Tacoma is a game that centers around a mystery. The player is in the roll of Amy Ferrier, an employee of Ventris assigned to investigate the Tacoma ship after the disappearance of the crew a few days prior. In order to learn what happened to the ship, the player can not only rummage through the crews belongings and explore the ship, but also watch AR recordings of the crew that were captured by the ship’s AI in the months, weeks, and the days leading up to the incident.
Although your objective is to find out what happened to the ship and crew, you end up learning an equal amount about their personal lives. Whether it is the relationship of one crew member with his kid, or the feelings two of the crew have towards each other and their careers, nothing is off-limits in Tacoma. Because everything may contain information necessary to finding out what happened to the crew, privacy goes out the window. Not only is spying on the crew strongly encouraged in this game, it is absolutely necessary. In order to progress in a timely fashion, you need to read data on the crew’s AR screens.
In Tacoma the crew seemed to believe themselves to have a reasonable level of privacy; the characters often split up into separate rooms. This would presumptively allow them to have conversations without being overheard by the rest of the crew. Additionally, they often close doors behind them to further reinforce their privacy. At one point E.V, the Captain, enters her private room that is password protected to continue a conversation in secret. The only way for the player to enter this room and hear this part of the conversation is for them to either watch E.V. type the passcode or rummage through her things until they find the code. In this moment not only does the character violate E.V.’s privacy by searching through her things, but also by following her into a room she expected to be alone in.
More than that, Tacoma gets you to like snooping on other people’s business. Since you can stop, restart, and fast-forward conversations as you see fit, Tacoma gives you an incredible amount of control into delving into the lives of its characters. Additionally, this mechanic in Tacoma taps into the same sensation that is fulfilled by watching reality television or scrolling through years of someone’s Facebook feed. The lives of these characters become important not only to the story, but also for entertainment's sake. However, in social media and in reality television, what you see has been curated or okayed by the person themselves. Meanwhile, in Tacoma, these characters expect that these conversations will be kept private. Not only is the player exploring the intimacies of these people’s lives without hesitation, but the game rewards you for learning as much as you can about both their professional and personal lives.
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