A Mortician's Tale: A Different View on How Games Treat Death

[Music] everyone was like alright we're behind schedule let's just get to this quickly and I was like no ok so I'm not going to show you a video apparently instead I'm just gonna show you these screenshots and so morticians tale in the game you are tasked with the daily tasks actual morticians have an actual real life so preparing of the despot ease of the deceased for burials in cremation this is a contrast from the comedy that was just happening right now but you're also attending the respective funerals for each member of the deceased and overhearing conversations with their loved ones and there's a bit of business elements to it too so going to the protagonist emails and interacting with her bosses and co-workers and clients etc and we launched the morticians tale for PC Mac vs steam humble and Achaia last October so this is the agenda for

the talk I'm gonna do a really very brief history on the history of death in video games I'm going to talk about my personal history with death and video games and how that influenced morticians tale most of this talk is gonna be about developing a mortician scale and then at the very end I'm going to talk about other did indeed get indie game dev is doing cool things with death and also close the talk with strategies on how you can also do cool things with death in your games so a very very brief history on definite video games so death has existed in video games as long as the medium has existed as a way to punish the shape-up player and challenge them to do better and since then we've seen some innovations on how we use death and video games from things like life systems to respawning to regenerating health or shields we've seen innovations on how damage is displayed from health bars to damage vignettes and everything in between and we've seen different death mechanics to innovate on game design altogether that challenged the player to take death

seriously so this can be things like perma death really really difficult combat or the loss of items and progress permanently we've also seen a lot of innovation on how we use death narrative Lee and I kind of want to focus on this a little bit because morticians tale is a narrative game it is everything that's really important to us and our team and in my opinion it's the area of game design in which players take death the most seriously so most often in games the way that we see Jessie's narratively is as a way to motivate the player to play the game so usually it's the very beginning of the game and it is your characters spouse or partner or child being killed off usually in a cutscene usually off screen but there's been a lot of better ways to kind of use death narrative Lee so a good example of this is the Mass Effect series which encourages players to build up relationships with player characters before they get kids killed off and most of the time the deaths of these characters are because of choices that

you've made as the player so you're directly responsible for those deaths and need to kind of deal with that impact over multiple games and so when I do my podcast every guest I have I like to ask them if they have a memorable video game death and I will say like 80% of the time they always bring up Aris slash heiress from Final Fantasy 7 and this makes a lot of sense if this is a game that you kind of grow up with because they do a really really good job at handling deaths both narratively and mechanically so and Final Fantasy 7 you have multiple characters that you can add to your party but the game is designed so that Aerith is the dedicated healer so most likely you're going to be using her in your party and so when the killer off spoiler alert the things like 20 years old when the killer off it's not just like oh this character that I liked is gone it's also you have to rethink how you've been playing the game except until now you've been using her and from here forward you have to now rethink about how you're gonna play the

game it is a really really good mechanical way to represent grief and like something may be taken away from you and how you can move forward without them and Final Fantasy 7 and Mass Effect are both really really strong examples because they marry narrative and mechanics together and there's a reason why these are these games are always brought up lots of games feature death but very few ask players to actually deal with it and so I want to talk about my most memorable videogame deaths and this is a game that got me interested in game development on a whole but also how it got me you got me interested in the subject matter to begin with so this is me when I was about 9 or 10 years old a girl in my class and her mom died in a very very horror that way and it messed me up I developed some really really serious death anxiety I couldn't stop thinking about death I couldn't stop thinking about how I was gonna die how

my mom was gonna die I developed some separation anxiety I couldn't go to school it was just help for a little while and this thing that helped me overcome this was my mom kind of sell this behavior and was like we gotta stop this and so she encouraged me to kind of ask her lots of questions and talk about my feelings and she would always answer them honestly which is really really important when we talk to children about death but a really big thing is that she encouraged me to kind of explore these feelings creatively so whether it was through drawing or writing or whatever and the thing that helped me overcome my death anxiety at least partly was a Majora's Mask and so I remember renting it from Blockbuster and I became obsessed with this game I loved it so much and I liked it because it was majora's mask like on the whole is very very very death centric there's a lot of death going on you interact with it a lot but very explicitly I remember the villagers in Clock Town so like the main

Erik like hub area of this game they don't know that them like the premise is like the moon's crashing into the earth and you just stop there right rewinding time they don't know that you can do that they don't know that you can rewind time that you're actively trying to save them so all they know that they are going all I know is that they are going to die and people deal with this in different ways so some deny it completely like the carpenters some people like the soldiers are like we got to evacuate the town where we'll be safe from the moon crashing into the earth I but some people just continue on with their lives and that was the thing that stuck with me the most is that the mailman's like well I'm still going to deliver the mail even if gonna die tomorrow and I remember just being like whoa this is amazing and it I remember that helping me so much with like dealing with my own mortality and I played that game so much specifically just like that town I just wanted to like talk to people and see how they were all dealing with it so not only did it help me get over some of my

death anxiety but it also aided my professional curiosity about this intersection so fast forward to 2015 a book is recommended me to me called smoke gets in your eyes which was written by this person here called Caitlin Dodie and she is a LA based mortician slash youtuber slash author and her book is a semi-auto graphical tale about her job and how she got into the industry and how she went from you know being like an intern to going to school and kind of seeing some weird shady stuff with the industry and then starting her own business and it's really really good it's really well-written written and very funny but it also introduced me to the idea of death acceptance or death positivity the death positive movement kind of similar to sex positivity is the idea that the more we talk about taboo subjects the less scary they are and the better we are to make decisions for ourselves and our loved ones about these scary topics so in Western culture America Canada specifically we're really really bad about talking about death we're really

really bad about pretending it doesn't exist and dealing with it really poorly when it does happen and so the idea of death positivity is not to remove these feelings of grief or sadness it isn't like grandma dad and I'm fine with it it's just the idea that death and grief are sad they're always going to be sad but if we're okay with confronting these things and lifting the veil on the death industry we are better equipped to make decisions for ourselves and our loved ones when we inevitably die and I resonated with this idea a lot especially as a person who overcame my own death anxiety through interacting with it directly and this is also when inspired a morticians Tale so Caitlyn's story was really really fascinating but I was also really into the idea of creating a video game where the about the western death industry specifically where players could directly interact with those themes and my goals were to maybe like encourage

the players to learn something about certain processes behind cremation and burial but also learn about the western death industry as a whole and kind of like one of our sub goals to it was that maybe we can encourage people who have death anxiety it said maybe like comfortably overcome it the way that I did with Majora's Mask so in order to support our goals like these goals I just mentioned we needed to be as accurate as possible right we did our research we talked to a lot of deaf professionals specifically myself a lot of things I did was look at certain procedures so doing a lot of research on procedures talking to a lot of deaf professionals about things like embalming and cremation our writer Caitlin Tremblay she did a lot of research about grief and kind of the spectrum of grief so grief isn't just sadness it can sometimes be anger it can be denial it can be happy it can be you talking about Netflix at a funeral like it's it's so broad and Caitlin did a really really good job at exploring this and doing her research on

it a big thing that we did - that was really important is that we drew upon our own experiences with death and grief and we made sure to explore our personal experiences with it in the game so morticians tales started out as my personal game but I was planning on making about myself I was very lucky and I got some funding I was able to hire a team and that was great because morticians tail grew to be a collection of all of our experiences with death not just mine but our whole team and I think it's a lot better of a game because of that adding personal bits of our experiences the subject matter is very important one of our goals was to get players hands-on with the processes behind cremation and burials and to learn these processes in a hands-on way so in videogames it's pretty typical that when there's a lot of bodies or zombies or whatever when you they're killed off their bodies just kind of disappear the mechanic exists for a reason but in a morticians - Oh asking the players to deal with that body directly and players take care of

bodies in the game the way that funeral directors take care of our bodies in real life when we die and so in the game you don't know any of people that you're taking care of it isn't like Oh surprise it's your sister it's you're all strangers and again like I think pretty typically in game when people die like narratively it's always someone that you know that you're connected to but in this game we've asked players to take care of someone that they don't know or love and something that we learned when we were doing a lot of research on the game and talking to a lot of like Caitlin Doughty Nalanda deaf professionals was that it's really really important that you spend time with the body after they died it's really really important part of the grieving process if you're from any other part of the world this is probably your normal thing for you but for again America in Canada this is a not a thing we do we're very much like okay grandmas gone bye see you at the funeral and so we wanted to make sure that we like put the camera first-person during these medical procedures and that we made sure that players spent a lot of time with

each respective body in getting players to directly interact with subject matters it was important for us to be comfortable and finding that act that balance of accuracy and comfort and we know this because the subject matter can be really uncomfortable to people so to find that balance is really important to us and one way we do this is the color palette so I prototype this game a couple years ago using Pico eight which has very very few colors and I kind of use a couple of purple colors and when we move this over to unity and made it a 3d game I was like I still like this palette I'm going to kind of keep going with this one because I think it really works with like the melancholy but hopeful vibe but I think it also really does a good job at masking some of the grosser things in the game so again there's no like bodily fluids there's no jaundiced skin there's nothing gross like that and the purple kind of hides a lot of the stuff and allows us to again like explore these things accurately without being too realistic about it another thing that we do too is kind of

humanoid figures all of the bodies all the people in the game yourself included kind of have larger heads and larger eyes and this is just to avoid uncanny valley we also in order for us to be comfortable we had to sacrifice some accuracy we didn't include a lot of things that are part of the procedures behind embalming for example the game is not a one-to-one simulation but it's just very very accurate still so mechanics-wise morticians tale is a narrative first game narrative is the pillar of a morticians tale and it was really really important for us that everything else in the game supported this narrative so the sounds the music the mechanics as well and so for the medical parts of morticians tale we were really inspired by trauma center which is a game series that you play as a surgeon but in trauma center you because we were playing as a surgeon they do this cool thing where the game has a timer and a score and fail States so it's very very very

stressful and it's trying to recreate the feeling of being a surgeon and having some urgency in trying to save this person's life so in contrast and work Tisha's tale is very much the opposite there is no urgency to it we don't let you have fail States right if we have there was one kind of the biggest critiques about the game was people were like I wish it could fail I wish I could accidentally cut somebody but if we let you fail that is you're disrespecting the body we are allowing you to disrespect two people and so we took that out of the game so yeah the games a little bit on the rails but that was designed intentionally to support the narrative of the game one decision we made as well is that the game has no dialogue options you are a silent protagonist and we did this for a few reasons one is because every single person deals with grief differently and death differently and so it felt really weird for us to have a fully fleshed-out character like a Nathan Drake character and that you the player has to kind of like take control of so

it was better for us to create a sound like wrote agonist that can act as a vessel for the player to kind of insert themselves and their own feelings and experiences in but it also we did this because it also places the importance of listening rather than you're not worried about like what your are not supposed to say you're just worried about that right but your the goal is to just listen to people and listen to what they're saying to you and that is a big part of being a mortician in real life a lot of your job is not to tell someone how to grieve is to listen to them when they are grieving so that was really important for us to be accurate in that way regarding the goal of being accurate we wanted to be accurate not just with technical and medical stuff but also with the emotional parts of the job so one of the things that I asked all of our Martin friends that we were making the game is if there was ever a point where they couldn't do their job where they had to say I can't do this someone else has to do with this guy or whatever and in my

mind I think it's like a goer thing or like a body thing but every single one of them responded with the exact same answer which was yes and it was always based off of the story behind the person so it was never like the the procedures the exact same is what they've always done in their life but because they knew the story behind the person it made it too hard for them to deal with and so we wanted to kind of make sure we were being accurate with that so in the game when you start out depending on you know who you are maybe it's a bit shocking to you that there's a body on the screen but then we kind of you know is very ritualistic everything is kind of the same the procedures are the same maybe you get a little bit used to it and towards the end of the game we have a couple bodies that again same procedures but their stories are a little bit sadder and this is really cool to see because when the game came out we saw a lot of streamers and youtubers play the game and they got to those part of the parts of the game and even though again the procedures are the exact same we didn't change a single thing mechanically every single person spent way more time on those bodies than they

did the beginning bodies so I was bringing alright I want to talk about the reaction so we released this game in October and we were met with lots of critical success which is very nice but also really cool was that we received a lot of messages and emails and DMS from people sharing personal stories about how the game really really resonated with them how the game helped them green there's a lot a hell that game help to make decisions after they played the game and then someone died and that game helped them make decisions regarding those processes or how to support someone who was grieving a lot of people mess just saying how they deal with death anxiety and how the game has helped them kind of overcome it a little bit which is really cool also a lot of fan art and cosplay which I'm a big fan of that's pretty neat when we made the game we expected and you know when to like it it's super nice should we understand but it's really cool that players are interested in the subject matter that they're interested in

exploring their own feelings about it and that the design distance we made the sign decisions we made have having a positive impact on people and we are not the only ones who are innovating on help death is used in games so I think any games in particular in particular are doing some really really cool things with death thinking outside how we traditionally use death in games bringing their own experiences to the table sharing stories from a variety of cultural backgrounds here are some recent examples you know we've seen lots of really cool innovations on the narrative side whether it's thematically via night in the woods or speed-dating for ghosts or very explicitly like the graveyard in The Walking Dead there's a lot of games that combine narrative with interesting mechanics to create immersive experiences with death and grief there are games that are exploring kind of new mechanics and in the case of the Valkyrie new mediums like VR and

we're using a Racine lots of games that are using existing mechanics to still tell stories about death and grief genocide family legacy or even horror horror or these are just a few examples there's lots more games that I could have included in here but all of these games deal with death in their own unique ways and they're very popular with players and they're really really good and powerful because they each use death mechanics that best suit their respective games so how can you do the same if you're interested in using death in your games of what is the best way that you can use it for your game so like I mentioned it's important to talk about and think about what that's this what death best fits your personal game if your game is mechanics first like a roguelike or FPS everything else in your game should support it and should include narrative so guacamelee is a fantastic example of this right and one of the big mechanics and guacamelee is or shifting between two worlds

there's a lot of combat mechanics that are really interesting about that so the narrative which is you know looking between the world of the living in rolled the dead fits very nicely with that and the aesthetic looks very cool to the sound design changes when you flip over everything supports that mechanic really well if your game is narrative first if the pillar of your game is narrative like a morticians tale whether it's a visual novel or first-person narrative game everything else in your game should support that so Edith Finch fantastic example of this right you did since mechanics do a really really good job at getting the player to directly interact with different deaths they do a really good up with that and make sure that you're not just relying on traditional death mechanics they're fine you know respawning exists for a reason life systems exist for a reason but it's really important that you figure out what best suits your game's design and as much as I'm like death is great how are you guys using in your games it's also important to think about is death

even necessary in your game if you're making a game like Animal Crossing do you need to have death on it does it support what Animal Crossing is doing just think about that specifically if you are working with deaths the way that we kind of did it's really really important for you to do your research and consult do interviews do consultations the Internet can be a really good resource there's a lot of really gross stuff that we found when I was doing research for morticians tales so just be careful if you're squeamish but really really importantly is to be respectful that is the most important thing not just with dealing with dead bodies but also with how other cultures are treating death if you're interested in exploring that make sure that you are consulting and paying your can that's and if you're again exploring death kind of explicitly make sure that you're understanding with being understanding with your players especially like for very very personal games like a mortician stay off death and grief is a very hard for a lot of

people and so it's really important to kind of think about and make adjustments as necessary a really good also an understanding understand play testing is not indicative of final play session I talked to Ian Dallas who's the creative director of Edith Finch I'm one of my podcast episodes and he told me a story about how during play testing people would be like this games this gets great this is cool and the same people would go home and then like message him be like I bawled my eyes out and he's like why didn't you cry here so you know if your play testing your games understand I don't think you actually said that but in my brain that's if your play testing your game and you're not getting the response you want you're not like Isis game sad enough I you know understand that playing games by yourself is very different than playing games when someone's standing over your shoulder watching you death is really personal and it's really important that again if you're dealing with death that you assess your own feelings because it can be really hard as a developer to

work on these games for two or three years it's really really important to be comfortable and when you're having discussions are doing research etc and making sure that not just you but your team is also comfortable with the subject matter right our sound designer Jenna Costa did a lot of research to make sure the sounds were accurate and she had to listen to like hours and hours of embalming music if she was not comfortable with that the game would have been very very different so it's really really important that if you want to explore this topic as deeply as we did that you're just somewhat comfortable with it and self-care is important whether you're making a game about death or just very very gory game or whatever it's really important to kind of take a step back sometimes and just be away from it and self-care can be things like having a bath or going for a run or if you're me it's watching Riverdale it's a terrible show I love it so much it's so good and if you're very importantly if you're not a person who is comfortable with death maybe consider

exploring those feelings about it if you're not comfortable with it you know consider making a game about those feelings because it can be very therapeutic ultimately and we're developing morticians Tail has changed me for the better I've learned so much from it and I've taken those experiences with me when people I know have died and so I hope if you decide to explore this topic that it can be as therapeutic for you as it was for me thank you so much [Applause]