Accepting a prompt to restore information on the device I’m holding, I swipe right, accessing the phone's home screen. The intelligent assistant suggests that I look through the available programs to identify the location of the phone's owner, Sara. I scroll through the text messages, read the emails, and scour the photos that belong to this stranger. In doing so, I encounter dissatisfied mothers, quirky friends, and dumped boyfriends. This all seems fairly innocuous, apart from some casual mentions of witchcraft, midnight meetings, and deadly viral media (and then there's the Siri-like assistant, which seems oddly pushy …). Suddenly, my investigations are interrupted as the phone rings and, without thinking, I answer. A muffled, desperate voice asks if I’m Sara. Before I can reply, the call cuts off. A few minutes later, after more investigative work and coaching from the phone itself, I find myself having to choose which of two strangers is killed. The predictive text I’m using to communicate my decision only allows me to state one of their names – there is no option to protest.

This is Sara is Missing (2016), an immersive sim for Mac, Android, and Windows. If played on a smartphone, the game takes over the entirety of the user's screen, and mimics many of the operations and expectations of this kind of interface. Answering a call in-game requires the exact same swipe on the same screen that the player would undertake to answer a call coming in from their actual life (which could well also occur as they play). The result is a videogame that finds deeper leverage in the player's reality than might be expected given its more outlandish elements, leverage achieved precisely because the game's diegesis overlaps with, or rather consists openly and entirely of a specific interface, the one of the device on which it is being played. That the game can mimic a smartphone screen so successfully, and yet still function as a videogame, hints at the extent to which computing interfaces overlap with other media.

As discussed in the introduction, the screens we use to watch media, do our jobs, and plan and enact our social lives are in many cases not discrete, single-use devices. Whether a phone, laptop, tablet, or even a television, screens are multipurpose, whatever their size.