We listened to the story of game development from SOMI, an indie game developer who has been developing games to use them as a medium to deliver social messages.

SOMI created “Replica,” hoping that through this process, players will be able to feel a sense of responsibility and guilt toward the current society while playing the game and change their behavior after all. Players are free to actively intervene, react, and reject the game. By changing trivial data in the game, we can bring about a change in reality. Despite the different circumstances and realities we face, it is possible to sympathize with each other by playing these games. Replica certainly functioned as a medium that led to this sympathy. He sees games as a means and medium of self-expression, and this is why he creates games that contain his own thoughts, perspectives, and stories.

His representative game “Replica” is about a reality in which individual thought, conscience, and freedom of expression were subjugated under the rule of law. Replica shows the story of fascism and the morality of the individual who became a participant in the oppression and ultimately reinforced hatred by falling into biased structures and totalitarianism. It has a unique structure in which these stories are unfolded only on the screen by manipulating the smartphone in the game. The main character of the game, Tom Ripley, owns one mobile phone. Under the government’s compulsion, the private lives of the phone owner are inspected to find suspected terrorism. Depending on the choices the player makes, there are 12 different endings. A characteristic of Replica is that the game leads to different results depending on the players’ choices while searching for small clues. While playing the game, we could not stop critically thinking about current political issues such as large-scale surveillance by state agencies, civilian inspections, fascism, and media control. The player intervenes in the interaction of the game’s story and struggles to make a decision in the shoes of the character in the game. The dilemma of moral choices when we play replicas and the responsibility and pressure of the consequences that arise from it provided opportunities to compare this virtual situation and reality. After playing the game, what would we do if we were actually in a situation similar to Tom Ripley?

SOMI created “Replica,” hoping that through this process, players will be able to feel a sense of responsibility and guilt toward the current society while playing the game and change their behavior after all. Players are free to actively intervene, react, and reject the game. By changing trivial data in the game, we can bring about a change in reality. Despite the different circumstances and realities we face, it is possible to sympathize with each other by playing these games. Replica certainly functioned as a medium that led to this sympathy. He sees games as a means and medium of self-expression, and this is why he creates games that contain his own thoughts, perspectives, and stories.