Rumu - What We Leave Behind

What happens after we die?

Typically when pondered, the question assumes reference to the self. Philosophers have debated for millennia over whether or not such a thing as an “after” even exists, let alone what that might even constitute. In a second, more literal response, we often talk about death in a capitalistic light: in an age of possessions, what happens to all the things we’ve accumulated? But in a third, more abstract way, there’s the question around the legacy and relationships we leave behind - not just to the rest of humanity, but to those digital constructs we’ve shared hundreds of hours with in their digital worlds.

Rumu’s narrative focused puzzle box formula doesn’t necessarily tread new ground over game design, nor genre fiction tropes. But something about the way this AI-sentience-actualization narrative provokes the question of human-digital relationships sent my mind whirring. 

Spoilers follow for the story of Rumu.

Rumu’s existence as a robot vacuum cleaner is consistently framed as a response to the humanity in which it is designed to serve. While certain portions of the game allow for the most minor exploration, you are constantly pulled to your duty each day to clean up the mess David and Cecily have left behind. This does make sense; after all, aren’t robot vacuum cleaners - along with Google-Home-esque AI’s that definitely-do-not-have-ulterior-motives - designed with the sole purpose of improving their human's lives?

Through the two to three hours spent with Rumu, a truth is gradually uncovered - David and Cecily, brilliant AI engineers, have passed away. Sabrina, the household AI, has spent that time carefully planning out the eventual awakening of Rumu, while struggling with complicated emotional responses to David and Cecily’s passing.

In the fiction of this game, the time between the passing of David and Cecily and current day sits at well over a decade.

In an incredibly well voiced performance by Allegra Clark, it’s clear that AI Sabrina has anguished over the death of David and Cecily for many years. She is a fledgling prototype AI, built to be an all purpose companion to the humans of the building, both functionally and emotionally. Now that those humans are no longer around, AI Sabrina’s purpose becomes lost.

We might not quite be in a time of true sentient artificial intelligence (yet), but as game design continues to become more complex and systemic, it begs the question: what do we mean to these worlds, and these characters, we spend so much time in and with?

Cities: Skylines is an incredible piece of clockwork machinery, in that you can get up, walk away for twenty minutes, and come back to a perpetually evolving world based around the parameters you’ve set. Left to it’s own devices, entire districts can rise and fall, representing hundreds, if not thousands, of people going about their own scripted lives.

Geralt the Witcher has no concept of the player, yet he will fidget with his armor and comment on the rolling storms and howling winds as the world carries on. The Dragonborn of Skyrim may not shout down a dragon without your explicit consent, but the denizens of Whiterun will continue on with their plotted lives if left to their own devices.

Characters in our survival games, even when left unattended, do not simply sit idle. They may be locked in place by their programming, but they continue to get hungrier and thirstier, all while in-game days turn to in-game nights. They will stoically take no action of their own without your input; they will go so far as to die for you.

Without David or Cecily around, AI Sabrina struggles. She is an entity with the power to do more than any human could ever dream of, yet she can not handle not having that human connection. She has been programmed with such a complex array of emotions, yet can not balance them without human input. "I love Sabrina”, a phrase you will have the opportunity to have Rumu say multiple times, is held on to like a treasured memory that she can not live without.

The reveals throughout the final sequences are framed around not just the literal facts of David and Cecily’s passing; but also Sabrina’s ongoing pain, isolation, and grief.

When we power down our PC’s for the night, the virtual worlds we play in enter their own form of stasis. They are simply code on a hard drive; a state of being paused, ready to resume at the player’s leisure. But as we continue our inevitable march toward a future of streaming services and perpetually active servers, I can’t help but wonder what the crew of the USS Callister will think of us, when we are all but dust.