# watery vidyagarm storytelling in soma trailer > in the interests of safety your ability to temporarily suspend disbelief has now been placed in a state of permanent suspension > ~ robert what amateur postmodern theorist to consider (standard) vidyagarm storytelling in the trailers for soma by frictional garmes as bad - not bad because it tries and fails but simply because it tries at all // video here the result woefully undersells teh garme and confuses potential players; yet perhaps this itself is the more actual meaning of 'teh garme' being played / sold here in which it appears shoehorning traditional book based techniques into an interactive (not) medium results in a common shared "ludonarrative" - that is a (supposedly) commonly accepted fail state of dire storytelling that 'because vidyagarmz' we're supposed to merely shrug at or ignore collectively perhaps whatever alleged 'dissonance' arises in/as the video storytelling being shown is somehow built into the narrative web itself and is fully accounted for; players are somehow 'meant' to automatically acknowledge this in-built dissonance which involves carrying on as normal(tm) - from the very outset the various audiovisual glitches shown in these trailers cannot just be merely read as direct signs of 'something gone wrong' in teh garme's universe; perhaps the near completely failed narrative attempts at whatever meanings / ideas the developers imagine they've expressing somehow nullify this alleged dissonance or gap rendering it somehow natural and inevitable; this perhaps is teh garme's truer conservative ideology maybe it's not just that 'something has gone wrong' deep under the sea and that we're merely there to figure-out-what-it-all-means. perhaps these glitches and bizarre developer explanations for 'what went wrong' disguise the unconscious dissonance in whatever was apparently 'going right before things went wrong' if one considers soma as a drug then perhaps the drug is the unstated and indirectly implied notion that (by and large) techno-scientific progress carries on smoothly efficiently harmlessly and totally benevolently and that events / spaces like those in teh garme "soma" are somehow just a one-off anomaly error or glitch in the system. yet perhaps the inverse is truer - that the event space of soma is now the default form and expression of our modern horrific smooth-sailing and that only by pretending that it is somehow merely 'out of place' can we justify the dodgy mythic narratives of techno-science soma e3 2015 trailer notes "you know what sucks about dying?" - having to be told about it by some annoying disembodied narrator nobody cares about completely out of the shallow blue? "the crash.." - dreadful voice acting makes this guy almost seem like ir's being sarcastic. - and then the frictional garmes logo appears. is frictional garmes company itself having the crash? (after all amnesia: a machine for pigs didn't seem that well received) "(..) made my like so much more.. *static sound* 'real'" - come on mate put a bit of effort into it! there's little sense of true urgency here - players are merely 'supposed to read as' the poor narrative on display as correctly meaning what it merely suggests through its dark annoyingly shaky visuals "all that hope.. wasted" - what if even all the non-hope players have that this might be a 'deep' garme with important human meanings is also wasted from the very outset - and/but they play it anyway and were always going to. (now that's a level of expected cynicism one can pseudo-cynically expect from garmes-as-culture) soma creature trailer notes > (..) at its worst it's a series of conversations that you might have overheard in a student union bar right after the matrix came out stitched on top of a garme about running away from monsters" > ~ rock paper shotgun - wot i think: soma let the laughably bad phrase "this is where it all went wrong simon" be your new guide for disbelieving inherently unreliable disembodied narrators talking to simon the snake "no one told us this could happen" - that might be because you're always so superbly confident that no one ever could or should "you are a snake simon - strike at the heart" - yeah at the undead biomech heart of such 'default to be read as remotely serious / scary' cheeseball narrative "hello?" - send in the next acting candidate please! "the hell is this place? how did i get here?" who andor what the heck do you remotely imagine you're talking to? "it's my sincerest belief that we can go on living" - despite the seaweed-stinking storylines we tell ourselves actually count for anything "it really makes you think about what it means to be human!" - probably the most embarrassingly lumpy conceptual sales pitches in video garme history to which the answer is "'spoiler!'" "how is this possible?" - indeed how is it possible that such dire (storytelling based) garmes narrative is continually allowed to exist manifest and freely roam the liquid internets without critical comment or witheringly sarcastic regard? perhaps one answer is that teh garme actively encourages the suspension of our critical faculties and disbelief as many players already invested in whatever meanings they imagine teh garme expresses state - "i don't think it's going to be scary but it looks very interesting." that is "it's a bit shit (/conceptually) and-but appears generally harmless (ie. will entertain me mindlessly for an hour or so." yet what if such a garme and its alleged 'deep meanings / drippy philosophical meanderings' weren't quite so harmless or naturally benevolent? indeed consider viewing soma as just a bunch of watery sound recordings of poor ideas poorly (yet slickly and professionally) expressed. that inattentive players are actively invited so-called 'behind the scenes' of its 'garmey' entirely artificial (yet culturally naturalized) construction does not mean soma feels any less opaque or regressively obscurantist in its suspect underlying ideas perhaps it this bizarre modern mixture of soggy pseudo-philosophizing and the default (garmes industry) need to be garmely 'ooh scary in quotes' entertaining that partially defines the anemic 'big ideas' / ideologically waterlogged narrative fish pond of soma // republic of bob