Emily Is Away
Emily Is Away is a visual novel that takes the form of a simulation of AOL Instant Messenger (aka AIM). It lets the viewer engage in a complex, disembodied, relationship with their eponymous high school friend, Emily, as you two both attend college apart in the early 2000s. The narrative centers around the anxiety and emotional loss that occurs as we transit between late youth and adulthood. What makes Emily Is Away work is that these broad themes are contextualized through a meticulous recreation of AIM. Familiar to anyone who was a teenager in the late 90s and 00s, this famous chat program is replicated in loving glory here, complete with its eye-bleedingly-ugly color choices for text and background, period-specific pixelated user icons to choose from such as Kill Bill and blink-182, song lyric “away” message, and yes, that omnipresent bing noise which punctuated those long tense silences between messages. I would highly recommend running this game in a smallish window that approximates the original size of AIM on the desktop, which is an option on the load screen (if you use Steam, it will even populate the game with your real friends list.) Emily Is Away is savvy mediation on the formative years of online relationships and the role of technology in both connecting and alienating us through its mediation.
Creator: Kyle Seeley
Link: https://kyleseeley23.itch.io/emilyisaway
Connections:
Amalia Ulman - Excellences & Perfections
Adrienne Salinger - Teenagers in Their Bedrooms
Richard Powers - Galatea 2.2