The first time game designer Nina Freeman fell in love and had sex was with a man she met in an online role-playing game. After slowly building a relationship through chats and emails, he flew across the country to meet her for a secret romantic tryst, and then left.
She never saw him in person again, only as an avatar battling his way across her computer screen.
Seven years later, Freeman has transformed the experience into a game called Cibele, in which you step into her shoes as she negotiates her first awkward romance in and around an online fantasy world.
"It was the most extraordinary way to have sex for the first time," says Freeman. "I had only told a couple people about it, because it was so unreal that I felt like no one would believe me. That's why I wanted to make a game about it, because it had it became this weird myth in my life."
Since the relationship took place almost entirely through the internet, that's where Cibele begins: on a simulated version of Freeman's old desktop, where you're invited to dig through her emails, journal entries, and photos. Although there's a certain amount of artistic license in play, a lot of the ephemera is very real, drawn from the actual files and chat logs Freeman found on her old hard drive.
"I've always had an archiving impulse to the extreme," says Freeman, who slipped everything from teenage fan art to risqué selfies into the folders of Cibele. "This was an experience where I was on my computer the whole time, and this experience shaped what was on my computer."
There's a certain voyeuristic thrill to rifling through her digital closets, especially when you know that a lot of what you're seeing could be closer to real than to fictional. But the scraps of information you find also offer valuable context about who the character of "Nina" is, and how her life changes as she spends more and more time playing an online game with a man named "Blake."
https://youtu.be/3QyZagctAOU
In real life, the game Freeman played was Final Fantasy XI, but in Cibele—the pseudonym she used in the game—you're launched into a fantasy world called Valteria where you embark on various quests with Blake that sometimes seem more like elaborate excuses for flirting.
The battle system in Valteria is tremendously simple: Tap on an enemy, and you'll attack it until it dies. It's probably generous to even call them "battles," since the enemies never hit you back. That's because Valteria itself is somewhat incidental to the story, and the things you do there are just a layer of background noise. It's the conversations you have with Blake as you play that matter.
"More often than not, these games function like a chat room," says Freeman. While people initially come to explore the world and advance their character, "you stay for the social aspects, to play and chat with your friends. The game becomes the mediator of all your relationships with the people there."
We soon learn that Nina and Blake are part of a larger team of players, but that they've been meeting in secret to go on private adventures away from prying eyes. As their otherworldly avatars wander together across strange pink beaches and lava flows, they start to trade awkward compliments, followed by photographs and phone numbers.
Cibele unfolds in three acts across six months. As the romance heats up, Nina and Blake start to talk about meeting in person. Almost immediately, something shifts in the relationship as they contemplate a face-to-face encounter. Blake in particular seems thrown by the idea; although he's a powerful, even aggressive character in Valteria as well as the leader of their group, he seems far less confident about the idea of relating to people in the real world.
"It's easier to talk when you're not looking at someone," he says, as his avatar swats at monsters on the screen. The question looms in the air, though neither of them quite says it: Will their relationship still work without the buffer of the game in between them?
When I meet up with Freeman at a bar in Portland, Oregon, the 25-year-old developer looks different than she does in the game. Her hair is now decidedly blue, a dramatic shift from the neon pink of her curls in Cibele. She tells me she changed the color to mark her cross-country move earlier this year to take a job at Fullbright, the studio behind the indie hit Gone Home.
Even before Cibele, which Freeman released under the banner of Star Maid Games, she had earned a reputation as creator who liked to make intimate games based on personal experiences. In 2014, she released How do you do it?, a game about trying to understand sex as a little girl by playing with her dolls, and earlier this year she published Freshman Year, about a night out with friends that became a harrowing encounter with sexual harassment.
"The games that I make are usually based on experiences that happened a while ago, because in order to be really honest I have to have some critical distance from it," says Freeman. "Otherwise I'm just going to be biased and write really emotionally, and I'm more interested in writing really transparently and critically about myself."
Because her work so often involves autobiographical events, Freeman says she is sometimes accused of being self-absorbed or egotistical. But rather than an exercise in vanity, she sees her work as the opposite: an opportunity to look back at herself and her choices with an unflinching and critical eye.
"I think it's good to be self-reflective, because otherwise, what are you doing? You're just letting other people shape who you are instead of being self-critical and learning from your actions. I spend a lot of time thinking about what I do in retrospect, to try and be a better person, because I think I do a lot of things wrong."
For Freeman, Cibele was a chance not only to make a game about an unconventional romance, but to reassess a pivotal moment in her life by examining the digital detritus it left behind (and then asking players to do the same). She felt it was particularly important to represent the man who inspired Blake fairly, spending a lot of time sifting through old chat logs and trying to see things from his point of view, especially towards the end of their relationship.
"I came to understand the actual experience a lot better as a result," she says. "I wanted to make both characters nuanced, rather than making him seem like just another asshole on the internet, because that's not who he was."
"I was kind of an idiot when this happened too, so I don't want to make myself seem like the wronged person. Neither of us did anything wrong—we just did what we felt."
When she started making Cibele, Nina hadn't spoken to "Blake" in seven years, and she had no way to contact him. So she changed many of the details—including his name—to obscure his identity. But after the press started to write about Cibele, something remarkable happened: He found her.
"He saw an article about the game and reached out to me," says Freeman. "We had this really intense conversation. In the end he said it was really cool that I was making it, and that it was a good thing. I got his blessing, which I didn't think was going to happen. It was so crazy to hear from him after seven years. I still haven't sorted out my feelings from that."
Freeman puts a lot of herself into Cibele, not just in terms of her experiences or the digital artifacts of her life, but also her physical body. She stars as herself in all the cutscenes we watch, including one where she reenacts her first sexual experience. Although this sort of radical openness can sometimes feel uncomfortable to players—I've heard the phrase "too real" come up a lot—for Freeman it's a crucial part of her artistic process.
"This is a game about the first time I had sex, and it was important to me to show that," she says. "Especially when we're talking about sex, I think there's a lot of power in showing bodies because it's the act of taking your clothes off and revealing yourself to someone else. Part of being honest about this experience, for me, is showing the most important part of this relationship."
Indeed, the most interesting message conveyed by Cibele, the one that grows less and less debatable as online dating becomes increasingly normalized, is that what we're looking at is, in fact, a relationship.
This was a very real first love for Freeman, regardless of the fact that it unfolded primarily in an online game rather than in bars or clubs or college dorms. And while it didn't last, Freeman thinks that has far more to do with who they were than where they met.
"I don't want people to think this is a game that says online relationships don't work, because I don't believe that," she says. "They can work and do for many people. I've been in similar situations to this outside of online games, because it's not just about the game, it's about a human relationship. Ultimately, it's about these two people."
