Jun 29, 2021 8:00 AM

Emily Is Away Re-Creates Social Media's Awkward, Early Days

The newest game in the trilogy immerses you in the nostalgia of poke wars and Nyan Cat.

Ask someone who played it what they think of the indie game Emily Is Away, and they might confess to shedding a tear at the end. If they did, they’re certainly not alone. Originally created as a free-to-play visual novel, Emily Is Away debuted in 2015 as an AOL Instant Messenger simulator where you attempt to foster a relationship with your crush while transitioning from high school to college. Throughout the chats, you choose one of three prewritten dialog responses and manually type on your keyboard, each real-life keystroke simulating a virtual keystroke as well as typos, deleted sentences, and anxiously rewritten jokes in an attempt to play it cool. Despite its short run time, it's a remarkable time capsule for the aesthetics and emotions of AIM’s heyday a decade earlier.

Upon its release, Emily Is Away was met with a flood of praise that caught its 29-year-old creator, Kyle Seeley, off guard. Nine months earlier, during a getaway weekend with fellow Boston-based game developers to prototype new ideas, Seeley was pleasantly surprised when higher-profile developers behind games like Kind Words and Vacation Simulator were eagerly coming by to see what he was working on. “At that point, I thought, ‘Oh, I might have something special here,’” says Seeley. “It was a proof-of-concept thing, and that’s why I wanted it to be free, but I never expected it to take off as quickly as it did.”

Given the success of Emily Is Away, it’s surprising to hear that Seeley never planned sequels. After a few months of reassessing the reactions to his game, however, he felt compelled to up the stakes and deepen the narrative. In 2017 he released Emily Is Away Too, a more in-depth version of the AIM setup that introduced new characters, a wider array of buddy icons, the real-time stress of talking to multiple friends simultaneously, and the thrill of swapping music suggestions through YouToob links, the game's era-specific parody of YouTube. Unsurprisingly, the sequel was a hit.

Then, in April 2021, Seeley returned with Emily Is Away <3, new visual novel centered around Facenook—his spot-on re-creation of Facebook circa 2008 and all of its forgotten flair—that offers a complex and nuanced look at how you interact with your friend circle while dating someone. With an increasingly winding narrative and an even wider cast of characters, Emily Is Away <3 is captivating to play and even more mesmerizing to look at. Seeley built the UI of Facenook to replicate the original Facebook wall structure, the old-school newsfeed, and the retro setup of the messaging platform. The accuracy of it is somewhat astounding considering the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine could take him only as far back as the old Facebook login screen. The game took Seeley three years to complete.

The most crucial part of re-creating Facebook from scratch for Facenook was the attention to the most minor details. The iconic traits of early Facebook, like the tell-all format of the original homepage or the never-ending poke wars, are all lovingly re-created. Other parts are rarely discussed when mythologizing the platform’s initial days, like notes used for chain-letter questionnaires or the gaudy virtual gift prompt that seems bizarre in hindsight, where you could give friends a pixelated thong or bubbling champagne bottle to celebrate their birthday. “I had totally forgotten until seeing old Facebook screenshots that the prompt for a status back then was always ‘so-and-so is,’” recalls Seeley. “That seems like such a crazy thing to do now, because it doesn’t make any sense to set people up with a tense. That was a big thing on early Facebook, and people got really innovative when working around that status format.”

Arguably the most vivid blasts from the past appear on YouToob. The layout of Seeley’s parody site serves as a reminder of how subtly YouTube’s redesigns came and went over the years. Poking around feels like blowing dust off an old trunk in your attic, especially when you notice the absurdly low view counts on each video. “All of those are accurate for the time period, which is pretty crazy,” laughs Seeley. “Even in 2010, if you had 2 million views on a video, that was like the biggest video on YouTube at the time, by far.” Don’t forget the typo-laden comment sections on each YouToob page, too, which Seeley pulled from the original posts he found while using Wayback Machine. Be warned: Most of the comments have dated slang and text emoticons that’ll make you cringe.

These details are what allow Emily Is Away <3 to crank up the nostalgia in tidal waves. At times, it’s almost sad to recall how quickly the internet moves and leaves once-staple totems to rot away, if not vanish outright. Internet culture is revisited in full force not just through video touchstones like Nyan Cat and “It’s So Cold in the D,” but also through old websites whose magnetic allure is slowly being forgotten: the addicting anonymity of Post Secret, the tender comics of A Softer World, and the genuinely thrilling sense of music discovery shepherded by Hype Machine. Even on Facenook, it’s hard to not wax poetic about the sidebar ads promoting box-office hits like Final Destination 3 (“Washed-up Disney stars in a weird horror comedy movie? It’s so bad but it’s so good!”) or what was, in hindsight, the beginning of the indie game revolution. Seeley even got permission to embed a QWOP-style mini-game in Emily Is Away <3 but ultimately scrapped it due to time constraints. Wrap all of this up in pitch-perfect mouse clicks and keyboard clacking, the whirr of a desktop computer starting up, and the Facebook notification sound—an intrusive yet soft pop, almost like the faraway burst of a bubblegum bubble that Seeley re-created himself—and it's like you’re just hanging out at home on your family’s desktop as a teenager again.

The trick to weaving these details together rests in Seeley’s choice of layout. “Once I started working on Emily Is Away Too, I realized that it’s more immersive to ditch the full-screen gaming mode and start using the actual player’s computer to your advantage,” he says. “That’s why I ask you to please set up your desktop as if it were 2006, to use a browser window for YouToob so you’re switching between screens, to ‘receive’ photos in the game as downloadable jpegs. I think games are really good at immersing people in things, and interface games—which are games that spoof programs—are doubly as good because you’re sitting at a computer with a keyboard and mouse, and in the game the player is sitting at a computer with a keyboard and mouse. You’re directly interacting with these people online as you would normally, and it does a lot to help players become immersed in a way that feels very real and habitual.”

Above all else, arguably the driving cultural force of Emily Is Away <3 is the use of music. In the first game, an AIM avatar of Death Cab for Cutie or Kanye West album art feels like a kitschy stamp of self-expression. But here, in the third game, Seeley ups the stakes for music to serve as a touchstone of taste, mood, and potential bonding. Characters curate YouToob playlists with Against Me! and Brand New to reveal their burgeoning sense of self, friends post Facenook statuses with cryptic Jack’s Mannequin or 3OH!3 lyrics that double as a call for help, and the player can handpick the artist profiles they “like” to be displayed on their account (though it appears this is exclusive to Itch.io for now). These aren’t just a way to reinforce the eras when each Emily Is Away game is taking place; they’re auditory cues that place the experience in its time. Whether you’re familiar with the songs or not, having a friend message you to enthusiastically share the “new” Deadmau5 single or Kid Cudi music video makes it feel like you’re bonding with a real person, not a bot.

The reason Seeley got to explore a broader spectrum of pop culture this time around is because the third sequel no longer centers around Emily in particular. There are a handful of characters that Seeley considers to be “a Frankenstein version” of his high-school friends, and each one gets to shine a light on their interests, their go-to playlists, and even their favorite memes. Mat is an amalgamation of Seeley’s best friends, Emily and Evelyn are different girls he had a crush on, and Kelly is the stable friend you eventually realize has a lot on her plate. With more key characters comes more personalities—and, Seeley hopes, more sage revelations about the ways in which you treat the people closest to you.

“For each game, personal things that have happened to me impact the story and the vibe it’s about. I wrote the first game right when I got out of college and moved back home to Boston, because I missed everyone I had met there; it’s ultimately about having a good friend that you inevitably grow apart from,” Seeley says. “Then I got to a point in my life where having a close, core friend group was really important no matter what’s going on. So with the third game, I was really trying to tell the story of what it’s like to actually be in a relationship. The first two games are more about you pursuing a relationship with another person, but there’s a whole step that follows after you get into a relationship, and I wanted Emily Is Away <3 to focus on that.”

“I think I’m most proud of the percentage of people that have played to the different endings,” Seeley says. "In the third game—this is kind of a spoiler—you can choose to be trusting and faithful to your partner or kind of be a toxic jerk. There’re different endings for those. Being a toxic jerk gets you the traditionally ‘good’ ending, but you were a toxic jerk to get there. I found that 85 to 90 percent of players choose to be faithful and trusting, even though it means your relationship is up in the air. I’m proud of people for doing that. I thought a way-higher percentage of players would be shitty, but I think deep down everyone wants to be a good person.”