{"id":71852,"date":"2019-10-16T03:10:50","date_gmt":"2019-10-16T10:10:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.taterboy.com\/blog\/2019\/10\/review-the-gig-economy-collides-with-psychiatry-ai-and-tech-industry-burnout-in-seattle-set-visual-novel-eliza\/"},"modified":"2019-10-16T03:10:50","modified_gmt":"2019-10-16T10:10:50","slug":"review-the-gig-economy-collides-with-psychiatry-ai-and-tech-industry-burnout-in-seattle-set-visual-novel-eliza","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.taterboy.com\/blog\/2019\/10\/review-the-gig-economy-collides-with-psychiatry-ai-and-tech-industry-burnout-in-seattle-set-visual-novel-eliza\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: The gig economy collides with psychiatry, AI, and tech industry burnout in Seattle-set visual novel \u2018Eliza\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

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It\u2019s tough to make a traditional recommendation for Zachtronics\u2019s Eliza<\/a><\/em>. It\u2019s a thoughtful, short visual novel \u2013 an interactive, illustrated story \u2013 that makes a point of realistically depicting someone who\u2019s wrestling with depression and burnout.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not an easy sell. \u2018Hey, play this game with a lot of intellectual baggage to it, where people are sad,\u2019\u201d said Matthew Burns, Eliza<\/em>\u2019s writer and director. \u201cMy hope was that people who aren\u2019t necessarily big gamers could play it and get something out of it. It\u2019s not necessarily a super gamey game. It has a story that I think is relevant, especially to the Seattle tech community. It\u2019s from that community, and I hope that people can reflect on it a little bit.\u201d<\/p>\n

Burns is a former producer at Bungie and Microsoft, who worked on a few of the Halo <\/em>games and the original Destiny <\/em>before going indie in 2015. Since then, he\u2019s worked on several titles published by the Redmond, Wash.-based studio Zachtronics<\/a>, such as last year\u2019s puzzle game EXAPUNKS<\/a>, <\/em>and contributed writing to Johnnemann Nordhagen\u2019s Where the Water Tastes Like Wine<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n

Eliza <\/em>is Burns\u2019 first project as a director. While its script has been a side project for Burns since 2014, the game itself was built in a year with a 5-person team, utilizing Zachtronics\u2019 in-house engine and a cast of surprisingly well-known voice actors.<\/p>\n

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Eliza <\/em>is set in Seattle, about five minutes into the future. Its protagonist is 34-year-old Evelyn Ishino-Aubrey, who was one of the programming superstars at a local tech giant called Skandha before she suddenly and spectacularly burned out.<\/p>\n

Evelyn emerges from three years in what amounts to a self-imposed exile \u2013 working at a bookstore and not talking to anybody she used to know \u2013 to discover that one of her old projects has become the basis of a new business in the gig economy, which her old boss is talking up as a \u201cmental health revolution.\u201d<\/p>\n

Eliza is a machine-learning program that serves as a cheap personal counselor, where human \u201cproxies\u201d wearing AR headsets provide a face and voice for the questions and answers generated by Eliza\u2019s code. Despite her misgivings, Evelyn picks up a job as one of those proxies, and accidentally gets back on the local tech industry\u2019s radar.<\/p>\n

Eliza <\/em>is six chapters long, with each chapter representing a week or so of Evelyn\u2019s life. You get to choose the course Evelyn\u2019s life takes across that period, like who she hangs out with or pushes away, and eventually decide what she\u2019s actually interested in doing with the rest of her life. The replay value of the game comes from your ability to change the course of the story by making different decisions, which is sped up by a chapter-select function that you gradually unlock across the course of your first run.<\/p>\n

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Admittedly, Eliza <\/em>does initially require a lot of suspension of disbelief. Its initial conceit \u2013 that at some point in the near future, even as intimate a process as mental healthcare might become something you do via strangers, apps, and algorithms \u2013 is a lot to swallow, but it does make more sense as you progress through the first few chapters. If anything, the more you learn about it, the more Eliza\u2019s <\/em>take on it starts to make a sick sort of sense.<\/p>\n

It helps that psychology isn\u2019t the story\u2019s only focus. Eliza <\/em>is one of the more stark portraits of a certain specific type of anxiety \u2013 that nagging sense you get in your early 30s that whatever you were \u201csupposed\u201d to do with your life, it wasn\u2019t what you\u2019ve done and isn\u2019t what you\u2019re doing now \u2013 that I\u2019ve ever seen in fiction. It touches on topics such as artificial intelligence, existentialism, self-forgiveness, and more as it goes, and while it\u2019s a slow, talky experience even by the standards of a visual novel, it gives you a lot of food for thought across its running time.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s worth mentioning that Eliza<\/em> is a dramatic character study at heart. It goes right up to the edge of cyberpunk a couple of times, but never quite goes over. Video games in general tend to be genre pieces, but Eliza <\/em>is unusual if not unique in that it\u2019s almost a straight drama. As a result, it could be a good \u201cgateway product\u201d for people who don\u2019t ordinarily go in for visual novels or video games, especially if they\u2019ve got a history in the tech industry. A lot of what Eliza <\/em>has to say cuts very close to the bone.<\/p>\n

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If I have a single abiding criticism of Eliza<\/em>, it\u2019s primarily that it\u2019s a choice-driven narrative that makes a number of its choices too easy to dismiss. The game\u2019s primary story paths, particularly as you approach its end, are roughly divided up among the main people in Evelyn\u2019s life. None are actively malicious, but two are obviously psychologically brittle, and one seems cheerfully ignorant that he\u2019s racing towards something like six kinds of possible disaster.<\/p>\n

It feels a lot like the game provides a soft pressure towards one particular choice, as it\u2019s the one that\u2019s clearly the least destructive to both Evelyn and the world around her. It still isn\u2019t as fond of \u201crailroading\u201d the player \u2013 offering big choices that turn out to be meaningless or basically cosmetic in the long run \u2013 as a lot of other games I\u2019ve played in this space (looking right at you, <\/em>Telltale<\/a>), but it still feels like its major choices aren\u2019t really choices. Then again, your mileage may and probably will vary.<\/p>\n

Beyond that complaint, Eliza <\/em>is a solid, well-written interactive story. It\u2019s working with some heavy and depressive themes, and like any similar work of fiction, it\u2019ll ruin your evening if you aren\u2019t in just the right mood. It can be a particularly rough sit if you have similar problems to Evelyn or you\u2019ve known people who have, especially in the first chapter, but it\u2019s worth taking a couple of hours to explore its narrative. It\u2019s deftly written with a subtle touch to its prose, and there\u2019s enough variation across its running time that it rewards a couple of extra plays.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve been really heartened by the response to Eliza<\/em>,\u201d Burns said. \u201cEspecially the responses where people say, \u2018I feel seen.\u2019 That\u2019s the best reaction I could\u2019ve hoped for from this, where people say, \u2018Yeah. I feel that. I get it.\u2019 That\u2019s the absolute best thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Eliza <\/em>debuted on Oct. 10th in the Nintendo Switch eShop for $14.99. It was initially released in August on digital platforms for the PC, such as Steam and Itch.io.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

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It\u2019s tough to make a traditional recommendation for Zachtronics\u2019s Eliza. It\u2019s a thoughtful, short visual novel \u2013 an interactive, illustrated story \u2013 that makes a point of realistically depicting someone who\u2019s wrestling with depression and burnout. \u201cIt\u2019s not an easy sell. \u2018Hey, play this game with a lot of intellectual baggage to it, where people… Read the full article…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":71853,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[174,377],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-71852","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-games-media","category-gaming"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t