Seaman

Pros • Huh-huh-huh. You said “Seaman.” Huh-huh-huh • Utterly unique concept and execution • Narration by Leonard “Spock” Nimoy • Occasional gems of conversational interactivity • Seaman has attitude up the wazoo and isn’t shy about showing it • “Time for a Sea-dump!” Splat	Cons • Massive time commitment involved, during which things develop at a slooooow pace • Untimely death of Seaman can plunge you into deep despair • Voice recognition is dodgy at best, and oftentimes simply frustrating • Visuals chug when lots of critters on screen • Spock doesn’t tell you to take care of your Seaman so that it will live long and prosper
Bottom Line Part game and part virtual pet, Seaman touches a place deep inside you. Heh. Seaman. I knew a gal who once screamed – we’re talking a banshee-like wail of pure horror at the top of her freakin’ lungs here – when she returned from an afternoon of rock climbing, checked her backpack on the ground and found her Tamagotchi had died while she’d been otherwise occupied fighting gravity. A person like this should never, ever buy Sega’s Seaman, because Seaman is to Tamagotchi what Virtua Tennis is to Pong. In fact, Seaman shouldn’t even fall into the vague virtual pet category, which really just conjures up images of those cheap plastic Digimon, Giga-Pets, Tamagotchi, Doragotchi, Angelgotchi (or, for the hippies in the crowd, Pet-Rockagotchi) and their innumerable ilk. Seaman is part virtual friend, but it’s also part interactive story, part puzzle game, part digital Sea Monkey and part therapist. Unfortunately, it’s also a year or two ahead of its time, because the voice recognition technology that’s an integral part of the Seaman experience just hasn’t reached the level of sophistication where it can be sea-mlessly (sorry) incorporated into a console game. That, or Seaman is also part deaf.

Several decades from now when our android slaves are fixing dinner, giving us our apres-work backrubs and secretly plotting some way to circumvent the Asimovian robot laws, we’ll look fondly back at Seaman as one of the first significant steps towards synthetic companionship. Then our androids will go all Blade Runner-replicant on our asses, and the human race will be stamped out, and Seaman will be just a memory – but a good memory.

Seaman’s premise revolves around the discovery of a new life form by a French scientist. It’s the player’s job to coax this being along its evolutionary path in a laboratory environment, interacting with it both physically (feeding it, maintaining its habitat) and intellectually (through conversation, via the included microphone attachment for the Dreamcast controller). Bits of the backstory are filled in by Leonard Nimoy’s narration, which lends the whole affair an additional level of surreality. But much of the process is left up to simple discovery, and it’s a voyage that takes many, many weeks to complete.

The evolutionary process, which includes a few grisly survival-of-the-fittest events straight out of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Virtual Kingdom, takes us from little cyclopean sperm beings (hey, the game is called “Seaman” after all) to a batch of baby-talking Gillmen, to a single, magnificent, golden Gillman – essentially a big trout with a human face and a weird tubular appendage (functions: nose-scratching, blood-sucking and pooping) growing out of its head. This growth alone takes several days, and you have to load up Seaman at least once or twice a day to keep the aquarium water properly heated and oxygenated, and to keep your new friend(s) fed and intellectually stimulated. Otherwise they croak in your uncaring absence, and there ain’t no Seanecromancer to bring ’em back.

The “game” aspect of Seaman is keeping him alive and thriving long enough to complete his evolution, which includes growing an insect food supply in a separate virtual terrarium, figuring out what Seaman needs to reach the next level of development (both he and Spock will give you hints in this regard), and eventually seeing Seaman become something more amphibian than fish. Ultimately he’ll reveal the secrets about his past and origin in ancient Egypt, but this can literally take months to get to.

But the tastiest part of Seaman (I hear it’s salty) is conversing with your virtual pet. Initially, the baby Gillmen respond only in gibberish (unless you say “gibberish” or “speak English” in which case you’re lectured on cultural sensitivity). Once Seaman reaches maturity, though, he’ll not only respond to things you say in a deliciously sarcastic way, but he’ll begin to ask you questions. He’ll want to know your birthday, family particulars, marital status, your job, your political beliefs, what kind of computer you own, what kinds of movies you like, and much, much more. He’ll ask you to name him – I named my Seaman after Electric Playground executive editor Jules Grant – and then he’ll respond to his name when you call him. (“Come, Jules, my willing slave! Now the tables are turned, ha ha!”) He’ll ask you flat out if you’ve ever cheated on your significant other. He’ll ask if you have a lot of friends. He’ll ask you about your feelings about yourself. Jules and I had many pseudo-discussions on the nature of self-image, and for a while there he seemed almost, well, human. (If you think I’m foolish enough to add “unlike the real Jules” after that, you’re sadly mistaken.)

And this is where both the strengths and weaknesses of Seaman are revealed. At its best, Seaman completely conceals the man behind the curtain, and offers startling moments of interactivity when he responds to a word or phrase you’d never have guessed would be in his vocabulary. But the voice recognition is incredibly spotty, and it can be frustrating at times to make Seaman understand what you’re saying, even with careful Hooked on Phonics articulation. Many times he’d answer a question of mine with some completely non-sequitur wisecrack, until I’d realized he thought I said “underwear” and not “Are you there?” or somesuch. Plus, while the long, slow process of maintaining Seaman’s habitat on a daily basis and nudging him along the evolutionary tree is rewarding in a bonsai tree growing kind of way, some gamers simply won’t have the patience to play Seaman the way it’s intended. You’re bound to see a lot of Dreamcast system clock rejigging going on.

(For the record, Jules died suddenly on me one day, right before my eyes, and I’m still not sure why. He seemed to be in an unusually good mood, too, treating me to a “Top o’ the mornin’, guv’nor” before reciting some quote about death and rolling onto his side. And you thought waking up one morning to find your goldfish floating in the bowl was traumatic. I wear a black armband to this day.)

Ultimately, Seaman’s real appeal might be the promise of things to come. Designer Yoot Saito (of Yoot’s Tower fame) says gamers “have been prisoners to their fingers. Voice recognition technology is one of the answers to a more versatile gaming experience, and I believe we will see it widely used in the future.” Thus, Seaman stands out not only as a novel and occasionally soul-stirring experience, but also as a necessary evolutionary link to the next generation of games, as well as the next generation of artificially intelligent companions. And best of all, Seaman will never, ever gouge your eyes out in a fit of pique over his genetically encoded four-year lifespan. I hate when that happens.

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