Let’s take a breather for a second and go back to simpler times. 2006, to be exact, when Kim Kardashians was just a glint in Paris Hilton’s Blackberry. Borat was the height of humor, Mark Zuckerberg controversially opened up Facebook beyond college campuses, and the internet still felt like something mildly idealistic (if a little absurd.)
In the not-so-distant past of 2015 game designer Kyle Seeley released the freeware title Emily is Away, a romantic epic divided into five virtual acts told through the nostalgia of an AOL Instant Messenger chat with the titular Emily. Beginning in 2002, the player’s senior year of high school, it ends where the upcoming sequel picks back up. Emily is Away Too takes place in 2006, the protagonist’s senior year of college. On top of a new Emily in the player’s life, the sequel—releasing next Friday—expands the buddylist to include Evelyn, and even largens the scope of the web to include the rise of “YouToob” and “Facenook.”
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The game not only captures the social and dating experiences of its creator from that time, but also a year of transformation and expansion for digital culture. Facebook transitioned into the primary platform for establishing your personality, connecting friends through the things they “Liked.” That same year, The Evolution of Dance garnered millions of views, all six minutes of its grainy, camera phone footage of an unassuming teacher-type clad in jeans doing mildly recognizable dance moves from various decades. A more innocent time, a more innocent internet audience to be sure, which only several years later would be saturated by an entire YouTube subgenre of viral Pop Culture Through the Ages Video Content.
“Pushing the story out of the chat window [in the sequel] allowed me to explore more of how we defined ourselves online in 2006,” Seeley told me over email. “If the first game is about how we communicated online in the early 2000’s, this game is about how we portrayed ourselves online.”
During chats, characters organically share their favorite music videos through Youtoob links during conversation to ask the player what they think of it. Or they’ll comment on whether each other’s carefully curated AIM icons or profile quotes align with the same tribe.
Image: Emily is Away Too.
Most embarrassingly, it reminds us of the then popular practice of posting Facebook notes with viral internet surveys, which Seeley styled based on actual notes his friends had posted at the time. Additionally, allowing players to flip between conversations between Emily and Evelyn this time, “gives the sequel a more complicated social dynamic.” Occasionally, both will mention other boys they’ve been romantic with, whom you can then mercilessly stalk on Facenook and judge for their bad taste in music and games.
“I myself have very distinct memories of syncing up Sigur Ros or an album on Youtube with someone over AIM and listening to it together at like 3 in the morning,” says Seeley, explaining how the mechanics of the game are autobiographical, but only in the general millennial sense. We can all remember the experience of dodging someone by throwing up a fake away message, or exporting chat logs to show someone else your conversations. To further nail the authenticity of
Image: Emily Is Away Too
old web culture, he even went back on the WayBackMachine to pull real Youtube comments and original usernames from 2006 which, if you think have terrible grammar now, a decade ago almost exclusively consisted of “all lower case, misspelled words, acronyms, and excessive characters,” Seeley says. “It’s interesting how we as a digital culture began to see that as immature and moved collectively away from it.”
Throughout the design process, Seeley was constantly struck by how much the web has changed since 2006. Particularly for sites still alive like Facebook and YouTube, the mutual evolution between platform and users made it easy to forget that they didn’t always used to play the same role in our lives. Facebook wasn’t just a place to share memes or post pictures, but a virtual space to share with only your closest friends. “It’s overall a pretty sobering thing, remembering these old platforms,” he says. “Some, like AIM, are just gone. And because of how technology evolves there will never be another experience quite like it.”
Image: Jess Joho, Emily is Away Too Facenook profile
While AIM still technically exists, the collective exodus from it left a hole in young Seeley. Describing both games as love letters to AIM more than anything else, he says the platform “was such a pivotal part of my self expression growing up.” Not only are the kind of internet personas and interactions had through AIM a thing of the past, but the advent of texting also now means that everyone’s always “online” to some degree. “It loses the obtuseness of waiting for someone to get online after school, or having to sneak down and use the family computer at two in the morning.”
But Emily is Away Too is not just a portal back into digital history, but more of an exploration of the people who populated that old web. They’re us, but weirder, dorkier, and a whole lot less cynical. “Like the technology, these people have changed too, leaving you with only memories to look back on,” Seeley says. “It’s definitely a trip.” Many have theorized on why it is millennials, more than any other generation, feel so tied to the nostalgic totems of childhood. Seeley has some theories himself: the fast pace of technology that quickly becomes obsolete, or the proliferation and easy access to digital images and interfaces from the past. But, for personally for Seeley, it’s about the friends he shared this bizarre, constantly-evolving online social experiment with. “I think I feel nostalgia for these old platforms because they were integral to how I developed into who I am now. Remembering these interfaces comes with some of the happiest and saddest memories of growing up.”
As Seeley sees it, there’s more to nostalgia than the comfort of going back to what we already know. For him, opening up and reliving those past relationships and conversations developed through outdated technology helps him re-evaluate who he was. And who he will choose to be in the future. Both his games include multiple endings depending on the player’s narrative choices, congruent with the overall theme of establishing identity in the digital age.
And maybe, he thinks, millennials are more nostalgic towards old tech because we’re the first generation to uniquely experience these complete shifts in communication at the same time together. Past generations shared the passive, much more gradual rise of film or television. Meanwhile, “The internet, its interactivity and social applications, fundamentally changed how we created memories with childhood friends,” he says. Around the entire world, young people move in droves from AIM, to Facebook, to Messenger, to Instagram, or Snapchat, almost instantaneously. “Everyone from my generation experienced those things. And, now that we’ve grown up and technology has evolved, they’re just gone. So maybe, we’re not just more nostalgic for things, but those shared experiences.”
