All the Times You’ve Played Coming Out Simulator 2014

The first time you play Coming Out Simulator 2014 you are twelve years old and deeply closeted and it’s so late at night that you aren’t even sure if the game is real or if you’ve made it up, some strange amalgamation of hallucination at 4:01 in the morning. The game tells you it’s “A half-true story about half-truths,” and you don’t quite understand what that means but you’re very gay and very desperate and hoping, just maybe, if you do everything right you can really be prepared to tell your parents, to not be scared for once. You are hoping, just maybe, there is some secret ending you can find in which everything is okay, and everything goes back to normal. You are hoping for the future.

The itch.io page shows a large download button, but you know your shitty 2009 Lenovo can barely run Internet Explorer, and you’re still terrified to download anything on any computer after your grandma clicked on a Facebook pop-up and somehow bricked her entire machine, so you opt to run it in browser and risk whatever difference there may be. You’re only twelve, after all, and you consider yourself a serious gamer, so it’s embarrassing to have to play it in-browser. You wonder if there’s a version on your dad’s PS3 slim, or maybe even the shiny new iphone 7 you know will be your first phone come Christmas time. Whatever the case, you cut your losses and for once feel good not knowing any of the boys at school who only play COD, so you won’t have to explain to them what you naively feel must be the most ultimate gamer sin. You’ve never heard of indie games before.

You forgo your impatience for a second and opt to ask the fictionalized Nicky Case more about them and their game, hoping it will illuminate something for you. What does “A half-true story about half-truths,” even mean, you wonder, but he doesn’t answer you. Automated text goes back and forth, to and from both Nicky and the player, and you can’t help but feel cheated. Those aren’t your words, and there’s so much you want to know and so many things you have to ask before the game starts and does it ever even get better, but Nicky tells you this is his story and he made it for a game jam and then you’re left with no other options but to suck it up, and start the damn game.

He asks how you think it all ends, and you are still hoping, desperately, that it all ends nice and neat and wrapped up with a bow. You choose the “With gay rainbows and unicorns?” option, and he tells you no; this game is based on real things said by real people. “As well as all the things we could have, should have, and never would have said. It doesn’t matter which is which. Not anymore.” For some reason, the idea of making options of words that went unsaid, or words someone would’ve never had the strength to say gets to your little twelve-year-old brain, and before the game even begins you have started to cry a little bit. You finally understand the meaning of a half-true story full of half-truths.

The game transitions to you as Nicky, in bed texting his boyfriend, and though at the current moment all you know is that you like girls and are very much gay, and no one’s even told you about all this gender stuff, looking at him as your avatar feels more right than if you were playing as a lesbian girl. You’ve always picked the boy in games, from Resident Evil to The Sims. You choose not to think too hard about it.

They discuss Inception, a movie you only know from film class, and Rick and Morty clips, so when you’re asked about the ending you just click something random, but when Nicky remarks “What’s the point of living a lie?” it strikes something deep within you, and you are reminded of the fact you’ve been trying to forget which is that since you were young you’ve been lying to yourself, over and over. When the church camp kids bullied you for having a crush on that one counselor, you insisted it couldn’t be true, when you watched Barbie movies you pretend like you weren’t imagining yourself with her. At some point in the future, fourteen years old, you will join theatre and put a rainbow sticker on your phone case, and your mother will confront you in front of the fridge and ask the big question, and though you know it and you aren’t lying to yourself anymore you will still feel buried in a mountain of shame. You know she doesn’t mean it when she says it will be fine; you act disgusted at the possibility of you liking girls like that, and then immediately feel like you’re going to throw up after betraying yourself so deeply. It is the closest you will come to telling her for years, but she already knows.

Nicky’s boyfriend remarks that you can’t keep hiding, and for once you don’t know which option to pick. “They can never, ever know,” “I wish I could tell them, too,” “I’m not ready to tell them yet” – all of these are true. You close your eyes and move your mouse at random, electing to ignore the pit inside you as you realize just how complicated the rest of your life is going to be.

You play the game again and again – you tell your parents everything, you try to lie, you stand up to your dad, you deny the truth, over and over and over again you click each option, but the ending is always the same. Nicky’s parents know, him and Jack break up, and life moves on. It never ends. It gives you a strange hope, but at twelve years old you can only process it alongside despair. Life goes on, and all the bad with it.

The next time you play Coming Out Simulator 2014, you are 16 and very much out aside from home, surrounded by friends as you show them the game you forgot meant so much to you. You remember each option incredibly vividly, and you sit there knowingly as your friends discover for themselves that it all ends the same. There is yelling, and laughing, and camaraderie in a room full of people just like you, kids your own age hidden at home but vibrantly alive at school.

You know you will have to officially come out eventually, but right now everyone you care about is here in this room.

The next time you play Coming Out Simulator 2014, you are 18 and have been living on your own in college for over half a year now. Everyone at college knows; your family that lives near to the college knows, and in some way you almost feel closer to them than ever before because of it. Your dad, and his family by extension, do not know. There are times he has come close, but you’ve worked to hide it from him your whole life, spent hours praying for him to not know. But still, when he brought your siblings to visit your dorm you freaked out and took down all your wall decor and begged your roommate to call you a name she doesn’t know you by, and you want all that to be over.

At 18, you are very tired, and it feels like your entire life has been spent hiding from a man you still don’t know how to feel about. You know the blowout will be legendary, you know coming out to him means facing all of your worst fears, you know this is what you’ve prepared for and dreaded and avoided ever since middle school. For some reason, you still hope there’s a way to bridge the gap between you, the distance that can only be felt between a father and his daughter that is so much like him that she can’t stand to look in the mirror, yet so different from him that he resents you for being your own person.

For some reason, you think choosing the right words can mend a relationship that for the past 15 years has been at best nonexistent and at worst downright abusive.

And so you scour your bookmarks and find that page on that now familiar website, and you boot up Coming Out Simulator 2014 once more.

The next time you play Coming Out Simulator 2014, you are on the brink of turning 21, you are out to all of your family, and yet you are somehow back to being deeply closeted against your will in your work and home life. You know there is no right series of options, no choice you can make that will change the way others react to you; but you are still hoping to see beyond the truths and half-truths, and find the part that comes after.

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Quinn Quimby is a Texas-based writer, philosopher, and video essayist. Check out their other work at https://www.youtube.com/@Quimbles/videos.