A philosophical journey with clicks of a mouse

By Christopher Byrd

NEW YORK: Reflecting on mankind’s long history with technology, British philosopher John Gray makes a bracing assertion in his book “Straw Dogs”: “Technology is not something that humankind can control. It is an event that has befallen the world. Once a technology enters human life — whether it be fire, the wheel, the automobile, radio, television or the internet — it changes it in ways we can never fully understand.”

It’s an observation brought to mind by the new point-and-click computer game Phoenix Springs, an eye-catching, thought-provoking exploration of the unintended consequences that follow a society-wide embrace of biohacking.

Players fall into the role of Iris, a veteran reporter, as she sits on a train with a desert looming through a window. The opening seconds, and an arresting dissolve from the sun-flooded train to a shadowy apartment, sets the tone for what follows — a slippery exploration of memory, time and space grounded in Iris’ quest to uncover the mystery of what happened to her brother.

Phoenix Springs, by Calligram Studio, offers a refreshing take on the point-and-click genre whose heyday was the 1980s and 1990s. Instead of amassing items that need to be deployed throughout the game, Iris collects information — names, ideas, phrases — which she must apply to her surroundings to try to make sense of them.

The game’s writer and designer, Jigme Ozer, said he tried to avoid “the key before door problem” baked into too many point-and-click games — where the player picks up an object lying around an environment and then looks for where it can be used. That’s not how it works in real life, Ozer observed. “If you have a problem,” Ozer said, “it stays in your head before you go looking for the solution.”

Iris’ problem is unveiled in those early moments on the train.

Clicking on Iris causes a squarish white overlay to appear with the name Leo Dormer. The window disappears when you click the name, and hovering the cursor over Iris causes a small text box to appear with both of their names next to each other.

“I remember now,” Iris says before reaching into her pocket, taking out a photograph of two non-smiling children posing for the camera. “Leo Dormer. My little brother.” The scene then dissolves into a nighttime apartment where Iris rises from a couch while the desert scene fades into a projection on a wall. Still gazing at the photograph, Iris says to herself, “This is the night that I find him.”

This elliptical game dares not to bend over backward to explain itself. Here is something for players drawn to expressively restrained color palettes, drone-y music and suggestive as opposed to declarative language.

After locating the death certificate for her and Leo’s guardian among the boxes of papers in her apartment, Iris discovers an address where her brother once resided.

Following up on that clue, Iris eventually learns that her brother once worked as a bioethicist at a local university. An exploration of the university, which has sunk into disrepair, leads her to a house where she discovers in an upstairs room a stasis pod just like those sleeping chambers one sees in sci-fi movies that allow astronauts to undertake journeys that otherwise exceed the limitations of a human life span. “End-of-life technology,” Iris remarks. “I thought it was illegal.”

Ozer said the game’s inspirations included Don DeLillo’s novel “Zero K,” which explores the philosophical implications of life-extending technology, as well as his own research into dementia villages.

Ozer, who is half French, half Tibetan and grew up Buddhist, added that the game touched upon two questions at the heart of Buddhism: What is the nature of death, and what is the nature of perception?

Both questions are really two sides of the same coin, he said, before offering a key, in the form of a question, to the deeper concerns of Phoenix Springs: “What happens to the self when you stretch it out over almost infinite periods of time — what kind of flattening, or what kind of shapes remain after it?”

When Iris takes her train ride into the desert, she finds a community of people who speak in a limited, abstracted fashion about their occupations. Their solipsism, and general lack of interaction with one another, causes Iris to liken them to orbiting planets that never intersect. In the world of Phoenix Springs, the answer to Ozer’s question is clear: Individuals are diminished, and satisfying answers to pressing questions are stubbornly elusive.