It’s an innocent enough question: “Can I borrow your phone?” Yet, ask most people and you might as well have asked for their social security number. With how frequently much of the world lives at an arm’s length away from our devices, it’s no surprise that we’d come to regard them as such intimate extensions of ourselves. That’s why taking the helm of another’s device is at once instantly familiar and strange. Having free roam of a character’s desktop or phone is like a hardwired connection into their psyche, a kind of social voyeurism a la reality television that compels players to investigate the life(s) bared before them simply because it’s there.
Two mobile games released this year, Accidental Queen’s Another Lost Phone: Laura’s Story and Bury Me, My Love by The Pixel Hunt and Figs, both gamify this concept, but to thematic ends that couldn’t be more different.
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