“The phone is your only lifeline,” the game’s director, Sam Warner, said. “I think that that dependency on the phone becomes pretty evident.” The player’s phone functions as both a flashlight through the dark building and the only connection to Claire, who acts as Ava’s confidant, informant and cheerleader as she tries to escape. “I think that that’s a different relationship than what a lot of games try to do with a controller,” Warner said.
These game developers are intimately aware of the codependent nature of modern-day phone use. Krankel admits his relationship to his own phone is not very good, adding that he looks at it “reflexively and regularly” throughout the day. “It’s too many hours of the day, and I wish I could focus,” he said.
“We still want to make things that we love, and that we think people will love, and we probably have shorter attention spans now,” he added.
Tascan said Netflix is only beginning to test how it might incorporate phone use into TV time. It is also trying to find a path to success in the video game space. A 2022 report found that roughly one percent of Netflix subscribers were playing its games, and the company shut down one of its game studios three years after acquisition. “Right now, all our games on TV are using the phone as a controller,” he said. “But down the road, what if we start doing more social things with the phone as well for people that are not in the same room?”
Still, even Unhinged won’t be muting notifications from your real phone for you. Night School considered blocking distractions automatically, but didn’t “because people would get frustrated,” Krankel said. Furthermore, he said, the team loved the extra tension of intruding messages or calls when players might not want them. “This game is designed to play like that, to sort of stress you out intentionally,” he said.
How much players want to use their phone in-game, or answer real-world distractions, is up to them. “I do think of my phone as like a portal to, like, a hell world,” Warner said. “But it does make a great controller.”
