Critical Compilation - Cibele

§CIBELE
One of the reasons why confessional storytelling is so rare in games might be because of the way it puts a lie to one of our most commonly held assumptions about players and the characters they control. We generally imagine that, when you play as someone, you are becoming them—adventuring as Lara Croft, saving the human race as the Master Chief, etc., etc. Confessional narratives shatter that illusion with experiences so specific and so tied to their creator that the distance between the player and the character is always present. When we see Freeman’s pictures and hear her voice, her personhood is inescapable.
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For a few years as a teenager, I imagined myself living a double life, an awkward teenage boy in one world and a creative, vibrant young man somewhere beyond the bounds of an LCD monitor. Playing Cibele highlighted the dissonance of my young identities and the way I used technology to shape them. I was neither; I was both.
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Even if you can’t relate, Cibele still insists on a personal response. If anything, my tendency to distrust Ichi made every moment with him feel all the more intrusive and significant. I wanted to see myself in his relationship with Freeman. Or maybe I wanted to see what she saw.

This is a game about that drive to connect, to see others and yourself clearly. It’s an experiment in how a creator might put themselves into a work and make a game that speaks honestly about their real life to the people who play it.

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I often think about the fact we don't really have 'online lives' any more.
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online is real life now.
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Nina Freeman's Cibele is a gentle but involving callback to a youth when the realm of internet chat—here, visualized quite literally through an online fantasy game—could be an all-consuming, furtive repository for everything fraught and unexpressed in our real lives.
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There will always be stories of young love, and people probably meet online now more than ever, perfunctorily, but it fascinates me that these stories will never again happen in exactly this way.
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Virtual communication is no longer magic. It's no longer rare and risky, and as time passes, more and more of us will be much the same person "here" as we are "there." Lots of us today spend more time on devices than we do off them. Friends and colleagues report being overwhelmed, not intrigued, by Reddit threads, Twitter replies, Tinder messages, Facebook notifications, Google Calendar invites, iMessages and texts. Now, for me, meeting someone in a club late at night who has read my articles actually recalls that old sinking feeling of finding out someone in your internet roleplay group actually goes to your school—they've accidentally found the real-life me, the secret me. The script has reversed: nowadays, in the age of remote working and Real Name Policies, some corners of real life feel more forbidden, more secret, than the internet does or perhaps ever will again.
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Games like Cibele and Emily is Away are not just memoirs; they're memorials. When today's young people want to whisper their secret longing and loneliness into the night in search of others, will they still put it online? If not, then where?


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This is a game about a young woman’s experience, fundamentally; it is her role you adopt, after all, her eyes through which you see. But Ichi (voice acted expertly by Justin Briner) also emerges with nearly equal vulnerability, showing a side of young men that is only ever ruthlessly mocked if it is portrayed at all. He is initially presented as that most loathsome figure in MMO gaming: the tough-talking, foul mouthed, exacting raid leader who sees himself cursed to be surrounded by idiots. But as you play, you see that he is, in certain ways, Nina’s mirror; MMOs afford her the opportunity to thrive socially in a world where she is not judged for being a nerd who cheerfully describes her aesthetic as mahou shoujo, and they afford for Ichi the opportunity to socialize without getting too close to people.

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exhibitionism and a confessional style of video game seems appropriate in this case, given the game’s thematic interest in adolescent infatuation.
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It’s a clever game, told in a clever way, that produces a very authentic representation of a fairly universal experience, but it feels like that in presenting the story in as raw a form as Freeman has that events here haven’t yet been considered with any maturity, only idealism.
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The game knows how to express itself well enough, but the reason that it doesn’t really enlighten us in any way seems to be because there is no sense of transformation of the character of Nina herself.
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Nina at the beginning was a girl infatuated with presenting a certain idealized image of herself and her world, and Nina at the end is a young woman that still seems infatuated with presenting a certain idealized image of herself and her world.
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Maybe, though, Cibele is simply intended as a fable or allegory. It’s just disappointing to me because it initially seems to promise an investigation of identity and exhibitionism that might uncover something a bit richer, perhaps, more oracular, than those genres typically allow for.

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There’s only so much you can read into the game as a broader commentary on the intimacy of play and on formation of sexuality in the digital age. It’s not as didactic as one might expect, to the point where I occasionally found myself tempted to read straight past the game into the phenomenon it portrays.
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For all its shortcomings, which should not be either ignored or overstated, Cibele has remarkable fidelity as a communication of a personal experience, and that makes it an exciting and successful piece of autobiography.