look forward to watching more!
Soma is one of my favorite games. I can never get enough of the story! Weirdly enough, when I first watched a playthrough of it I found it disappointing. I'm not sure why, maybe I was in the wrong headspace for it at the time. I was one of those people who found Simon to be irritatingly dumb, but like you explained, there's explanation to it. (Old, "flat" scan, brain damage.) I hope you don't mind but I'm going to vomit a bunch of disconnected Soma thoughts here now, because I love this game a lot and your video was fantastic: I was reminded of different pieces of media by your Black Mirror references: the Ghost In The Shell animated movie from 1995 (where a minor character has to cope with the fact that he's never had a family, those memories were just implanted into his brain), Bladerunner 2049 (similar idea, implanted vs real memories), a short story from Stanisław Lem - Memoirs of a Space Traveller, 1950s (the protagonist meets a man who uploaded his wife's mind into a small artifact that has no input or output, where her consciousness exists alone forever, but cannot go insane), the Altered Carbon tv and book series (human consciousness is stored in an artifact in the spine, bodies are called "sleeves" and the rich can practically afford living continuously forever which dehumanizes them through the centuries. There's also VR torture and all sorts of scary and cool shit. I love the worldbuilding. It's everything I wished Cyberpunk was.) and the simulation called Tranquility Lane in Fallout 3 (a whole vault full of people stuck in a simulation of a pre-war 50s suburban environment for 200ish years. Their leader poses as a little girl who regularly massacres everyone and wipes their memories upon every reboot. Only one old lady can tell something is up. And your dad is a dog.) I wonder if Simon's scan has been resurrected before (maybe even in failed machines). Did you leave his scan intact? If you delete him, the WAU can never resurrect and torture him again but current Simon is probably his last run forever. While I'm all for poisoning the WAU at Alpha, I think it's worth thinking about what that means for the future of humanity on Earth. Especially since Simon doesn't know if he can even launch the ARK at this point. What if the WAU gets it right in a few hundreds of years and makes a whole bunch of functional humans who can live in the new, hostile Earth conditions without going nuts? How is poisoning the WAU different from nuking the whole world right now because a huge majority of humankind is constantly suffering from wars, famines etc? The argument of live vs. survive comes up in Metro 2033 too (the book). I thought it was interesting that different characters had completely different takes on it. I never really thought Amy CAN NOT ask to die because of the WAU. I always interpreted it as she doesn't WANT TO die. She's scared and suffering but she is asking for help, she clearly had hope in my eyes. You gave me something to think about. Also you probably know this already but you can leave her alive (but suffering even more) by unplugging only one of the two tentacles. The shuttle will work with the second one still plugged in. I never considered the Ark as "heaven". I mean yeah but... I'd like to think that even if Simon was going along with Cath's plan for selfish reasons (or self-preserving at the very least), Catherine was doing it for the future of humanity. She was obsessed with her project but I think it was selfless. She was somber but not upset about being left behind, knowing they ultimately succeeded. I love the fact that Catherine is regularly regarded as a meek and submissive person in past recordings but the Catherine we know is kind of aloof about her current digital existence and she orders Simon around and seems almost callous. Then you get to Omicron, learn about the structure gel's improving abilities and realize that Catherine's cortex chip is smothered with the crap! So is this an improved Catherine? Does that mean Catherine's unaltered, original copy will never make it to the ARK? What will her coworkers say? Will she ever recognize this change in her personality from pre-scan or will she think she has always been a self-assured, confident person? What else has the structure gel altered in her personality? Memories? Feelings? And how come she was an instrumental part of the ARK's creation and operation but her scan wasn't the first one to go onto it? Or did she overwrite an old copy of herself at launch? How much time has passed for people in the ARK by the time her and Simon arrived and they shot it into space? Decades? I only found one problem with the game: if Simon poisons the WAU and loses an arm, how the fuck does he not instantly die from the deep sea pressure? You know, with his suit having a gigantic missing piece in it now.... Finally: I asked the devs if the K-8 helper bot has a human brain scan stuck in it, considering it has advanced AI but no voice module beyond beeps (it says so in-game). It sure acts like a person, it even gets scared and flees from him if he harms the other robot floating around. But the devs just said "Schrodinger's K-8". Smug. 😦 If you read my thought diarrhea all the way, thanks! I recommend reading and watching all the lore stories and movies on somagame dot com for more stuff that completes the game. Can't believe how much thought they put into it!
Well done as usual Mert, your attention to detail is something I appreciate for every second of your videos. I did not have the same reaction to this game that you did, but that is mostly down to how I interact with and consume games. I tend to not look for the underlying themes, just how much I enjoy the gameplay.
Thank you for giving me a video I can finally throw someone at when they ask me to explain why SOMA is one of the best written games. Literally one of the only channels where I can sit and really watch over an hour of content. Lovely work. Also, Americans love Black Mirror too.
For me the most interesting part of SOMA is the debate of what makes you "you". Is it your brain? Is it your body? Is it your conscience??? The whole Sarang continuity thing is obviously bullshit, but the idea it introduces- that "you" is defined by your 'soul', your conscience and your experiences, is the real point of it. It's a question particularly close to me as someone with autism and ADHD - aka, a very fast brain - but also multiple chronic illnesses - aka, a very slow body - and who had to grow up developing a sense of self around these two parameters. At some point, it felt like my body was a vessel, a necessary evil of sorts, except with time I came to realise they were not entities you could separate. It's made more obvious by disability, but your very human body is essential to shaping who you are and it even defines...well, your experiences, thoughts and memories.
Oh wow this reminds me so much of the concepts of Severance. Like if your brain/consciousness is severed, which you is the real you? Is the severed you even a person? Do you owe anything to your severed self? Granted, time and place is vastly different from Soma, but it is unbelievably similar to that White Christmas episode omg, dunno how no one's compared those two. Severance is a masterful television show exploring those themes and I would absolutely recommend you check it out!
I watched an analysis of SOMA a while back and looooved the story so much I was sad that I didn’t experience it for myself. :( I love analysis videos and yours are always top notch so you already know I’m going to watch.
A very similar theme to Surface Detail by Iain M Banks, which is one of his Culture series. Deals with different species 'Hells' as virtual afterlifes.
It's been a while since this video was published, but for things exploring similar themes, I found a lot of Charlie Stross's work quite good (although I must admit it kind of spoiled SOMA for me because I guessed what's going on quite quickly and also I have previously thought over all that consciousness stuff before and SOMA didn't really ask me any new questions); there's a lot of similar content in Glasshouse, some in Accelerando, and in the Saturn's Children duology.
The three laws of robotics are not really practical since "A robot may not injure a human being" is very vague. What does "injure" mean? Can a robot perform surgery when it's require to cut open someone? Can it give human medicine that cause side effects? And of course the question of what is a "human being" that we still can't decide to this day.
21:02 Those machine are meant to work in water. However if you actually looked, you can shut down another part of the facility or something which I believe painlessly shuts him down, never had the chance to check.
A interpritation of the WoWs attack couls be that it computed how many humans it could protect against the number it has to kill to protect itself. As long as save equals more then kill it will kill, even if its by a single person.
Some recommendations for other fiction in this space: We Are Legion (We Are Bob) by Dennis Taylor is a light hearted (if you can handle the nerd humor) story about a tech bro who dies then wakes up and given control of s space ship that can create copies of him/it-self. Diaspora by Greg Egan is a trans-human becoming post-human story where conscious software explore the universe. It was written by a mathematician and it shows. Roko’s Basilisk is from the Less Wrong forum and explores the relative value we should put into simulated versions of ourselves. What effort should to take to prevent possible torture of a future copy of yourself? It has created a weird split where some people see it as a critique of utilitarianism while others (claim to) see it as a legitimate actionable threat.
There's one game that is sort of similar to this called The Talos Principle. Its a puzzle solving game (with some VERY frustrating puzzles), that I would recommend checking out if you can! I remember playing this when it first came out for my channel and the ending just stuck with me. Simon, alone and trapped on the ocean floor for the rest of his life, if he can truly ever die, while a piece of him is in a virtual paradise. I did choose to kill the original body so he wouldn't suffer the same fate as the next one, though it sucks that the one we end up piloting next can't have the same mercy done for him. I wouldn't have minded it being more of a puzzle-like game instead of a horror (maybe more of a puzzle game with underlying horror themes?). Also the first time I played it apparently the game didn't finish installing, and when the ceiling of the one room caves in my game stopped to finish the download XD I was also stupid and went down the wrong elevator and just plummeted down to the ocean floor where I died (and sort of gave myself a panic attack cause I HATE underwater games)
Such a fantastic game, I only played it last year and it really stuck with me. I love your content and I hope you would one day do an Amnesia: Rebirth critique 👁👁
oh wow that was really interesting (and terrifying), something interesting to note is that there's another black mirror episode that seems to represent the hopeful ending that the simon on the ark got to experience. it was called 'ss' something and it was about a dude creating virtual clones of people who angered him and forcing them to reenact his favourite star trek-esque show (and also torturing them if they didn't agree). however, the virtual clones eventually find a way to kill him and escape to the wider internet in their spaceship - the ending is positive as the characters say they have a whole galaxy out there to explore now because they made their way into a virtual spaceship world type game. although I wonder how happy they would be in say 100 years or so since i don't think they can die lol, but at least they have each other?
im not kidding i nearly killed myself because of what this game made me face as a human. mortality , the desire to escape it , the fear of death that eats at you literally. this and stranger things, the part where the sister kills herself and your powers stop working all the sudden. some things are permanent, some things arent. and as a human these things are painful to think of and feel. im better now obviously but holy shit man , these games did things to my young mind no school could ever educate me on
There are a few things that give me the "Soma" feels but most of them are science fiction stories Mostly Philip K. Dick's work-specifically Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and Time Out of Joint, who I think is referenced at the start of the game and a short story by Robert A. Heinlein called All You Zombies (though there is some transphobia and intersex-phobia if you plan on looking into it, but its absolutely mad)
I want to point out that my comparison isn't a literal "download and upload minds" but rather the themes of transhumanism and the struggle of human identity with in social cultural limitations.
good god soma messed me up when i first played it. when I got to t h a t ending, i yelled so loud that my housemates knocked on my door to make sure i was okay omg
Oh man this game made me so uncomfortable, when you took over the headless corpse I just felt so gross and disgusted, the existential horror of this game was something else.
It's never said out loud but people assume that the transporter in Star Trek works the same way as is talked about in SOMA: a new person is created whenever they use the transporter with all the memories and thoughts of the 'original' so for them it seems like a continuous experience. Meanwhile, the 'original' that stepped on the transporter pad was killed. There are even people who believe the same thing happens to us in our sleep.
New viewer here. Really enjoyed the video/topic. Also 10/10 production values. First time hearing someone explore this topic in this level of detail and I found it surprising that I actually disagreed with you completely about scans being distinct people / dying to win the coin toss. It might be due to reading a lot of Greg Egan but I found I buy the argument that you and a clone of you are the same individual. Or at least are for quite a while - you can hardly remember .01% of things from years ago so a few minor differences in memories can't be enough to count as a separate distinct person. ( "Learning to Be Me" is an amazing short story about this from the opposite POV ) Side note: Might be my ADHD talking but I found the first 15 minutes a bit difficult to follow as I couldn't understand what "the argument" you were making was without a clear topic sentence - until I finally got that it was just to explore the idea of digital consciousness through a few bits of media.
Hey Toast! Really glad you liked the video :D On the topic of the feedback, I do really see your point and I do completely agree. I felt the same when writing it but no matter what I tweaked I just couldn't find that direct point within the first few pages of the script and it did bother me immensely. I have no idea how to improve this in the future but I would like to try hehe
As a bigtime transhumanist and an even bigger time fan of Soma, I'm so happy to see new perspectives and content about this game even in 2022! I love your religious metaphors on the story and the various Simon variants' responsibility over life and death. I totally never thought about that!!💗💞💖💕
Thank you Ink! I'm not religious myself but I felt like all the comparisons really stuck out to me to the point where I felt that the story was ABOUT them. On reflection I'm unsure as to whether or not that assumption is shared haha. Glad you liked the video and thank you for watching!
Have you seen The Prestige? Yes, a movie about magicians, but it has a surprisingly similar concept. Big SPOILER for a movie from 2007: one of the magicians finds a way to actually copy himself for a magic trick and after each time he does it, one of him is immediately killed in a glass box of water. The remaininh him is constantly terrified that the next time he does the trick, he looses the coin flip (just like Simon at the end of Soma) and ends up as the poor bugger who drowns in the glass box. That movie fucked me up, exactly in the same way that Soma does.
theres a rather rudimentary-looking horror game called Lily's Well and i think you ought to play it fully it's not similar to SOMA or anything. I just think you'd like it.
Another Soma possibly being another ‘copy’ of Simon’s consciousness waking up having been beamed or copied to new locations throughout the infinite universe having to go through the same realizations again and again, still, he copies himself again, thinking it’ll be different. A true nightmare
The only thing I would call that's similar to Soma would really be the manga Blame! And really there are only parts of that story that are similar. Would reccomend it though if you love existential horror.
I really forgot how messed up this game was 😅 The comparisons to the black mirror eps were cool and ones I would've never made despite sharing similar ideas. I definitely agree that if you aren't thinking too far ahead, the ending hits you like a tonne of bricks and you have to feel for DeepSeaSimon. The only thing that makes me feel a little bit better about it is kinda "the greater good" point, you fall so others can continue; the previous Simons fell so one could make it to the ark and live happily. The simplicity of puzzles in horror/heavy story type games will always be my preference unless its paramount to the story itself. When you get stuck at a puzzle that takes you out of the story or halts progress in general can be super annoying and destroys the immersion so are very welcome here. Your video essays are always a pleasure to watch and its amazing that brands are starting to discover and support you, super happy for you Mert. Keep fuckin killin it 💪
I was pretty lucky on my play thru, i didn't kill EVERYONE just those mercy ones, and left the "other Simon" to wake up so i always imagined deep sea simon could go back and at least have a few consciousnesses to talk to hand hang with until the buildings completely collapse. Wasn't much but 🤷🏾♀
Okay so I've been thinking about this all day (Thanks, Kay) and I think what bothers me most, especially about the Cookies, is that they never had an ounce of choice. They've done nothing wrong to be tormented. They did not ask to be born, or imprisoned, or used for help. They were brought against their will only to be tormented. They didn't even have a chance to choose
Horizon Zero Dawn and the sequel, Forbidden West, are very much in line with the themes and horror elements you found interesting here. I don’t recall seeing you review them, and don’t see them on your list a when I double checked just now. I recommend them :) I would say play the story, read the lore you come across, try not to worry about doing all the stuff, the first game in particular suffers from low-level open world bloat.
If you want another good existentialist piece of media (not horror though) I would highly recommend Nier Automata. It has a hopeful outlook on what it means to exist in a post-human future and it's another story that could only be told through the medium of a video game
Finally, somebody talking about Soma lol. No but for real Soma was great. I get so exhausted with people who are obsessed with the idea that if a game doesn't have a point system "it's bad". Like I think most fps are garbage but guess what? I just don't play them! Problem solved! I'm not out here apeing out in the reviews of the newest call of duty enraged that it doesn't have a story that stays with me for days so why can't self proclaimed "GAMERZ" learn to curate their experience? Stray is currently facing this back lash but Soma caught it too.
Im honestly really glad i found your channel. You have some of the best commentary and discussion, and i really like your sense of humor. *but heres the thing* If you dont stop making the exact joke im thinking of every time i may just have an existential crisis because clearly theres a glitch in the matrix
