Games: Florence (plus the First Six Months of Love)

2026-05-27

I recently added a gaming section to my website. This is yet another vehicle for my philosophy: to express thoughts in a relatable way; thoughts that I could have formulated in abstract terms.

I got Florence (spoilers below) because it was peddled as a puzzle game. Given my positive experience with Gorogoa, I thought to myself “my body is ready!” and looked no further: https://protesilaos.com/games/2026-05-26-gorogoa/.

Alas, Florence is barely a game. The player’s agency is reduced to super simple interactions for 30 minutes. If I am to judge Florence as a game, then I am not giving it a passing grade.

Still, Florence has the redeeming quality of being an interesting interactive novel. The elements of interactivity make for an effective story-telling medium. Depending on the audience, this is more reliable than presenting people with a wall of text that they will get bored of within 3 seconds.

The story is about a girl named “Florence”. She leads the generic modern city life. Her world extends from her home to the office, while her social affairs are largely confined to a binary choice of “repost” or “love” buttons on a social media app.

Like her fellow city dwellers, she commutes while being absorbed in her own world, enabled by digital media. Instead of paying attention to her surroundings, she blasts music in her ears and stares at her screen all the time.

In other words, Florence embodies and symbolises the robotisation of the human being. This is the person that had anticipated and embraced its own obsolescence by machines long before the advent of AI. The introduction of artificial intelligence has, in this regard, been a formality, the culmination of a process that stretches back several decades.

AI can be a celebrity and influencer because those people are reducing themselves to caricatures: fake looks, fake clips, fake personalities. AI can be an office clerk as those are tasked with a robotised job anyway. AI is your new emotional support and romantic other because the solitude of digital life at-large took intimacy away from you, while porn and its Hollywood counterparts gave it the fatal hit. And so on.

There is a life outside that world; a life of slow pace, of simplicity, of austerity, and appreciation of the little things. Talk to a modern girl like Florence, for example, and she will tell you about her notion of freedom, which revolves around the pursuit of a career. Social standing is the token that matters. If this girl has more of an intellectual side, she will expound on the evils of traditional societies, and will go to great lengths to explain how terrible it is for women to be seen as “baby machines”. Instead, she will continue, freedom is realised through business opportunity, not understanding that she is daydreaming of becoming a “paper machine” that the corporate higher ups will blithely replace with an actual bot.

As the story progresses, Florence has the good fortune of running out of battery on her phone. The digital world that is depriving her of situational awareness no longer has a hold on her psyche. She is finally free to notice finer points in her milieu, even though she is not well developed on that front. She meets a guy named “Krish” that eventually becomes her boyfriend.

Through this love affair, Florence discovers a small part of the human element. She encourages Krish to cultivate his musical talents. In turn, he inspires her to express her own artistic inclinations and connect with what she used to suppress for a lifetime, pressured by her “tiger mom” to focus on the bullshit goal that is academic excellence at all costs.

In this regard, Florence gives us a hint of what it means to not be absorbed in your own world and to not settle for mindless routines. Do what you must to survive, but otherwise resist the degenerative forces of inertia as you become your own person and a champion of fortitude.

Florence and Krish fail to incorporate that lesson in every aspect of their life. They make the common mistake of thinking that their future will be all about sunshine and rainbows by switching to an auto-pilot mode. They thus become complacent and eventually revert to a life of mindlessness, which brings about the demise of their love.

Nature does not tolerate stasis. Organisms that become too comfortable experience decline which brings about their end. They are absorbed by other organisms, becoming an environment to them, subject to their force, or altogether undone. Love is no different. It must be maintained with care, with emphasis on the finer points and everyday stuff, the way one tends to their garden with undivided attention.

Life is a struggle regardless. Yes, it would be nice in some way if we could just sit back and rest. But no matter how intensely we prey to a benevolent god, the forces we are subject to will remind us how things actually work. To this end, I bring to memory a wonderful song by Michelle Gurevich, titled First Six Months of Love: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqGQIO2m3YQ.

Michelle is a cynic at heart. She speaks the truth without euphemisms and the attendant penchant for beautification. Our world thinks of cynicism in a negative way because fundamentally it prefers to delude itself with all sorts of fancies than to deal with the difficulties pertinent to the here-and-now of our condition.

In the song, Michelle states thus:

Before begin the dissections
Before the therapy sessions
We danced the night we met
Now we need dancing lessons

Remember how it all began
We must not let habit set in
Come up the stairs, let's recommence
The first six months over again

Florence and Krish were not aware of this reality or anyhow did not live up to its rigours.

Florence ends with the girl switching away from her office job as she makes a living off of her art. One can only hope that in the process of disentangling herself from the values of the society she once took for granted would give her the impetus to think that there is more to be done beyond her own personhood.

There is nothing inherently wrong with digital media and the tools that technology makes possible, including video games and this very website of mine. The key is to find moderation, which typically means that you spend more time outside your head, literally and figuratively touching grass.