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straightforwardly) wrote2023-01-07 03:36 pm
straightforwardly) wrote2023-01-07 03:36 pm
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242 | The Wishing Stone
Today I beat my first game of the year: The Wishing Stone, a point-&-click adventure game with visual novel elements that I’d picked up through a charity bundle on itch.io last year. It was pretty different from what I was expecting it to be!
The premise is that the main character, Ailsa—who’s feeling pretty indifferent about life and is struggling with some memory issues—helps out a witch one day. The witch then gifts her a “wishing stone” that will grant her three wishes. The first wish has to be made before midnight; otherwise, the wishing stone would grant her something unwanted.
My impression going in it would be one of those fantasy games with a deeper undercurrent—dealing with some sort of serious theme. Based on the opening prologue, I assumed that it would be a game about grief, and specifically that Ailsa’s memory issues were going to turn out to be the result of her trying to deny what happened, and that the game itself would be about her accepting what happened and learning how to move on.
Yeah, no. What I actually got was a lot more different—and heavier—than that.
First of all, this game isn’t even fantasy.
It’s science fiction.
As you play through the game, you find out that it actually takes place in the far future. Humanity has basically destroyed the planet. Many species of plants and animals have gone extinct, and those remaining have mutated horribly. The atmosphere is poisonous—being outside for too long is dangerous, indoor climates are heavily controlled in order to be livable, and resources are incredibly limited.
But people are living. Their lives might be difficult and imperfect, but they still have lives, families, goals, dreams.
And then a few more natural disasters hit, and it turns out life on earth is about to end a lot sooner than people thought—in approximately a year.
Some people do the sci-fi trope of boarding space shuttles to travel to a new world, but space on those shuttles are limited. Most of humanity are going to stay on the planet to die.
But there’s one more option that people have. One that’s also limited, but more available to the general population than the space shuttle option.
They could enter something called Foreverland.
Or, in other words, they could chose to have their bodies euthanised while their consciousness is copied into data and uploaded into a virtual reality where people can live their dream lives.
This was something which already existed in the world of this game. Initially, it’d been a program meant for the elderly and the terminally ill: a way for people who were already dying to continue on their lives in a different form. Later on, other people could also voluntarily choose to enter Foreverland, even if they weren’t dying, but on one condition: they also had to agree to allow their physical body to be euthanized. And there were people who thought that seemed like a decent bargain: giving up physical existence in order to gain a digital immortality in a dream world where you can have everything you want. Pre-apocalypse, it didn’t even necessarily mean leaving your loved ones behind: people who’d entered Foreverland could still communicate with their loved ones in the physical world through the computer screen, like a video chat, despite their physical bodies now being dead.
The game doesn’t shy away from the horror elements of this, and the way the game discusses the implications, morals, ethics, and meaning of a system like this was my favorite part of the game, though it definitely got heavy. There’s questions of whether a digital copy of a person is same the person themself, how it might change someone to live in a world where all their wishes and whims can be granted, whether there’s truly such a thing as forever, and, of course, the risk of what could be done with your data when your entire existence is data.
One point I keep returning to is how, in order to be uploaded into the virtual reality, you have to die. And again, the game doesn’t shy away from the horror of this. Ailsa’s parents are initially against utilizing this technology, but when the apocalypse comes, her mom can’t handle the thought of her daughters never getting the chance to grow up, and decides to enter Foreverland with them. (Ailsa is 9 at this point, while her older sister Gina is 14.) Their father is horrified and initially fully against it: he sees it as a death, with the digital copies being an entirely separate existence from the person themself.
In the end, he does enter Foreverland with them, but only because he can’t stop them, and if they’re going to die anyway, he may as well die at the same point with them rather than live on for a short time alone. Later on, when their family gets the news that Gina had decided to end her existence within the virtual world, their mother is absolutely destroyed by the news, but their father takes it fairly calmly, not because he doesn’t care about Gina, but because from his perspective, she already died long ago, when she was 14.
Nor does the game shy away from the actual moment of euthanasia. Gina enters Foreverland first, Ailsa second, and then her parents. Ailsa sees her sister’s corpse exit the machine after she’s been uploaded, before having to enter the machine herself with the knowledge that she’s about to die. And live on in a different form, yes. But it doesn’t change the fact that she, her physical flesh-and-blood body, and whatever existence that is contained within it, is about to die.
It’s a heavy moment, and made heavier still by the fact that Ailsa is only nine years old when this happens.
Another thing this game makes me think about what it means for a child—or a digital copy of a child—to “grow up” within a virtual reality. Like I just mentioned, Ailsa is nine when she enters Foreverland, and her reason for doing so is the reasoning of a child: she wants her family to be together forever, just as they always have been.
But even as she grows up, this continues to be her main motivation. She’s devastated by Gina deciding to move out, and when the news of Gina’s self-destruction breaks her family apart, it destroys her: not only because her sister is dead, but because it also leads to her parents’ separation and how it means that they’ll never all be together forever again like she thought they would be.
And then I started thinking. Is this a character trait of Ailsa’s? Is this the type of person she would have grown up to be had she had the chance to grow up in the physical world? Or is she shaped by that having been such a core part of the data that had been uploaded into the virtual reality? Is it even possibly for data based on a child to truly “grow up” in the way a person normally would, or is it always going to be shaped and influenced by that initial starting set of data in a way that a physical human being wouldn’t be?
I don’t think the game was explicitly trying to make this point, but when I saw this moment, I couldn’t help but start thinking about it.
Of the true endings, my favorite is easily the “Sisters” ending. It’s the first one I chose, and it’s the one that works best for me. True, Ailsa—or this version of Ailsa—is separated from the rest of (the virtual) reality forever, but she gets to be reunited with her sister, and Gina doesn’t have to be alone anymore.
But I also liked one of the normal endings, “Home”, quite a bit as well. True, Ailsa never finds out the truth about their world (and, more importantly from my perspective, the truth about what happened to Gina), but she gets a chance to rebuild her relationships with her family, and her family as a whole has a chance to heal. (I like to think that the alternate Ailsa does the same thing in the “Sisters” ending.)
Also, Owen’s email was a very satisfying character development moment for him. I liked the detail it revealed about Ailsa’s father as well—that he’d put himself into hibernation mode after the news of Gina’s self-destruction, giving the system instructions to only wake him if Ailsa or her mom contact him. He’d never wanted to experience the virtual reality in the first place and had only come for his family’s sake, so it makes perfect sense that, once their family fell apart, he’d both choose to seal himself away from that reality while still making himself available to them if they needed him.
The premise is that the main character, Ailsa—who’s feeling pretty indifferent about life and is struggling with some memory issues—helps out a witch one day. The witch then gifts her a “wishing stone” that will grant her three wishes. The first wish has to be made before midnight; otherwise, the wishing stone would grant her something unwanted.
My impression going in it would be one of those fantasy games with a deeper undercurrent—dealing with some sort of serious theme. Based on the opening prologue, I assumed that it would be a game about grief, and specifically that Ailsa’s memory issues were going to turn out to be the result of her trying to deny what happened, and that the game itself would be about her accepting what happened and learning how to move on.
Yeah, no. What I actually got was a lot more different—and heavier—than that.
First of all, this game isn’t even fantasy.
It’s science fiction.
As you play through the game, you find out that it actually takes place in the far future. Humanity has basically destroyed the planet. Many species of plants and animals have gone extinct, and those remaining have mutated horribly. The atmosphere is poisonous—being outside for too long is dangerous, indoor climates are heavily controlled in order to be livable, and resources are incredibly limited.
But people are living. Their lives might be difficult and imperfect, but they still have lives, families, goals, dreams.
And then a few more natural disasters hit, and it turns out life on earth is about to end a lot sooner than people thought—in approximately a year.
Some people do the sci-fi trope of boarding space shuttles to travel to a new world, but space on those shuttles are limited. Most of humanity are going to stay on the planet to die.
But there’s one more option that people have. One that’s also limited, but more available to the general population than the space shuttle option.
They could enter something called Foreverland.
Or, in other words, they could chose to have their bodies euthanised while their consciousness is copied into data and uploaded into a virtual reality where people can live their dream lives.
This was something which already existed in the world of this game. Initially, it’d been a program meant for the elderly and the terminally ill: a way for people who were already dying to continue on their lives in a different form. Later on, other people could also voluntarily choose to enter Foreverland, even if they weren’t dying, but on one condition: they also had to agree to allow their physical body to be euthanized. And there were people who thought that seemed like a decent bargain: giving up physical existence in order to gain a digital immortality in a dream world where you can have everything you want. Pre-apocalypse, it didn’t even necessarily mean leaving your loved ones behind: people who’d entered Foreverland could still communicate with their loved ones in the physical world through the computer screen, like a video chat, despite their physical bodies now being dead.
The game doesn’t shy away from the horror elements of this, and the way the game discusses the implications, morals, ethics, and meaning of a system like this was my favorite part of the game, though it definitely got heavy. There’s questions of whether a digital copy of a person is same the person themself, how it might change someone to live in a world where all their wishes and whims can be granted, whether there’s truly such a thing as forever, and, of course, the risk of what could be done with your data when your entire existence is data.
One point I keep returning to is how, in order to be uploaded into the virtual reality, you have to die. And again, the game doesn’t shy away from the horror of this. Ailsa’s parents are initially against utilizing this technology, but when the apocalypse comes, her mom can’t handle the thought of her daughters never getting the chance to grow up, and decides to enter Foreverland with them. (Ailsa is 9 at this point, while her older sister Gina is 14.) Their father is horrified and initially fully against it: he sees it as a death, with the digital copies being an entirely separate existence from the person themself.
In the end, he does enter Foreverland with them, but only because he can’t stop them, and if they’re going to die anyway, he may as well die at the same point with them rather than live on for a short time alone. Later on, when their family gets the news that Gina had decided to end her existence within the virtual world, their mother is absolutely destroyed by the news, but their father takes it fairly calmly, not because he doesn’t care about Gina, but because from his perspective, she already died long ago, when she was 14.
Nor does the game shy away from the actual moment of euthanasia. Gina enters Foreverland first, Ailsa second, and then her parents. Ailsa sees her sister’s corpse exit the machine after she’s been uploaded, before having to enter the machine herself with the knowledge that she’s about to die. And live on in a different form, yes. But it doesn’t change the fact that she, her physical flesh-and-blood body, and whatever existence that is contained within it, is about to die.
It’s a heavy moment, and made heavier still by the fact that Ailsa is only nine years old when this happens.
Another thing this game makes me think about what it means for a child—or a digital copy of a child—to “grow up” within a virtual reality. Like I just mentioned, Ailsa is nine when she enters Foreverland, and her reason for doing so is the reasoning of a child: she wants her family to be together forever, just as they always have been.
But even as she grows up, this continues to be her main motivation. She’s devastated by Gina deciding to move out, and when the news of Gina’s self-destruction breaks her family apart, it destroys her: not only because her sister is dead, but because it also leads to her parents’ separation and how it means that they’ll never all be together forever again like she thought they would be.
And then I started thinking. Is this a character trait of Ailsa’s? Is this the type of person she would have grown up to be had she had the chance to grow up in the physical world? Or is she shaped by that having been such a core part of the data that had been uploaded into the virtual reality? Is it even possibly for data based on a child to truly “grow up” in the way a person normally would, or is it always going to be shaped and influenced by that initial starting set of data in a way that a physical human being wouldn’t be?
I don’t think the game was explicitly trying to make this point, but when I saw this moment, I couldn’t help but start thinking about it.
Of the true endings, my favorite is easily the “Sisters” ending. It’s the first one I chose, and it’s the one that works best for me. True, Ailsa—or this version of Ailsa—is separated from the rest of (the virtual) reality forever, but she gets to be reunited with her sister, and Gina doesn’t have to be alone anymore.
But I also liked one of the normal endings, “Home”, quite a bit as well. True, Ailsa never finds out the truth about their world (and, more importantly from my perspective, the truth about what happened to Gina), but she gets a chance to rebuild her relationships with her family, and her family as a whole has a chance to heal. (I like to think that the alternate Ailsa does the same thing in the “Sisters” ending.)
Also, Owen’s email was a very satisfying character development moment for him. I liked the detail it revealed about Ailsa’s father as well—that he’d put himself into hibernation mode after the news of Gina’s self-destruction, giving the system instructions to only wake him if Ailsa or her mom contact him. He’d never wanted to experience the virtual reality in the first place and had only come for his family’s sake, so it makes perfect sense that, once their family fell apart, he’d both choose to seal himself away from that reality while still making himself available to them if they needed him.