Alter Ego was a text-based ‘fantasy role-playing game’, frequently cited as one of the best C64 games ever made. The ‘role’ was that of a person: specifically, a cisgender, heterosexual Westerner, as an only child born into a two-parent family with a married mother and father. I first read about Alter Ego in an old issue of Zzap! 64 magazine. I was immediately attracted by the tagline – ‘What if you could live your life over again?’ – and desperate to play it after Zzap! awarded it 98 per cent, stating that ‘the writer. . . displays a great sense of humour and a surprisingly perceptive view of all the problems both the young and old face in their lives’, calling it ‘original, unusual, compelling [and] varied’. There were male and female versions: the male one was released first, and it was this that I managed to find, ten years after its release – by which time the male version was a rarity, the female one virtually untraceable.
Both editions were created by Dr Peter Favaro, a clinical psychologist who interviewed hundreds of men and women about their most memorable experiences, putting those that ‘many people shared’ into the game, along with others that he devised. (Favaro also discussed an infant version called Child’s Play with Activision, but this collapsed due to financial difficulties.) He understood that Alter Ego could only ever be a small quotation of life: the instruction manual asserted that ‘Alter Ego is first and foremost a game. It was designed to be entertaining, not clinical. There are certain insights that can be gained from playing the game, but life improvement or self-analysis should never be the goal.’
The manual also said that ‘Because of the authenticity of the life experiences explored in the program, Alter Ego contains explicit material which may not be suitable for computer users under the age of 16’, and in the US, the game was not to be sold to them. There were no such restrictions in Britain, and in any case they would have been impossible to enforce by 1996, so with all this in mind, I clicked on the game’s first experience icon and threw myself into its alternative reality. (...)
From the start, your experiences were emotionally complex, weighing against playing as the nastiest, most self-destructive or irresponsible person possible – for example, in Childhood, if you opted to keep playing with a box of matches, ignoring your conscience’s repeated exhortations for you to stop, you could burn down your house. You would not be killed here (although one approach was to find all the choices that could lead to your death – I died in a car crash, took an overdose, committed suicide, ignored an ultimately fatal illness and collapsed during a senior citizens’ softball game), but you could cause considerable damage and traumatise your parents; one of the most striking moments in Alter Ego came with the ice-cold conclusion that ‘You are never punished, which somehow makes you feel worse’.
by Juliet Jacques, New Statesman | Read more:
Image: Alter Ego
