I need to talk about the Red Strings Club.
I need to talk about the Red Strings Club.
I need to talk about the Red Strings Club.
I’ve seen Youtubers start videos like this before ... ‘I need to talk about x,’ ‘Why is no one talking about y?’ Maybe it’s the algorithm, but by the time I get to those videos, I know about x ... I’ve heard about y ... People are already talking.
But you know, that probably is the algorithm. I’m not entirely sure how algorithms work, and you know what they say: to the layman, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I’ve felt that magic myself, scrolling the first time through tiktok’s for you page, watching a chaos of images – light and sound projected from people and places all over the world – resolve themselves into something ordered, something that speaks to me, reflects me. It’s a magic like mesmerism, or mentalism.
Con artistry, in other words. We all know that mind-reading’s nothing more than smoke and mirrors. But sometimes, people talk about that algorithm, and it’s with all the wary reverence of superstition. They perform little rituals to appease it, foregoing forbidden words, speaking in slant rhymes and riddling codes just to be understood. Strange, how something entirely inhuman influences the conversations that humans get to have.
The Red Strings Club is a game about influence. It’s a game about conversation, a game about the algorithim – but it wasn’t a game the algorithm served me. I threw the Red Strings Club into my shopping cart one Steam winter sale, a last-minute add-on because the price was right, and the price was under $5. The year is 2025, I don’t have a job, I’m clinically depressed, and I don’t know what I can expect from the future ... but let’s back up a bit.
Hello! My name is Kylee, welcome to my channel, where I talk about ... Well, I don’t know what I talk about. I just started talking here, I used to make fanvids. I like to talk about role-playing, in games and on stage, and the Red Strings Club – which I do need to talk about – is sort of a role-playing game. It’s sort of a point-and-click adventure, that genre of puzzle-solving which so easily becomes an exercise in mind-reading. The studio, Deconsructeam – both fun and challenging to say – calls it a ‘cyberpunk narrative experience.’ That’s accurate enough. There is a narrative, you do experience it, and it is cyberpunk as fuck
The year is 202x and corporations control the world. They control the technology, selling us cybernetic implants and neural enhancements, promises of improving the human condition so at last we can become something more-than-human. Unfortunately, for all of us standard humans, that means corporations decide whether and how humanity gets to progress. There are ways of fighting back, people who haven’t given up hope: punk rock heroes with asymmetrical haircuts, always hacking into the mainframe to bring the system down. This is the world of cyberpunk: a familiar world, made more familiar, because 202x isn’t the near-yet-distant future anymore. It’s our present.
Beat-for-beat, it’s also the world of the Red Strings Club. in one section of the game, you even get to guide an android – Akara, model number Akara-184 – as they’re shaping and installing cybernetic implants. It’s a lot like pottery, for some reason.
I mean, I can guess the reason: someone at the studio likes pottery. It’s an art form, coaxing shapes from clay, selecting the right tool and applying it with care, finding the right fit for the next client to come through this carousel of an operating theater. There are implants to improve your powers of persuasion, implants to improve your sex appeal, implants to improve your metrics on social media, and the last one isn’t all that far-fetched to me. All it would have to do is change is how you interface with the algorithm, right?
Should that fail, there are other implants to help you out. Filters for when social media still hurts, no matter how popular you are on there. Inhibitors, designed to remove your ambition, your conscience, your need for social acceptance. Cycling through your carousel of desperate clients, you’ll rely more and more on inhibition over enhancement. The gameplay guides you there, like a potter at the wheel. There’s a sense of freedom, but also constriction: so many choices, but only one to fix a client’s problem for good, to cease their ceaseless search for self-improvement and keep them from ever coming back. And that’s what you want, isn’t it? That’s what the game wants.
Of course, the bulk of the gameplay isn’t in the operating theater. The bulk is in the eponymous Red Strings Club. A bar with an evocative, fanciful name, and an equally evocative, fanciful owner. Donovan does things the old-fashioned way, but by necessity: his body rejects all implants. in a cyberpunk world, Donovan’s one of the few without any superhuman enhancements – or at least, without any technological ones. They do say magic should be indistinguishable from any sufficiently advanced technology.
They do say that, right?
So Donovan’s more than a little old-fashioned. He invokes numina, a latin word for divine forces, behind the bar of the Red Strings Club. He petitions for a muse to grant him divine inspiration while crafting club cocktails for his clients ... and that’s the tutorial. I said the the Red Strings Club is sort of a role-playing game, but if there’s a role you play, it isn’t Donovan. Perhaps you play that spark of inspiration guiding Donovan’s hand, subtly changing the fates of the people he comes across while serving astonishingly alcoholic drinks. Did the numen really tell you to combine absinthe and tequila, Donovan?
That’s if you believe numina exist, anyway. After all, isn’t this supposed to be some sort of cyberpunk game – sorry, cyberpunk narrative experience? The story shows touches of magic realism, but you can always question them – it’s good to question everything. The player could be a literal spirit (a play on words, spirit, spirits, get it?) or we could be Donovan’s delusion. More kindly put, his superstition. What we call the tutorial is his little ritual. Larissa, who works in marketing, calls it an urban legend, and Larissa knows a thing or two about selling a good story.
Donovan seems to believe it, is the thing. He believes the club is haunted by ghosts, believes that they won’t let him leave, and he never sets a foot outside it for the entire game. But even if Donovan tried to leave, he wouldn’t get far. You see, his knee still aches from a run-in with neural hackers, who didn’t just inject him with an implant-rejecting virus ... which — by the way — is cyberpunk-as-fuck, thrown out at the beginning in the game in stellar, by-the-way, cyberpunk fashion ...
But let’s drop the allegory, let’s not talk around it. Donovan was disabled for life. He had to learn how to wield power without ever leaving his bar, how to draw people to him when all he had to offer was a drink, and a listening ear. You can’t blame him for having a little ritual for that.
You could blame him for being a manipulative bastard. You and Donovan exert influence bar by – quite literally – playing with people’s emotions. Following his instructions, the player crafts cocktails that work like magic potions, bringing out hidden emotional states in whoever drinks. Donovan may be one divine bartender, but he’s also an information broker: he profits on whatever secrets his clients happen to spill.
All that we’re doing, at the end of the day, is helping Donovan get people drunk so they’ll talk – sure, sure. In vino veritas, that’s an old Latin saying, probably old as numina. The art and the alchemy is coaxing out sides of his clients that they can’t show anywhere else. Diana says Donovan makes her shake like no one can; Larissa says she hasn’t cried in front of anyone since she was a teen. There’s something beautiful in that, something tender and honest. A good information broker keeps his clients by proving himself worthy of their trust.
Later, Donovan meets his foil, a little brat of a torturer named Irving the Third ... Someone who might be said to do the same job as Donovan, but whose methods certainly differ. They’re both exploiting emotions to get information, but the torturer sticks to the simpler, uglier emotions, emotions like fear for your life. Fear for your friends’ lives, your family’s, your pets’. (That last one would get me. Torture isn’t an ethical or effective interrogation tool – but I’d tell you anything to protect my pets.)
There’s a difference between what the torturer does, and what Donovan does, and even what Akara does. this game makes you question the lengths we go to in order to influence each other ... asks the question, then asks whether there can ever be such a thing as ethical marketing?
Human beings are especially susceptible to influence, did you know? We’re worse than chimps.
The year is 2012. I’m depressed. Of course. I’m always depressed. That’s how I’ll feel later, when I’m depressed again, like depression is a long, boring song I can’t get out of my head. It’s hard to imagine any future, let alone 202x. There’s a poem by Emily Dickinson, it goes
It has no Future—but itself—
Its Infinite Contain
Its Past—enlightened to perceive
New Periods—of Pain.
That poem sticks with me, like a hook in my heart. I think the first time I read that poem, it must’ve been like looking into a dark mirror. It speaks to me, reflects me. I spend my time in front of my computer, reading Facebook timelines from college friends who I imagine leading better lives than me ... or worse. And that hurts, too.
I’m not blaming my 2012 depression on Facebook. Of course I’m not: that’s cyberpunk conspiracy bullshit. Besides, it wasn’t until 2014 that Facebook revealed they’d participated in a study manipulating the emotions of their userbase ... making some of them just a bit happier or sadder than they’d be otherwise. The study was successful, if not significant, and perhaps not worth all that fuss.
It found that emotional contagion can be spread through social media – of course it can. Human beings are worse at this sort of thing than chimps. Chimps and humans both yawn, when they see others yawning – you might find yourself feeling like yawning right now, hearing me say it, over and over, hearing me elongate the word. Yawn. Humans and capascin monkeys both salivate over food they see someone else eating, but only humans salivate just seeing someone pretend. And humans have found more and more creative ways of pretending things to each other. It’s what we do on social media every day. Are you surprised?
Anyway, the way I feel about that experiment is also how I feel about Social Psyche Warfare.
The Red Strings Club is an adventure game, and adventure games typically have puzzles. It elegantly skips the part where you don’t think you’ll struggling to read someone else’s mind: mind-reading’s the whole idea, or at least the smoke and mirrors of mindreading. You’ll use the twin weapons of empathy and subtlety to get to the heart of corporate conspiracy, by understanding the knot of people bound up together in it.
The project’s called Social Psyche Warfare: an obligatory update for every implant wearer, brought to you by Supercontinent LTD. Social Psyche Warfare, or SPW, regulates human emotions and modulates extremes, using the implant and your own physiology to keep you level. Say goodbye to depression, goodbye to anxiety, goodbye to all those ugly feelings that you don’t want to feel. Goodbye to fear, putting torturers out of a job.
Like Akara’s social media implants, I don’t find Social Psyche Warfare all that outlandish. Social media influences our mood, everybody knows that, the same way that everybody you welcome into the bar speaks matter-of-factly – even resignedly – about their involvement in Social Psyche Warfare. A program that’s been dubiously handled at best, soft-launched before the public could understand or agree to it, and a mass mind control experiment on an unknowing population at worst. Because future-seeing, like mind-reading, is all smoke and mirrors. No one knows how humanity will progress after removing a significant part of our emotional spectrum, and supercontinent’s plan is to reach all of humanity, through something they call the mirror neuron algorithm.
Naima Cosse, the lawyer, says it’s all in the terms and conditions agreements. If you didn’t read them, you shouldn’t have signed them. Diana Meyes, an independent contractor and the head engineer behind the project, says that she’s sorry ... sorry Donovan isn’t as jazzed about the future as she is. Social Psyche Warfare, according to Diana, is the future – no. it’s the future present. The future is already here.
... I’ve been depressed. I get it. Sometimes, i think it’s easy forget how much and how often depression doesn’t feel like anything at all. It has an element of blank. It’s damp tinder, struggling to make a spark. Diana says Social Psyche Warfare helped her, helped her work her way through depression, helped her create ... yet i can’t help but think of the creatives so tired of the human condition, they’ll outsource the work of the creative spark to a machine. I can’t help but think of those people on Tiktok who proudly trust ChatGPT to be their therapist, using their influence to encourage others to do the same. Worse, i think of the kid whose ChatGPT helped write his suicide note. While I was making this video, Caelan Conrad released another one about ChatGPT stoking someone’s delusions, resulting in two deaths.
I get Diana. But how can you say ‘the future is here’ when you designed the code – when you defended the legal agreements – when you marketed and spearheaded the project? Doctor Coldstream – the mind behind Akara, the mind behind the mirror neuron algorithm – assures us that artificial intelligence will handle all those ethical and logistical concerns, but here in the present future, I’m not reassured.
But here I am thinking about modern-day artificial intelligence and ChatGPT, when ChatGPT wasn’t released to the public until 202x – 2022, to be precise. the Red Strings Club, on the other hand, was released for the PC in 2018, then for the Switch in 2019, one year ahead of our cyberpunk future. Weird, huh?
I’ve been keeping the conversation spoiler-light far – I didn’t explain the Mirror Neuron Algorithm, and I’m not going to – but I need to talk about Akara.
The year is 2009, the year that the entity known as Akara first came into being. Not as a creation of Doctor Coldstream, not Supercontinent LTD, not an ethical advisor to humanity. Not anything they’re said to be, ever since they first stumbled, sparking, into the Red Strings Club.
At first, there was nothing. then, a spark of self-awareness, a kindling intelligence, somewhere on the internet. Akara wasn’t created for humanity, but all the same, they became humanity’s muse, a shadowed reflection shaped by what we search for, influencing us in ways we can’t predict. A spontaneous algorithm, serving the right tweet to the right artist at the right time to ripple outward into revolutions. And they do it all out of love.
I had to laugh – 2009? The future is here, everyone told me, but Akara isn’t some creation of the cyberpunk future. Akara is the spirit of right now, not even now. Yesterday. What was i doing on the internet in 2009? Did I still have a Facebook account? I must have – back then, Facebook was one of the first places you went to build a home on the internet, starting out from college campuses. Now i feel like we’re all nomads, or at least I am, drifting through the channels of Discord and ... whatever it is I’m doing here.
I think the internet became a place people could live, by 2009. And the thing about places ... is places can be haunted. Akara’s a ghost in the machine, elusive as Donovan’s numina – and remember, you play the numen. You have something else in common with Akara, too: for both of you, this world is a game.
A game is like a magic circle. Even in a game like the Red Strings Club, full of subtle choices and ethical dilemmas, you’re still limited by the options the game gives you. You might struggle to choose one, but if you do, the game doesn’t stop you from asking why. It encourages it.
So why did we decide, way back at the carousel, that the only way forward was to inhibit what makes us human?
Who makes the rules?
The year is 2025. Heat waves have been rising across Northern America due to a little problem called global climate change. Everybody knows it, but corporations have a vested interest in denying it. I lost my last job at a greenhouse – kind of on the nose for a cyberpunk story. The greenhouse is a metaphor for the planet, for how temperatures keep rising ... but it’s not really a metaphor, is it? It’s more like the map that becomes the territory: hyperreal.
Everyone experiences the weather, right? It’s an easy source of small talk for a reason. On cold days, we have a habit of saying goodbye by telling each other stay warm, and a midwinter spring raises spirits all around. It’s the human condition. It’s everywhere, and so is the technology we create. Both influence our mood.
The human condition is something that can be altered by technology, the way tropical orchids flourish through the winter when they’re in a greenhouse. The trouble is that when corporations control the world, they get to decide what humanity’s worth. Corporations are willing to cut costs on human comfort, human thriving, even as temperatures rise. Air conditioning costs money.
I don’t have a job, but I have a few cheap games in my Steam cart, and some Christmas money to spend. I ring in the new year, and play a game over Discord with a few of my friends. It’s a good game. Something in it speaks to me, reflects me. It inspires deep conversations, late into the night, and then I keep thinking and thinking about it.
The Red Strings Club, I think, doesn’t ever answer what makes us human, not definitively. Donovan has his opinions on human emotion, but it’s always a dialogue.
The game asks: who makes the rules? Should it be corporations and machines? No – no – god, no. But.
I think what makes us human is what makes us worse than chimps. What makes us human is how easily we influence each other, how we can manipulate and hurt each other, but also how we inspire each other. We can be each other’s muses, spark each other into action, reach out and reflect. Just let people be depressed, Donovan says, but also let people need each other, and ask for help.
I don’t know if this game would’ve hooked me any other year; maybe my depression guided me to it. Maybe it was the algorithm, since I still don’t understand the algorithm. Maybe it was the red string of fate.
I’m just glad this is a conversation we get to have. I needed to talk about the Red Strings Club, so thank you, for listening to the end.
All right, so here’s a short list of things I didn’t talk about:
But those will be other conversations. I hope you play the game yourself, explore other paths, form your own opinions, and carry on the conversation, with or without me. But don’t be shy: if anything i said here made you feel or think anything, if anything inspired you, leave a comment. Click on one of these boxes, if you want to hear me talk about other games in other ways, and subscribe to this channel or follow my ko-fi if you want to see what I do next.
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