The couple are entwined on a small bed in a dormitory room in New York City. Young and inexperienced, they fumble at each other’s clothes, his hands all over her. The camera draws in nearer, almost uncomfortably stark and intimate in the way of all mumblecore movies about the awkward first stages of a new relationship. But this is not an independent film. This is a video game, and the woman on the bed is played by its designer, Nina Freeman. It’s a long way from Call of Duty.

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For the last five years, Freeman has been working with small teams of artists and programmers, making intensely personal games about sex and relationships. She came to prominence with the acclaimed How Do You Do It, an interactive skit about a little girl exploring the idea of sex by bashing a Barbie doll and Action Man together. In Ladylike, you control a conversation between a teenage girl and her mother during a drive to the mall. No matter what you say about school, boyfriends or clothes through a series of conversation options, the mum always disapproves. You literally can’t win.

Earlier this month Freeman released her latest project, a multilayered narrative game named Cibele. Developed with small studio Star Maid Games, it’s about the designer’s brief relationship with a man she met in the multiplayer adventure game, Final Fantasy XI, where hundreds of players gather and form online clans to slay monsters and discover treasure.

When you start Cibele, you find yourself accessing a simulation of Nina’s own computer desktop from the time of the affair, complete with folders full of her real photos, poems and live journal entries; but if you click on a specific icon you enter a role-playing game called Valtameri, a fictitious take on Final Fantasy, where you meet Blake, who leads his own in-game clan of fellow players. As you fight monsters in this synthetic adventure, you hear Nina talking with Blake on the phone and see short film sequences, showing her taking selfies and emailing them to him.

It’s a short but complex and self-reflexive experience; a game-within-a-game about the ways in which multiplayer role-playing adventures like Final Fantasy XI double as social arenas where players meet, flirt and gossip. “I wanted to explore the journey that these two went on together in the digital space,” says Freeman, who refers to the Nina of the game in the third-person. “It’s about what it’s like to have these intimate interactions through an online game; what it’s like to be the girl who is sending pictures to her lover over the internet and talking to him on the phone and longing for this physical interaction that feels almost out of reach.”

Although the character of Blake is fictitious, he represents the man Nina met, but is no longer in contact with. “He does know the game exists,” she says. “He got in touch with me and he was like, ‘It’s cool that you’re making this.’” To make things even more complex, his role in the game is played by Freeman’s partner, Emmett Butler, who also worked on the project. Did she find this strange?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nina Freeman acts out a scene in Cibele

“Emmett has worked with me on a number of personal games in the past,” she says. “So he had a good idea of what he was getting into. Filming the intimate scene at the end was a lot easier for both of us, since we know each other so well. Our roommate at the time actually filmed it – it was nice to be able to create that portion of the game with people I feel comfortable around. The voice actor for Blake was actually not Emmett, but a young man named Justin Briner who we worked with remotely. He was really great, too.”

For Freeman, video games have never been the solitary, isolating pastime of common stereotype. As a child in the sleepy coastal town of Ipswich, Massachusetts, her favourite thing was to visit her friends Melanie and Brittany, hide out in their basement and play on a Nintendo console all day, until their parents kicked her out for the evening. Together they devoured games like Super Mario 64 and Legend of Zelda, sharing the stories as they unfolded on screen. When she discovered Final Fantasy XI at the age of 14, it was a way of meeting up with friends – but also forging new relationships. In Cibele, the player can swap between playing Valtameri and chatting with other characters via simulated instant messaging, email and chat forums. It’s a clever approximation of how we now socially multitask online, seamlessly moving from one window to the next.

Freeman says that in our era of Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, this idea of the internet as just another romantic space is prevalent and natural. “For my generation online relationships are basically a normal part of life. A lot of people have contacted me after completing Cibele, saying: ‘Oh wow, this happened to me when I was playing World of Warcraft as a teenager. I was that young girl on the internet, trying to negotiate a relationship with someone I’d never met.’”

For some, the way Freeman explores her own experiences so personally through her games is extraordinary. But she sees many parallels with poetry, which she studied at New York’s Pace University under Charles North. He introduced her to the New York School: Elizabeth Bishop, Langston Hughes, Frank O’Hara. She worked for a while at legendary East Village live poetry venue the Poetry Project.

Later, two things happened: she started hanging out with a bunch of independent game developers who introduced her to offbeat, experimental titles like Anna Anthropy’s Dys4ia, about the transgender designer’s own transition, and Gone Home, about a burgeoning romance between two teenage girls. She also came down with a chronic illness. “I was suddenly surrounded by game makers,” she remembers, “and I thought, these games are poetry. So while I was sick I had a bunch of free time and taught myself how to program.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Inspiration: screengrabs from the games Gone Home, left, and Dys4ia

Has she ever been concerned about the implications of putting herself out there so honestly? “Putting myself into these stories in a vulnerable way has definitely taken practice. I’m more and more comfortable with each project. I have learned to separate my present personal life from them, because it could be uncomfortable to feel like critics are talking about me when they talk about the game. Yes, they are talking about me, in a sense, but they are really talking about the character I created based on me. That distinction is important.”

Freeman and her collaborators Emmett Butler and Diego Garcia are now part of a vibrant new era of independent game design. The explosion of broadband internet access, together with the arrival of cheap development tools like GameMaker and Twine, has meant that almost anyone can make a game now, put it online and find a global audience. Whereas big PlayStation titles require teams of hundreds and budgets of millions, a downloadable indie title can be built by one or two people on a cheap PC.

The result has been an explosion of idiosyncratic titles – but also the emergence of indie gaming scenes and venues. Games have effectively become the new punk rock – or, as Nina sees it, the new poetry: “I saw a lot of parallels with the Beats,” she says. “I was excited because what I found so inspiring in poetry was starting to happen in games.”



With Cibele now finished, Freeman is concentrating fully on her current project, Tacoma, the latest title from Gone Home creator the Fullbright Company. Nine months ago, she moved to Portland, Oregon, where the team is based. Set on a lunar research station, this eerie adventure is an ambitious move for her. “I’ve never made a 3D game before,” she says. “Fullbright is one of the few studios that’s really exploring this idea of games as character-focused narrative spaces; it’s very much about letting the players explore stories rather than being controlled by them.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A desktop view from Cibele

But what of our rookie couple in Cibele? Is there a happy ever after to their hook-up? Not exactly. While Blake is confident and seductive online, he shies away from anything more than a single physical meeting: “I don’t think relationships are comfortable,” he tells Nina. It’s not hard to see this as a reflection on the alienation of online relationships but maybe it’s actually just about kids finding new ways to deal with social anxieties.

“Cibele is about the two characters negotiating their boundaries,” says Freeman. “In the end it may not really work out for them – but at least they were honest with each other. That’s important to me because as a developer and a person, I want to be as honest as possible. I want to write characters that feel really raw and real; I want to show my flaws and the good things and the bad all at once – because that’s what people are.”