I don’t know if Kiss Me First is good, but that’s my own fault

Kiss Me First is a new drama on Channel 4 written by the same man that did Skins, so it’s got a lot of sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll (or at least a bit of the first and some of the second if not lots of the third). But you know what else it’s got? That’s right: video games! Now you’re talkin’ my language, baby.

Kiss Me First is about a teenage girl called Leila who has spent her recent years caring for her terminally ill mother at home. After her mother’s death Leila is unleashed into a world she doesn’t quite understand, with no friends – everything about her is sort of soft, like she’s a bit out of focus and wobbling, and I keep thinking of her as Bambi – so she spends a lot of time in a world she does understand. The online VR game Azana is an entire virtual planet – sort of a cross between Minecraft and what your wildest expectations for No Man’s Sky were. And here Leila meets a small group of self described losers and f*** ups who hang around sort of off the grid, all under the watchful, creepy eye of Adrian.

Adrian has somehow broken into the source code of Azana and can build anything he wants without the developers realising something fishy is going on. Adrian is smug and confident, and talks in a dreamy yet self-possessed way that makes these lost losers think he’s very important and worth listening to (viewers who have experienced either university or a craft beer bar at lunchtime will instantly recognise Adrian as That One Guy Who’s Writing ‘The Great American Novel, But, Like, The Great British Novel, Y’Know?’). Adrian is, in fact, manipulating the members of the group in a kind of blurry what is and what isn’t a game; he’s playing games but with people’s lives [oooh, spooky].

Meanwhile, Leila quickly strikes up a close IRL friendship with another member of the group, Tess. As a whole the series is about Leila navigating all the horrible things Adrian contrives for the characters to do (which get pretty dark, pretty quickly) whilst trying to save Tess from aforementioned bored rich boy’s machinations.

It’s based on a book, also called Kiss Me First, in which a girl is manipulated by a mysterious cult into taking over the online presence of another woman who intends to die (the idea being that if her social media accounts are still going nobody will be suspicious). You can easily see why the series adapts some of these ideas into a video game setting. Games, especially online ones, can play a lot with your identity; games can provide escapism; games can connect like-minded people together. And it might be a good show! I’m pretty sure there are some good performances in it. But here are some things that are perhaps an indication that my opinion of the show as a whole may be unfairly skewed:

• The avatars in Azana all look physically like their players, so that’s some pretty expensive/sweet application of tech right there.

• Everyone in Azana moves/swims/emotes like real people. People even shrug and stuff. Are there idle animations? What are we looking at here?

• What exactly are the controls for Azana, because some people use keyboards and some people use joysticks, but there’s also a combination of the two and the suggestion of wearable tech too?

• The group that Adrian leads calls themselves ‘Red Pill’ and Leila googles it and finds out it’s a Matrix reference, but doesn’t find out any of the creepy mysogynerd cultish behaviour associated wi- oh I see what they did there.

• Sometimes when the tech is explained, vague but appropriate words like ‘scaleable’ and ‘proxy server’ come up a lot.

• At one point one of the characters is upset and crying and her avatar in game is crying too, and I just imagined her typing /sob into the chat bar with shaky, sad hands, and that made me laugh quite a lot at what I imagine was supposed to be an impactful scene.

These are all things that are not pivotal to the plot in any way, really, but I could not ignore the things they got ‘wrong’ – except it’s not really getting things wrong, it’s just ignoring or changing inconsequential details in service to making the drama actually work, because, for example, if all the scenes in Azana involved a static camera rotating around Leila’s avatar and the conversations were crackly, echoing audio with someone’s kid crying in the background whilst a little mic icon flashed on and off above the other avatars, that would be pretty terrible to watch. Or hilarious, but I’m not sure that’s the vibe C4 is going for.

This makes me the person who goes to see a film and then catalogues all the ways it’s different from the book – with the implication being that the fact it’s different at all is bad – except the video game equivalent of that, which is somehow worse. Even worse again because I’m doing it even though I’m self aware about it. If I were to write a list of good movies or TV shows about and featuring playing video games (not adaptations of, and by the way the only correct answer there is Doom featuring Dwayne ‘Dwayne The Rock Johnson’ Johnson and Karl Urban) it would be: none, there are none, they all get it wrong.

The conclusion I’ve come to is that if you’re making a TV show that revolves heavily around characters playing video games, do not aim it at or ask for reviews from people who play games, because our opinion on it may end up being overly specific and annoying and probably unfair.