Maybe you’re like me in that you don’t enjoy the feeling of being marketed to. You don’t like feeling that you have been targeted by an ad campaign or that your behavior is susceptible to suggestion so easily. Or maybe that’s just my hang-up.
You want to feel that you are an individual with discernment and refined tastes. Your interests cannot be cataloged into a spreadsheet and compared with existing data to create a profile of your behavior. You are unpredictable and that makes you interesting, and human. You have a personality. You are not a number, you are a free person!
I hear you. Let me also tell you that I had a marketing situation that worked on me a few weeks back. See, I’d played both Citizen Sleeper games this year and last year, so I got myself on the publisher’s mailing list. Among the updates and announcements, I’d sometimes see info on other games they’d published. One of them was Neo Cab, which was coming to iOS for free. The promo blurb intrigued me enough that I decided to spend actual money on it for my Switch, not realizing it wasn’t a new game at all.
A few breezy hours of gameplay later, I was glad I made the purchase. Neo Cab is a visual novel where you play the role of the only human cab driver in Los Ojos, a fictional city that sure seems like it’s in California. As Lina, you drive only at night, which adds to the isolating atmosphere. (The alternately propulsive and chill soundtrack by OBFUSC was good enough that I bought it on Bandcamp shortly after finishing the game; it also helps set the mood of driving a cab through a big, empty city at night.) The only person she knows in the city is her old friend, Savy, who has agreed to let you move in with her. Gameplay occurs through conversations with your passengers, most of whom are surprised to learn that you are a human being. Each night, you are responsible for taking a few passengers around the city and keeping them occupied while in the car. Just like a gig worker in real life, you have to worry about your car’s fuel level, your passengers’ ratings of your driving, and your emotions’ impact on your ability to make conversation. Each of these elements plays a role in the type of passenger you can pick up and how far you can go to get them. You also need to find a spot to stay each night to rest and recharge. As the nights go on, you realize that the friend you had planned to move in with is a bit cagey. Even after she’s in your cab for a quick ride, you still feel that she’s hiding something and that she may even be in serious trouble.
In a simpler world, you could just connect with her again and rest at her place for the night before figuring out how to make the next steps in your move to the big city. That wouldn’t be much of a game, though, so the factor motivating your action as Lina is trying to solve a mystery of what is happening with Savy when she disappears suddenly one night. Now, the conversations you’ve had with passengers aren’t just in service of getting a better rating and more pay. Each person who rides with you has information that might be useful in helping locate Savy. You’ll also learn about the troubles and issues your passengers are facing, some of whom would despise each other if they ever met. You might even get so wrapped up in their needs that the idea of finding or helping Savy seems less interesting. The game will eventually push you toward a resolution, but you can play it out in a variety of ways.
The combination of autosaves and manual saves makes it possible to retry certain parts of the story in order to get a desired outcome. I got worried a few days into the game when I was low on money, far from charging stations, and unable to pick up passengers who only ride with drivers with high ratings. I was sure I’d get stuck and have to re-load a save from a few rides before. In a very clever twist, I had to use Lina’s phone to train an in-game AI program by solving puzzles and answering questions. I eventually got so annoyed at it that I was able to force quit the program by repeatedly giving it wrong answers. Still got paid, though. This was a really interesting way to emphasize the human hands behind all of the automation in the game (and in real life). Regarding artificial intelligence, it’s humans all the way down. Having to engaged in microwork to train AI to get a pittance that can be used to charge an electric car that is used for the gig economy is a dystopian level of labor exploitation. All of these exact conditions may not exist for a single person at the moment, but each part of the process is currently happening somewhere on the planet. By having players engage with microwork in this way, Neo Cab presents a critique of artificial intelligence and automation while reminding players of the importance of human labor and interpersonal skills.
To be fair, that critique is apparent early in the game. Picking up your first passenger yields a conversation that results in Lina commenting on Capra, the company that operates the fleet of autonomous cabs. She calls the cabs “soulless capsules of glass and plastic” then realizes “but hey, those things don’t need health insurance.” Too true. Companies will do anything to keep from having to pay workers a living wage. I enjoyed this anti-tech messaging throughout the game as much as I did trying to solve the mystery of where Savy went and what was going on with the gang of bike punks. (There are bike punks.) Turns out it was a good thing for me to be susceptible to marketing after all. Well, at least, the kind of marketing that results from an independent publisher asking me to opt in to a mailing list about games similar to ones I’ve already been enjoying. I’m human, which means I’m a little predictable, despite my desire to be seen as unique and interesting.
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