Spoilers for Eliza follow.

I've always looked to the Pacific Northwest with rose-colored glasses; coming of age in the 1990s and therefore being obsessed with the "Seattle sound" of grunge and its relatives, I wanted nothing more than to live there and be part of it. And family vacations to stay with my aunt who lives in San Francisco were such a departure of culture from my midwestern upbringing that it was quite like a completely new world. I've visited both Seattle and the Bay Area many times since growing up, but it wasn't until recently that I realized I've been holding a strange vigil or reverence partly crafted out of fondness for my childhood, but also my memory of what the cities' energy was like.

Things have completely changed, now: both cities have--I hesitate to use this term because it sounds incredibly loaded--fallen to the demands, whims, and byproducts of consumer technology and its advancement. To clarify, you won't find any fist-shaking luddite sentiments here: "machines are controllin' us, maaaan!" et al. Looking at the monkey's paw, one of the fingers uncurls, as I realize what having my teenage wish granted would have meant for me the adult, today. Seeing what both cities have become, can I even say that things happened in spite of what the cities are, or is it because of what they are?

The latest offering from Zachtronics, Eliza, is quite a departure from their other entries. I've been pushing the game on all my friends, some of whom raise an eyebrow because they know the studio's earlier games: EXA Punks, Opus Magnum, and SHENZEN I/O, to name a few. Put simply, those games were about programming, thinking with a software engineer's or developer's mind. I've no such mind for that kind of thinking, so why the ardent recommendation? The reason is simple: whereas previous Zachtronics games were about the programmer's mind, Eliza must be about the programmer's soul. By that fact, it cannot use the languages of input-output, inductive and deductive logic and its arguments, and interger-operand statements. There is a frightening lack of logic in life; some of us embrace it, others suffer. And by "suffer," I do not mean that we succumb and give up...suffering in this sense also includes the act of trying to impose logic and order on it, forcing it to behave in a predictable, pleasing way. Attempts in this manner will succeed only to a point because there are only so many points of data we can absorb, maintain, and use.

Presented in a very easy-to-use (and familiar, if you've ever played other visual novel games) format, you follow the story of Evelyn Ishino-Aubrey, former prodigious developer of Eliza (a clever reference to the old chatbot), a "virtual counseling app" that uses something like machine learning to be able to offer "therapy" to its users by way of what are called proxies. The game explains that in Eliza's earliest iterations, an avatar with a computer-generated voice would offer the counsel: "What makes you feel that way?" and "Tell me about what life would look like if you were happy?" At some point, however, they switched to employing proxies, which are real people who sit facing their (but really Eliza's) clients and read the computer-generated responses and inquiries aloud. That is, it inserts the human element in a manner that is strangely, ironically dehumanizing: a person is reduced to a singular function. And just for a bit of dark humor, clients are asked to rate (one to five stars) and optionally tip their proxy, as though the proxy's contribution as an individual were worth anything...as well as a level-up system for the proxy themselves.

Evelyn's journey, it turns out, both proves and disproves the adage that you can't go home again. Resurfacing from a three-year hiatus (really, grief- and burnout-related depressive isolation), she becomes curious about the user's experience with Eliza and wants to know what it ended up being after she last worked on it. Along the way she meets new people, catches up with old coworkers and colleagues, and is more or less nudged toward the edge of the career/life choice plank: does she return to her old life to finish what she started and give in to the high-minded but sinister invitations of the CEO who's taken notice of her return? Does she sing the same song but in a different key with the departed psychologist/team lead to make something "that will revolutionize humanity?" Does she reject both choices and turn a new leaf with an old friend to pursue a creative life or use the encouragement from a new friend to pursue an entirely different career? Does she reject those choices as well? Rainer (the CEO) eventually tells you his ambitious plan: he wants to turn Eliza into something else, something far more complex, akin to creating new life. His take seems to be that humanity is finished, useful only for what it has accomplished thus far; something greater lies ahead. Eliza--and by association, Evelyn--is the key. Most people will think that Soren is Rainer's philosophical opposite (they certainly do take shots at each other), but I think it's actually Rae, the Eliza facility manager who is suffuse with praise for Eliza's idea, execution, and success. She's seen the good it can do first-hand and thinks it would be better if it were more widely available to more people, all in the name of mental health. As for Soren, a charming and self-depricating (and pretty creepy around women!) guy who has decided to start his own company, he tells you flat-out what his goal is: to end human suffering. His proposal is an app called Aponia (from Greek: "The absence of pain.") The way by which he believes he can achieve this is direct stimulation of some nervous pathways in the brain. The game doesn't really go into the bio-medical logistics of how this would work; the implication is that its a headset the user wears that paints something not too unlike augmented reality over their field of view. Evelyn has her misgivings about this idea, just as she did Rainer's poisonous, creation-denying philosophy: isn't what he wants to make only a way to avoid facing our problems? Is reality is so unbearable such that we feel we must escape it? Soren seems to think so, and it's quite obvious that his own life is one pervaded by past mistakes, feelings of inadequacy, and loneliness. In a strange way, his solution to never feel lonely again is to make an environment that is by its very nature isolating. Yet he is passionate about Aponia and believes its the only way.

When I first heard the name of the company behind Eliza (and therefore Evelyn's former employer) was called Skandha, I paused briefly. Skandha is a Sanskrit term that in Buddhism refers to five factors or qualities that contribute to what we would call a personality, or the individual. To be brief, these five things, sometimes called the aggregates--matter, feelings, perceptions, volition, and awareness--comprise the individual but are themselves impermanent. Matter degrades, feelings are fleeting, perceptions can change, volition waxes and wanes, and awareness is often veiled or ignored. As it applies to Eliza, and with my own understanding as a Buddhist, I sought a connection: why name a company, the creator of an ever-growing neural network made only of peoples' experiences with the application, about the five things that keep us from reality? Perhaps it's simple: there's a metaphor here for our culture's relationship to mental health. Is it, as Ranier implies, little better than astrology and fortune-telling? Or is it, as Rae believes, the way forward--a revolutionary form of specialized help that can liberate people from their suffering?

I wrote the title for this blog entry and the opening paragraphs the way I did to show a parallel: our relationship to reality, to our memories, our past can only live inside us, yet we live though them every day. We don't wake up in panic and lack the words for our experience; they've held over from the previous day, week, year, and so on. And yet, we can never go back to those moments again; none of us can physically step one second into the past--or the future. For Evelyn, the past--her brilliant work, her loss, her aimless spiral into and out of pain--has followed her, only it is not the past, now. It is the present. Skandha is on the brink of something large and terrible, Aponia is on the brink of its colorless world, and all the lives of the people in between move as the waves of the sea. Evelyn even reflects on this: "All those people with their lives...I feel so disconnected from them, yet I know I am part of them." Her Seattle has changed, and so has she. Without judgment on whether it has improved or worsened, the fact stands alone, immutable truth. But has something been overlooked?

Popular culture has an idea about enlightment, the ceasing of craving, the liberation from the cycle of reincarnation. The idea is more or less that it is unattainable, that it achievable only by the ascetic or scholarly few. How could someone who has a life entangled in others' lives, with their own cravings, triumphs, and losses ever achieve the beatific aura of eternal bliss? The truth about enlightenment can be found in this game, I believe: enlightenment is something we simply overlook. We need not set out for a grand journey with an end so far away we will be unable to see where we started. We only need to see ourselves, where we are, here and now. As author and mystic Rupert Spira says, "Not 'here' a place and 'now' a time, but here and now: this timeless placelessness, this placeless timelessness" (The Transparency of Things: Contemplating the Nature of Experience, Oxford, UK: Sahaja Press, 2016).

Thank you.

And I promise I won't try to lure unsuspecting adventurers to the deadly maze that is my archives.