New game out today explores digital landscape of love and sex: Cibele

Who says you can’t find love online?

That’s the premise of a new game by Brooklyn ex-pat Nina Freeman, called Cibele. In the game, you play through the experience of a girl playing a game online and meeting, and then falling in love with, another player. The two don’t know each other except in the context of their characters, and the game is about how you navigate that relationship. It’s meta.
“I hope this kind of comes across in the game, but human relationships are human relationships,” Freeman said via email (she now lives in Portland.) “There’s this like bare medium of who you’re communicating with but in the end you’re still talking as a person. People are people and they want to have human relationships. I think whether we know it or not we want to break down the barriers to knowing other people and we’re just expressing ourselves through these new modes of communication.”
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The game is based off Freeman’s IRL experience with meeting a man online and having a digital relationship. A lot of parts of the game involved her, personally, down to the photos of her you can see on the game’s desktop screen. She stars in the release trailer, from which the above screenshot is taken.

“Cibele is based on my own life, and I did play online and meet a guy and did eventually meet up with the guy, in real life,” she wrote. “It doesn’t give anything away but no I’m not like dating him now or anything. I was about 19 years old. I’m 25. So it’s sort of looking back on that relationship.”