Becoming-Imperceptible
The whole premise of the game is to collect memories and keep records of the present to pass on to the future generation of humans. As such, Estelle is aware that the world as she knows will come to an end. She has already accepted her fate. She is aware that after the ‘end’, “Life [goes] on” (Braidotti 2013, 137), which is why she keeps a journal of her memories in the first place. In fact, the opening line of her journal, of the game, starts with “Who are you?”, referring to the person reading her journal in the future. In wanting to collect memories of the world she is currently living in, she “assume[s] faith in a future, and also a sense of responsibility for ‘passing on’ to the future generations a world that is liveable and worth living in” (Braidotti 2013, 138). And so, she, or rather the player, writes in their journal “as if already gone” (Braidotti 2013, 137), taking pictures and noting their interactions with other characters and all the things they come across.
What I also find interesting is that, unlike many other games, the player gets to choose their dialogues and the memories they want to pass on. As such, the gameplay does not exactly follow a linear pattern, with only one possible set of actions/dialogues. Rather, analogous to Braidotti’s Aion, opposite to the linear Chronos, Season: A Letter to the Future (2023) gives the player the option to write their own journal, to select which corners of the world they want to explore and what memories they want to keep. In keeping select traces of the past and the present, and ‘erasing’ others, the player challenges the idea of a linear historical timeline. The game recognizes that each player might select a different route and tell a different story to the future. However, this does not alter the ending of the game. As such, the ‘past’ and the ‘present’ do not really matter. The player merely shares the knowledge that they want to pass on to the ‘future’. This is especially true when considering that at the end of the season, nearly all traces of the ‘past’ disappear, leaving humanity to start anew. This non-linear gameplay therefore showcases the past, the present and the future as one “critical mass of an event” (Braidotti 2013, 137), thus allowing the player to Become-imperceptible.
From what I have stated so far, it makes it look as if the game only considers humanity’s fate, which like Stray (2022), would make it anthropocentric. However, I have not played the whole game yet, so claiming that would not be fair. Yet, even if it were purely anthropocentric, it still offers players the chance to adopt a new subjectivity, to Become-imperceptible. Indeed, through Estelle, through her biking around the world, taking pictures, meeting all kinds of people, and journaling—different than the usual games in which avatars kill one another or constantly have to strategize to defeat their enemies—gamers of Season: A Letter to the Future (2023) can see the ‘end of the world’ in a new, more hopeful light.
