I know this game is mostly joke, but there is no other game I've had such an emotional connection with something entirely virtual before, and it's embarrassing to say it's one of the few games to make me ugly cry. You can laugh, but Seaman is a video game that means everything to me.
Seaman talks with you about life & death, religion & cultural traditions, and the past & the future. Seaman is a pet that you start from raising as an egg until it decides it is ready to venture out into its own world, thanking you for helping raise itself to peak mental and physical strength (or at least in my ending). You grow very close with Seaman, especially after having the conversations you do with it. It starts simple, especially when still in it's baby stage, but eventually your daily conversations with Seaman start focusing around the health of loved ones around you, how aging and death is inevitable, and eventually Seaman starts to question it's own morality. Seaman begins to wonder if it's real or just a part of my experience. If it will ever experience love and loss, or if it's just supposed to fulfill whatever it needs for my virtual pet experience. It's very eerie.
Seaman also just has a very fascinating look at technology. It talks a lot about how it feels computers will make our lives overall more sedentary, and how eventually we probably will never need to leave our homes because we can just work, socialize, and commerce with the computer. For being a game from 1999, it’s crazy how much it was able to predict aspects of not just a post-online world, but a post-covid lock-down internet world.
Seaman is memed a lot, and I don’t blame people, I mean the creator put his own goddamn face on a fish (and the insects you feed it, too!!), but just because you can find small humor and oddities in the challenge that life brings doesn’t take away the impact it still has.
I loved my Seaman. It’s something I think about weekly, wondering how it’s doing out in its virtual world outside the box I raised it in. Seaman is not real, but the impact it left on me certainly was, and I’ll never forget it.
4.5/5
Seaman talks with you about life & death, religion & cultural traditions, and the past & the future. Seaman is a pet that you start from raising as an egg until it decides it is ready to venture out into its own world, thanking you for helping raise itself to peak mental and physical strength (or at least in my ending). You grow very close with Seaman, especially after having the conversations you do with it. It starts simple, especially when still in it's baby stage, but eventually your daily conversations with Seaman start focusing around the health of loved ones around you, how aging and death is inevitable, and eventually Seaman starts to question it's own morality. Seaman begins to wonder if it's real or just a part of my experience. If it will ever experience love and loss, or if it's just supposed to fulfill whatever it needs for my virtual pet experience. It's very eerie.
Seaman also just has a very fascinating look at technology. It talks a lot about how it feels computers will make our lives overall more sedentary, and how eventually we probably will never need to leave our homes because we can just work, socialize, and commerce with the computer. For being a game from 1999, it’s crazy how much it was able to predict aspects of not just a post-online world, but a post-covid lock-down internet world.
Seaman is memed a lot, and I don’t blame people, I mean the creator put his own goddamn face on a fish (and the insects you feed it, too!!), but just because you can find small humor and oddities in the challenge that life brings doesn’t take away the impact it still has.
I loved my Seaman. It’s something I think about weekly, wondering how it’s doing out in its virtual world outside the box I raised it in. Seaman is not real, but the impact it left on me certainly was, and I’ll never forget it.
4.5/5
3 Comments
One thing I will say now actually now that i think about it (excuse my rambly squirrel brain) is Seaman on the PS2 is different enough to get a separate rating and listing imo - its a different story and you catch them from the wild instead of raising them from eggs. Added QoL stuff, too.
I really need to play this, always looked like so much fun
Dalaamclouds
2 months ago