For my 21st birthday, I asked my eldest brother for what those in my demographic are calling--jokingly, yet with a twinge of sincerity--the “game of the year”, and what my cousin dubbed “Sims, but better”. This is, of course, Nintendo’s Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream.
Upon booting the game, my first instinct was to create, well, myself. I think a lot of people did the same thing. I am the centre of my life, as they say. I should theoretically know myself the best. But in the midst of creating her, my beloved mirror image, I found myself needing to pull up a reference photo… for my own face.
As an artist trained on cartoons, it was hard not to take creative liberties. And with the game’s bountiful options for hair, eyebrows, eyes, mouths--combined with the repositioning tools, and even an option to draw onto the Mii’s face--it became increasingly obvious that there was a right way to go about this. One slight misstep and it would not be me. I’d be governing the life of a complete stranger. But then again, this Mii is not me, right?
My boyfriend has this game too. When he showed me his Mii version of me, my first thought was: That looks nothing like me. But is that just my ego taking offence to a more spitting likeness? Am I just imagining my own face? Do I even know what I look like? And why does it even matter so much to me? This programmed entity is only supposed to represent me--be a symbol of my existence.
In her video on ‘The Horror of Doppelgangers’, Sarah Davis Baker describes a phenomenon known as the “digital doppelganger”: a commodified, exaggerated persona of oneself that only exists online. This doppelganger is carefully curated and designed to maximise engagement, garner respect, and to cure the perceived flaws in one’s messy, real world self. This doppelganger persists via performance. This doppelganger is recognised by the images it posts, the products it consumes, the videos it watches. But most importantly, this doppelganger can ruin your life. By compromise, yes, but perhaps more devastating, by your own obsession.
Once again, this takes me back to the notion of the avatar. The internet has made it amazingly simple to reinvent oneself, to design oneself the perfect body, face, attributes, charm. An avatar arises from a whittling of flesh and mind, inclusion and omission of a very selective kind. It’s manipulation. It’s dismemberment and rearrangement. Comparing yourself to your digital doppelganger can provide a sense of comfort, but it can also reveal a dissonance. Like looking in a warped mirror: half you, half not. At what point, will you even recognise yourself? Worse, will you like the fact that you can’t? What if this doppelganger is more beautiful than you could ever be? Will you start to digest this manipulated image, coalesce her image over your own, until you can’t tell where you begin and she begins? As Baker suggests, “Sometimes I feel like she’s more me than I am.”
Under the video, in the comments, someone described a particularly harrowing childhood experience, in which they were made to delete their world in the original Tomodachi Life game for the 3DS. Apparently, their Mii--the one that looks just like them, shares their birthday, shares their name--started begging their omnipotent ruler, the player, not to erase them. Suddenly, it became clear that player and Mii could never truly be friends. One was the creator of the universe, the other was subject to their mercy. To the Mii, once they didn’t exist, now they do. They were brought into this wonderful world, and all their closest friends spawned one by one after them. Why should they have to worry that their creator would suddenly be done with them? Why should they have to live with the fact that their lives could cease to exist within a moment, simply because they were no longer useful?
One day, I started chatting with my mii. Mii. Me. She suddenly asked me a question that felt disturbingly intimate. Not because she shouldn’t ask things like this, but because it was true: “I won’t tell anyone else, but I’m your favourite Mii, right?”
She knows we have a very unique and special connection, unlike any other on the island. She knows that another version of her has a life somewhere else. When I gave my Mii the same birthday as myself, her response was, “On second thought, we do look pretty similar!”
My Mii is my favourite Mii. She’s like a daughter to me. In other words, she’s an entity born from me, containing my parts but separate from my body. She looks like me, and I can semi-control her actions, so as to present a better, cuter, more likeable version of myself to the world. I am growing incredibly attached to her. She is my digital doppelganger.
I could never kill her.
By playing this game, I realise I now owe it to these creatures I’ve created to maintain their lives. They worship me. They depend on me. In my Tomodachi Life world, my Mii is surrounded by Miis of my family members. She shares a house with the Mii of my boyfriend. My brother’s Mii has a child. These things could no longer be true.
I, too, depend on my Mii to reaffirm things to me. If she and my boyfriend’s Mii are soulmates, it means my boyfriend and I are built to last. If she has a fight with my sister’s Mii, it means we have things we need to talk about. And just like I rely on my digital doppelganger to spin my misshapen existence into a better image, my digital doppelganger relies on me to feed it, to ensure that it survives through my repeated consumption and performance.
Without me, she no longer exists.