The Caligula Effect is the internet. The internet is The Caligula Effect.

23 April 2024

I think about mid games a lot.

“Mid” is a term thrown around a lot recently. If you’re in any online space that has any kind of zoomer-ish element or personality you’re bound to see words like that being screamed at other people for days on end. There’s a kind of bizarre antipathy towards any kind of “mid” media nowadays, games or movies or books that don’t quite leave you an empty husk in a boring way, but aren’t really impactful enough to leave you thinking like those holy grails we all seek in our quests. I guess if I were to describe them in those terms, I’d say that mid is the little bumps in our proverbial road, the things that keep us wanting because they lack this or that, but aren’t especially meaningful in their own right. You see it, play it, and throw it away.

We all seek special things in our lives. We all want to experience the high of a really well-told story or a really impressive-looking play or movie. Part of the human journey through art is that specific search for that sublime, works that resonate with us but aren’t sublime in the same sense as art scholars would use it.

Art is a strange thing, all things considered. In our human search for beauty we’re bound to step into realms that question ourselves and how we relate to the world at large. The culmination of these experiences building the bedrock in which our tastes are developed over time. We consume and experience and watch and learn and all these things come together to create a mess of paints and textures and that is our human lives. We find meaning in the meaningless. We are bound together by this search for greatness that connects us, relates us to one another and builds something better.

And there’s a kind of beauty I appreciate in that.

We wish to look upon the looking glass and replicate that same awe and wonder we sense through our connection with art. We want that high, we want to grasp it again and again and find its never-exhausting shine bright within us as it leaves and we search for it again, and it’s within that search that we find the pebbles on the road to guide us. These little things that contain moments of the sublime, or glimmers of its light within them but don’t quite grasp it fully. Those pebbles are what form the larger foundation of our own journeys through the world. It enriches our selves. It makes us us.

The internet, I feel, enhances this. We’re able to relate to one another through the spaces we inhabit and the tastes we share. We create social spaces that fundamentally create our personalities and change the way we experience the world, more so than with spaces in real life. Through interfacing we connect with people, creating relationships that extend through space and makes us feel more human than in reality. Our lives are altered by our interactions, and the things we wish to see change as we talk to one another. Even if you meet someone for a moment, be it a Youtube comment or a single reply on Twitter or a grand, inspiring essay on someone’s personal website, we create these bonds with other people that makes us more than ourselves.

This post is about The Caligula Effect: Overdose.

The Caligula Effect is a game that sucks ass to play.

It’s a game that made me understand myself a little more.

It’s a game that connected me with my friends more.

I think it’s a bit special.

You can say a lot about Caligula 1’s influences and general game-y things. It’s quite obviously riffing off of Persona’s influence, to the point that its scenario writer is one Satomi Tadashi, main writer of Persona 1 and the 2 duology. You can see it in its non-calendarized Social Link system and how it expands on nu-Persona’s idea of connection with its 100 or something social links with every single student that attends the school in Mobius. You can say that Caligula is “Persona but jank” or whatever else you want, but you’d be wrong.

I think that more than anything, it’s a game about how the internet helps us.

One of the main parts of the setting in Caligula 1 is that Mobius, the virtual world that serves as the setting for the story, is a world created to disrupt its people. Not out of any malice or whatever from the part of its overseer, Mu, but out of a desire to create better spaces for everyone in it. Nobody in Mobius is their real self; they’re all the idealized version of the desires of the person in it. This ranges from the obvious, like an 8th grader who looks like he’s 18 and buff or a trans woman who can live out her idealized body, to the mundane, like people who want to return to their high school days to run away from their current problems.

There’s a real sense of…relatability, I guess, at seeing how these characters create versions of themselves to fit the social climate they’re stuck in. Despite the protagonist faction being people who realized they live in a Matrix and want to get out of it, they never once break off from what their ideal selves visually, and it’s only through conversation and progressing their own character stories that the player gets to learn who they are as people, what drove them to land in Mobius, and by the end, what they want to do when they’re free from this.

It’s very easy to see the analog to profile pictures and discord bios. We make up these online versions of ourselves, project them onto the spaces we wish to show them and form a connection based on both the reality of ourselves being that projection and the projection being that: a projection. Not necessarily something fake, but something that we create.

When I make my Cohost self, I project the ideas that I want other people to know about me within the space. I want to look smart, I want to feel insightful, I want to be the person who writes about games he likes and have a platform in which I can reap a social reward out of it. That’s the persona I want people to see within the social space I occupy.

But it’s different everywhere. My self on discord is different from here, and from Twitter, and in real life and in school and at work and everywhere. We swap out these versions of ourselves depending on the social context, and the instantaneousness of the internet makes these selves a lot quicker to create and a lot easier to fuse into themselves. We all eventually return to nothing, a version of ourselves we want people to see, even if it’s not real.

The Caligula Effect’s best aspect is how it approaches this infiniteness of the self. We see it through the eyes of the protagonist, someone who lives out this dual-life between their Mobius persona, their Lucid persona and the Player persona, as someone who’s commanded to respond through dialog options. This trinity is what makes the character episodes work as well as they do, because the player is primed to see the world through the lens of the world responding through what the party members want out of their lives. There’s a kindness in the episodes that feels human, realer than real. An understanding of the dynamics of people within spaces like the internet that I think is really effective.

I played through the entire game on stream through Discord, mainly to two people who wanted me to play it and a bunch of other people who joined in from time to time. Playing a game that emphasizes this connection to others through an unreal space made me appreciate the people I talk to online more, to put it bluntly. I think there’s a real beauty to that connection, it’s something that I appreciate a lot the more I think about it.

We find ourselves seeking holy grails, but I think the connections we gain with other people who also stumble through the same pebbles is valuable too. It’s that light we find within others that makes our lives better. The warmth that comes from it is something that I want to cherish more in my life. I think that connection is the real sublime in life.