Anyone who ever played and loved a video game, especially as a teenager, will know that the game itself is often only part of the experience. It is also about community. We seek out other players, through forums, message boards and social media, and sometimes the relationships we form in these haphazard spaces move beyond expressions of shared fandom. They become friendships, support networks, perhaps even romances. Videoverse, the new visual novel from Kinmoku, creator of the acclaimed relationship drama One Night Stand, is an engrossing and emotional study of these digital relationships and the games that precariously support them.
The year is 2003 and 15-year-old video game fan Emmett spends hours each day on his Shark games console, playing the Japanese role-playing game Feudal Fantasy. When not playing, he is socialising on the machine’s online service, Videoverse, a combination of discussion forum and instant messaging platform. Emmett is part of a thriving, mostly supportive community of gamers and artists, but when the console’s manufacturer, Kinmoku (one of many slyly self-referential elements in the game), seeks to move the user base on to its new Dolphin console, the company announces that Videoverse will soon be switched off, plunging the group into an existential crisis.
