4 ms·

Has anyone played SOMA? Spoiler warning. It explores this idea of, what if there's an AI in charge of ensuring mankind survives at all costs. What would it be w

by andai 5mo ago

Has anyone played SOMA? Spoiler warning. It explores this idea of, what if there's an AI in charge of ensuring mankind survives at all costs. What would it be willing to do, to keep us alive? Would we even recognize the result as human? It's a horror game and it explores all kinds of fascinating and disturbing scenarios. Simulations of human minds. Artificial worlds. Human minds in robot bodies. Genetically modified humans. Man-machine hybrids etc. (A great exploration of the substance/structure matrix, by the way. My favorite question in AI and consciousness. Is the special sauce in the material, or its shape, both, or neither?) The very question of aligning the AI with humans assumes that we have a very robust definition of what human means in the first place. Ostensibly the AI was aligned. It did succeed in keeping humans alive! But it did that in all sorts of ways that mostly made them wish it hadn't.

RajT88 5mo ago
The same theme was present in season 2 of Raised By Wolves. (RIP my favorite show in some years)
Shalomboy 5mo ago
SOMA was a cognito-hazard for me and my roommate in college; we played it in the dark together while on some sort of mild hallucinogen and when it came time for Simon to find that high-pressure dive suit, we lost our minds (no pun intended). Watching the WAU twist its way through PATHOS II in whatever way worked first is a particularly jarring analogy for what has happened to our own profession. I can't help but think it would be nice for Frictional Games to revisit this topic again soon. Sidenote: It breaks my heart that all the great underwater-settings in media are hotbeds of horror scenarios. I think Subnautica broke the mold for this, here's to hoping the next generation of aquanauts take to the depths from that series.
- ACCount37 5mo ago
  There's the upcoming ONTOS game that looks like Frictional's SOMA successor.
  - Shalomboy 5mo ago
    This is the first I've heard of it, but wowwww what a cool game. Thanks!
- YeGoblynQueenne 5mo ago
  You should try Inside. There's a few underwater sequences and they're not horror at all. Honest.
  - the_af 5mo ago
    Haha. Inside is a marvelous game.
braden-lk 5mo ago
One of my favorite games, and I recommend it to anyone who loves a good existential sci-fi horror. If you are not comfortable with stealth games, it also has a "Safe Mode" where enemies aren't a threat to you if you just want to experience the story. Spoiler warning for those that havent played-- I forget the details exactly, but one scene stuck with me. It was a screen in one of the labs, where an experiment was running over and over. It was an uploaded consciousness of one of the test subjects, stuck in an interview room. He kept realizing he was trapped in a simulation and would start panicking. The computer would reboot him, trying another sequence to get him to not realize he was an AI. I think you as the player are given the option to turn him off forever, iirc.
- hilariously 5mo ago
  There's definitely a short story in Accelerando about this same topic.
  - XorNot 5mo ago
    I mean all of Accelerando is kind of about this: the idea is introduced in chapter 1 when you meet the lobsters.
- efskap 5mo ago
  Reminds me of the SCP-like article / short story about the first executable snapshot of a human brain, with similar horrors of realization. https://qntm.org/mmacevedo https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
- the_af 5mo ago
  Did you unplug the robots with consciousness who still thought they were humans? It always breaks my heart. I don't know what the right choice is. Leaving them be, broken, in their delusion they are on the Ark (or that they've been injured ans help is coming). Do you put them out of their misery? But it always seems like you're murdering them! Well done, SOMA.
  - andai 5mo ago
the_af 5mo ago
I just love this game. So many good things about it. Not only the one about AI you mentioned, also the issue of consciousness and the self. I simply love how the game tackles this in a way that can only be done with an interactive first person PoV. Also, I just love this phrase: > "I woke up in my bed today... a hundred years ago."
stared 5mo ago
SOMA is existentialism 2.0 (wrote about it here https://p.migdal.pl/blog/2019/06/games-in-which-you-walk-and-get-immersed/ https://p.migdal.pl/blog/2019/06/games-in-which-you-walk-and...). To concepts you menton, I would add grey goo and x-risk.
- CamperBob2 5mo ago
  Neat. Not sure if your site is a gold mine inside a rabbit hole, or a rabbit hole inside a gold mine, but I really dig both the aesthetic and the content.
  - stared 5mo ago
    It is lovely to hear these words!
- andai 5mo ago
  A most excellent list!
sunrunner 5mo ago
I like to get into heated debates with friends that have played SOMA about whether or not the events in the ending that is presented to you were all necessary and effective, or perhaps undermined the overall message in some way. Specifically (and no spoilers, but I will be talking structure), you see parts A -> B -> C. I believe that part C makes the sequence of A -> B much less effective, by essentially removing a lot of the tension caused by seeing A, believing what it shows, and then immediately cutting to the reality of B. C only really takes away some of that tension, and I feel like it was added because of concerns about how a simple A -> B -> fade to black, would leave players feeling. Arguably it's the truest representation of part of the game's message, but to me feels like a bit like it's shying away from really making you face the specific truth highlighted well by B. Alternatively, keeping all the elements but playing them as A -> C -> B, would keep the message intended by seeing A -> B, and make it gentler for the player to receive, but ultimately remove the powerful effect of the buildup from A leading immediately to the reveal of B. Dropping C entirely would lose the confirmation of 'Seeing both sides', however I believe A -> B is a more powerful vision, and players can come to question whether C even exists by themselves.
- the_af 5mo ago
  Haha, I had to decode what you meant. I think C is absolutely necessary and the game cannot work with it, because this is critical: > Dropping C entirely would lose the confirmation of 'Seeing both sides' The game doesn't really work in full ambiguity and uncertainty. Enough people didn't understand it even with C (as you can see if you go read the subreddit about the game). If it's any consolation, I'm actually deeply worried about this: C is not the salvation we may think. C is not forever, and in fact, it's quite brittle! There's also no, ahem, mechanical way to reverse C back into its... "source". So the source is gone forever; once we have C, C is all there is, for as long as C can last without any failure or decay, which might not be much longer.
  - sunrunner 5mo ago
    > Enough people didn't understand it even with C Yeah that's a good point, and perhaps explains why C was added in the first place. I was going to say that B also shows the literal protagonist not really understanding it either, however now I think about it that reading doesn't track because as a player you've only been able to see one point of view at each branch along the way, so the other experiences are still happening in the background, just not observed by you. > C is not the salvation we may think I agree, and in fact the way C is presented in that moment (and maybe described throughout, it's been a while since I played through the game) also implies a 'nice' closure, or a victory that, like you say, doesn't really exist, on top of taking player's minds away from B. I guess B is the more obvious existential horror, C is one you have to question a bit before it starts to feel wrong.
loeg 5mo ago
The thing about fiction is, it's fiction. The author can write whatever outcome they want. It doesn't necessarily tell us anything about the real world.
- Morromist 5mo ago
  I don't see anything in SOMA that's implausable, so I don't see how it fails to tell us anything about the real world, any more than any other prediction about the future. And we pretty much have to make predictions, its both in our nature and a smart thing to do. Its possible AI and computing may never be able to reach that level of capability, but we can't know that. One thing that's great about SOMA is that the AI isn't nessessarily very capable and that's part of the problem, its very powerful but its not doing a good job with its enormous task.
  - loeg 5mo ago
    Really? You think this is plausible? https://i0.wp.com/bloody-disgusting.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/ontos.jpg?w=900&ssl=1 https://i0.wp.com/bloody-disgusting.com/wp-content/uploads/2... https://assetsio.gnwcdn.com/147465209158.jpg?width=1200&height=1200&fit=crop&quality=100&format=png&enable=upscale&auto=webp https://assetsio.gnwcdn.com/147465209158.jpg?width=1200&heig... It's a horror game; it is of course full of implausible, fantastical, gross elements.
- drfloyd51 5mo ago
  But it does give us an idea to chew over. And we can determine how “real world” that idea is. Some of us can even see how to bend the idea a little and make a reasonable version of it “real”.
  - loeg 5mo ago
    Yeah, that's the most charitable possible interpretation. But a fiction writer could just as easily write a utopias as a dystopia, and one isn't any more "real" than the other. It's just fiction.
m463 5mo ago
I didn't play soma yet, but I played eliza and it ate my brain. (it was actually the included kabufuda solitaire game though, not the AI in the game)
Jach 5mo ago
I enjoyed the game but I think its exploration of the topics was pretty shallow. It might be better received if it's someone's first dive into such topics, though. I still enjoy ice cream the nth+1 time eating it, so I can't complain too much about games or anime or books that cater to parts of my interests, even if they fumble some things. Someday I'd like to play a game that plays with the ideas from Robin Hanson's Age of Em book. One of those is just the multiplicity of artificial minds, so many mind-upload stories revolve too much around one or perhaps at most two (and boring debates over "who is the copy") instances, unless it's a parallel worlds colliding thing which is pretty different. We've seen some of the multiplicity stuff play out in the real world with our non-human AI "agents". Spin up a bunch of artificial minds to work in parallel on some task, let them make notes that stay behind, but then they're all shut down except perhaps one that continues guiding the overall project and making decisions when to spin up more or not.
- the_af 5mo ago
  > I enjoyed the game but I think its exploration of the topics was pretty shallow Really? Interesting. I'm a die-hard scifi fan since forever, and of course I know the topic of consciousness and identity are well explored in scifi (and philosophy), but I thought SOMA did something genuinely deep and unique with it: It put it you in the center of the experiment. It's YOU who's experiencing all sides of this, you who get to be surprised by the consequences. This is very different from reading about it in a scifi novel or even watching it in a movie. By making you the protagonist, and having it be an ineractive experience, you get to experience first hand the cognitive dissonance and confusion of... the thing. SOMA (re)convinced me that videogames can be art. Not saying it's the only example, of course!
  - andai 5mo ago
    Yeah it makes you be the guy who has to unplug the thing. Which implicitly forces the decision: is this thing human? Or sufficiently human that I ought to feel bad about this... (Or otherwise sentient — I would probably feel bad about unplugging animals too.)
  - Jach 5mo ago
grantcas 5mo ago
[dead]

by andai 5mo ago

RajT88 5mo ago

The same theme was present in season 2 of Raised By Wolves. (RIP my favorite show in some years)

Shalomboy 5mo ago

SOMA was a cognito-hazard for me and my roommate in college; we played it in the dark together while on some sort of mild hallucinogen and when it came time for Simon to find that high-pressure dive suit, we lost our minds (no pun intended). Watching the WAU twist its way through PATHOS II in whatever way worked first is a particularly jarring analogy for what has happened to our own profession. I can't help but think it would be nice for Frictional Games to revisit this topic again soon. Sidenote: It breaks my heart that all the great underwater-settings in media are hotbeds of horror scenarios. I think Subnautica broke the mold for this, here's to hoping the next generation of aquanauts take to the depths from that series.

ACCount37 5mo ago
There's the upcoming ONTOS game that looks like Frictional's SOMA successor.
- Shalomboy 5mo ago
  This is the first I've heard of it, but wowwww what a cool game. Thanks!
YeGoblynQueenne 5mo ago
You should try Inside. There's a few underwater sequences and they're not horror at all. Honest.
- the_af 5mo ago
  Haha. Inside is a marvelous game.

braden-lk 5mo ago

One of my favorite games, and I recommend it to anyone who loves a good existential sci-fi horror. If you are not comfortable with stealth games, it also has a "Safe Mode" where enemies aren't a threat to you if you just want to experience the story. Spoiler warning for those that havent played-- I forget the details exactly, but one scene stuck with me. It was a screen in one of the labs, where an experiment was running over and over. It was an uploaded consciousness of one of the test subjects, stuck in an interview room. He kept realizing he was trapped in a simulation and would start panicking. The computer would reboot him, trying another sequence to get him to not realize he was an AI. I think you as the player are given the option to turn him off forever, iirc.

hilariously 5mo ago
There's definitely a short story in Accelerando about this same topic.
- XorNot 5mo ago
  I mean all of Accelerando is kind of about this: the idea is introduced in chapter 1 when you meet the lobsters.
efskap 5mo ago
Reminds me of the SCP-like article / short story about the first executable snapshot of a human brain, with similar horrors of realization. https://qntm.org/mmacevedo https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
the_af 5mo ago
Did you unplug the robots with consciousness who still thought they were humans? It always breaks my heart. I don't know what the right choice is. Leaving them be, broken, in their delusion they are on the Ark (or that they've been injured ans help is coming). Do you put them out of their misery? But it always seems like you're murdering them! Well done, SOMA.
- andai 5mo ago

the_af 5mo ago

I just love this game. So many good things about it. Not only the one about AI you mentioned, also the issue of consciousness and the self. I simply love how the game tackles this in a way that can only be done with an interactive first person PoV. Also, I just love this phrase: > "I woke up in my bed today... a hundred years ago."

stared 5mo ago

SOMA is existentialism 2.0 (wrote about it here https://p.migdal.pl/blog/2019/06/games-in-which-you-walk-and-get-immersed/ https://p.migdal.pl/blog/2019/06/games-in-which-you-walk-and...). To concepts you menton, I would add grey goo and x-risk.

CamperBob2 5mo ago
Neat. Not sure if your site is a gold mine inside a rabbit hole, or a rabbit hole inside a gold mine, but I really dig both the aesthetic and the content.
- stared 5mo ago
  It is lovely to hear these words!
andai 5mo ago
A most excellent list!

sunrunner 5mo ago

I like to get into heated debates with friends that have played SOMA about whether or not the events in the ending that is presented to you were all necessary and effective, or perhaps undermined the overall message in some way. Specifically (and no spoilers, but I will be talking structure), you see parts A -> B -> C. I believe that part C makes the sequence of A -> B much less effective, by essentially removing a lot of the tension caused by seeing A, believing what it shows, and then immediately cutting to the reality of B. C only really takes away some of that tension, and I feel like it was added because of concerns about how a simple A -> B -> fade to black, would leave players feeling. Arguably it's the truest representation of part of the game's message, but to me feels like a bit like it's shying away from really making you face the specific truth highlighted well by B. Alternatively, keeping all the elements but playing them as A -> C -> B, would keep the message intended by seeing A -> B, and make it gentler for the player to receive, but ultimately remove the powerful effect of the buildup from A leading immediately to the reveal of B. Dropping C entirely would lose the confirmation of 'Seeing both sides', however I believe A -> B is a more powerful vision, and players can come to question whether C even exists by themselves.

the_af 5mo ago
Haha, I had to decode what you meant. I think C is absolutely necessary and the game cannot work with it, because this is critical: > Dropping C entirely would lose the confirmation of 'Seeing both sides' The game doesn't really work in full ambiguity and uncertainty. Enough people didn't understand it even with C (as you can see if you go read the subreddit about the game). If it's any consolation, I'm actually deeply worried about this: C is not the salvation we may think. C is not forever, and in fact, it's quite brittle! There's also no, ahem, mechanical way to reverse C back into its... "source". So the source is gone forever; once we have C, C is all there is, for as long as C can last without any failure or decay, which might not be much longer.
- sunrunner 5mo ago
  > Enough people didn't understand it even with C Yeah that's a good point, and perhaps explains why C was added in the first place. I was going to say that B also shows the literal protagonist not really understanding it either, however now I think about it that reading doesn't track because as a player you've only been able to see one point of view at each branch along the way, so the other experiences are still happening in the background, just not observed by you. > C is not the salvation we may think I agree, and in fact the way C is presented in that moment (and maybe described throughout, it's been a while since I played through the game) also implies a 'nice' closure, or a victory that, like you say, doesn't really exist, on top of taking player's minds away from B. I guess B is the more obvious existential horror, C is one you have to question a bit before it starts to feel wrong.

loeg 5mo ago

The thing about fiction is, it's fiction. The author can write whatever outcome they want. It doesn't necessarily tell us anything about the real world.

Morromist 5mo ago
I don't see anything in SOMA that's implausable, so I don't see how it fails to tell us anything about the real world, any more than any other prediction about the future. And we pretty much have to make predictions, its both in our nature and a smart thing to do. Its possible AI and computing may never be able to reach that level of capability, but we can't know that. One thing that's great about SOMA is that the AI isn't nessessarily very capable and that's part of the problem, its very powerful but its not doing a good job with its enormous task.
- loeg 5mo ago
  Really? You think this is plausible? https://i0.wp.com/bloody-disgusting.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/ontos.jpg?w=900&ssl=1 https://i0.wp.com/bloody-disgusting.com/wp-content/uploads/2... https://assetsio.gnwcdn.com/147465209158.jpg?width=1200&height=1200&fit=crop&quality=100&format=png&enable=upscale&auto=webp https://assetsio.gnwcdn.com/147465209158.jpg?width=1200&heig... It's a horror game; it is of course full of implausible, fantastical, gross elements.
drfloyd51 5mo ago
But it does give us an idea to chew over. And we can determine how “real world” that idea is. Some of us can even see how to bend the idea a little and make a reasonable version of it “real”.
- loeg 5mo ago
  Yeah, that's the most charitable possible interpretation. But a fiction writer could just as easily write a utopias as a dystopia, and one isn't any more "real" than the other. It's just fiction.

m463 5mo ago

I didn't play soma yet, but I played eliza and it ate my brain. (it was actually the included kabufuda solitaire game though, not the AI in the game)

Jach 5mo ago

I enjoyed the game but I think its exploration of the topics was pretty shallow. It might be better received if it's someone's first dive into such topics, though. I still enjoy ice cream the nth+1 time eating it, so I can't complain too much about games or anime or books that cater to parts of my interests, even if they fumble some things. Someday I'd like to play a game that plays with the ideas from Robin Hanson's Age of Em book. One of those is just the multiplicity of artificial minds, so many mind-upload stories revolve too much around one or perhaps at most two (and boring debates over "who is the copy") instances, unless it's a parallel worlds colliding thing which is pretty different. We've seen some of the multiplicity stuff play out in the real world with our non-human AI "agents". Spin up a bunch of artificial minds to work in parallel on some task, let them make notes that stay behind, but then they're all shut down except perhaps one that continues guiding the overall project and making decisions when to spin up more or not.

the_af 5mo ago
> I enjoyed the game but I think its exploration of the topics was pretty shallow Really? Interesting. I'm a die-hard scifi fan since forever, and of course I know the topic of consciousness and identity are well explored in scifi (and philosophy), but I thought SOMA did something genuinely deep and unique with it: It put it you in the center of the experiment. It's YOU who's experiencing all sides of this, you who get to be surprised by the consequences. This is very different from reading about it in a scifi novel or even watching it in a movie. By making you the protagonist, and having it be an ineractive experience, you get to experience first hand the cognitive dissonance and confusion of... the thing. SOMA (re)convinced me that videogames can be art. Not saying it's the only example, of course!
- andai 5mo ago
  Yeah it makes you be the guy who has to unplug the thing. Which implicitly forces the decision: is this thing human? Or sufficiently human that I ought to feel bad about this... (Or otherwise sentient — I would probably feel bad about unplugging animals too.)
- Jach 5mo ago

grantcas 5mo ago

[dead]