Exploring Helplessness in Games with Bury Me, My Love

I already thanked you for attending this talk my name is flora Mohan as you can tell by my wonderful accent I'm from France and I'm going to try to explain to you how in our game very mallove we try to make the player feel helplessness no helplessness is not the feeling that is often explored in video games but when you tackle certain topics you just don't have the choice and that was our case I'm supposed to remind you to turn off your phones and also if we don't have time following me any questions at the end of the talk we can meet in the wrap-up room overlooked 20:22 thank you so very quickly Who am I I'm a former journalist I've been a journalist for ten years before I started making video game and then I founded the pixel hunt in 2013 and the pixel and is a

video game studio that specialized in reality inspired game what our reality inspired games well I'll come back to it in a moment our latest game is bury my love no I'm sure a lot of people here have already played it but I'm not sure everyone has so here's a quick trailer for you to get familiar with the project [Music]

[Music] [Music] so bury my love is a reality inspired game it is a game that is directly based on true real-life events in our case the

story of migrants who fled from Syria and are still fleeing for Syria today and try to reach Europe in hopes of a better life it was written by the help of Donna Donna is a Syrian woman who left Damascus in 2015 and who's now living in Germany and we met Donna because of an article in French newspaper Le Monde where she was telling the story of how she kept in touch with her family via whatsapp for all the journey she made so this was a very inspiring story and we decided to make a game that would mimic the way migrants use with sizing ups because you may or may not know that nowadays almost every migrant has a smartphone and for them that's not a luxury and that's actually the only way they have to keep in touch with their friends and families so that's very crucial to them then again

when you make a reality inspired game there are ethics you have to respect and they are actually quite close to journalism or documentary filmmaking ethics so I was already familiar with them before I started making games things you could you should do is to respect reality you have to gather a lot of documentation you have to be really sure to really know what you're talking about and you also obviously have to listen to the people who actually experience the story you are telling in your games there are also us are things that you should not do and the main and most important thing and the thing that is really different from classic games is that you should not be to play eccentric a lot of games focus on the player and on thumb and sometimes that makes players little bit like untitled brats they want they expect that the game is built around and for them and for

pleasure that's not what we did for bourbon I love that that made us get some some hefty comments but still we are happy with it because he was mandatory for the topic we wanted to tackle so I push the wrong button because I'm so scared what we learned actually listening to migrants we've been listening to Donna obviously we've been chatting with Donna on over what's up ask there are lots of question but we also listen to lots of other migrants and read and saw things and what we learned is that no matter how you prepare your journey things will go sideways there are too many things that you cannot control that you are not aware of too many policies that change don't so you so you will need to adapt you will more often than not have the feeling that you are not in control at all also being connected with your loved

ones is nice because you have them in your pockets you can give them updates on your situation but it's also very hard because they are always with you while not being physically with you so if something bad happens to you what should you do should you tell them should you keep them from knowing because you don't want them to worry should you lie to them this is this is difficult and it's not so difficult on the other side when you're someone who's stayed in Syria or was already in Germany and you're watching for news and you don't get news whereas you should you you you know you could get news because they have the phone what happens what what what's going on this is very difficult to live through and for those who stay or for those who are already arrived helplessness is the feeling that they get the most and this is the feeling that they have the most trouble dealing with so that's why we designed our entire game around this feeling of

helplessness we want to do as players to obviously not live their lives because it's just a video game but to empathize and to understand what they are those people go through so how did we do that how did we convey this feeling of helplessness as a game design first of all we put you in the position where you are not on the ground it's not you who travels you play as married nor husband and I don't even like to say that because you're not really playing a smashed mast marriage is a character on his own and sometimes it will say things that you would probably not say because maybe of cultural differences or anything so it's not even of about you as the player but the character you are impersonating is not on the ground he's not the one who is living things so that's a kind of a special situation for a videogame so

to make you understand that we thought we had to make a very living Nora we wanted to convey to you the feeling that you were talking to a real person that near noir was really alive and how did we make that first we tried to make her as consistent as possible nor is brave she's zestful she's independent she's also fairly stubborn and she has a tendency to trust people too easily those were our writing guidelines that we tried to keep along the way when we were writing the 110 thousand words of the game because we wanted you no matter which path you would take to feel that you were really connecting and bonding with a real person then again nor lives through very tough times and sometimes she will lie too matched this comes from a testimony from Donna and I think it's one of the best proofs of love that you

can even give someone you are living through a very terrible situation and you don't want to tell you loved ones because you don't want them to worry so no lies to Marge and she lies to you and sometimes if you're very careful if you if you read her all her message very carefully you will notice over time that she told you some something at one moment and then you realize that it wasn't the complete truth so that makes you feel helpless why did she feel compelled to hide things from you because there are terrible things because she thought you could not do anything about that that's up to you to imagine and also nor hesitates when she talks to you and this is also an important way to make you feel that she actually lives things ones very quick technical points to make Baramulla we used inkle Studios scripting longer language Inc and because it's open source and because

it's awesome and because the people are a tinkerer studios are super dope so thank them okay and in the script we put some comments and for instance this fake commands followed by a time in milliseconds will make this little animation of Nora's typing appear on the screen then disappear so you would think as a player or she wanted to tell me something but she changed her mind why did she do that and you don't have the answer you just have to imagine why also merged is not on the ground so but he loves noir so he wants to help her very very very bad so it will feel compelled to give advice even though you don't have enough information to know which I advice is good or which advice is bad so sometimes you will give nor bad advice and you will maybe feel bad about that but it came from from a good part of your heart you wanted to help her you

just didn't know what the consequences would be but the main feature to make you understand that you are not in the ground is the fact that burning alive is a game that consists of 99% of waiting you are actually not playing the game you can put the phone in your pocket because noir asked to do things and she doesn't have time to chat with you and so you have to wait for a new notification for it for her to come back to you she's the one who's leaving the things you you are just the one who is there for her if she needs you but she doesn't always need you or did we convey that first we had three states one or the basic state is that she's online so social all night like in every chat applications but when we when we add a little common line on script wait for 30 minutes and be busy then the statutes turns to busy so you know that she's still connected she still there she's

normally okay but she can talk to you because she has things to do but sometimes there will be word waiting times where new will appear us offline and then you will start wondering what happens why why is she completely offline doesn't she have battery in the phone anymore is she in a zone where there's no signal no coverage or is something worse happened well you will not know until Nora is back online and as you are not on the ground you will not decide when she will be back online also we did not hesitate to populate the game with very very short sessions for instance is in this screenshot you must wait for 20 minutes for her to come back and she just comes and tell you that she's approaching the border and that she will be away from coverage and so she will she can't talk to you anymore and then she's off again so you have a notification you read three sentences and then you can put your phone back we

try to do that in order to make you feel that she's the one living the things and you are not the second point is that even when you can talk to her and even when you make choices you are often not not really in control to explain that I have to give you a little dialogue about how new work works as a game character she's defined by three variables the first one is her money she lives a country with a son and she will have to pay smugglers to pay for a bed to eat food and everything and sometimes you will reach situations when if she doesn't have enough money if he can't do some things but there are two other variables that are most psychological the first one is the the love the rule of relationship between her and you and sometimes you will give her advice that will maybe make a love you less or you more and you you will not know that and the third one is a morale is she

doing okay did she lived through something that was really bad for a morale those three variables are evolving during the entire games okay and this is important because sometimes very rarely in fact you will have direct decisions when nor doesn't know what to do for instance should she go to location a or location B she will ask you and you will be able to tell her what to do and if she's in a good mood she will listen to you and sometimes she will not listen to you because she's stable but you will then have direct decision okay go down good that way I think it's better and she will follow your advice first but that's very rare actually in the game most of the very important decision that you will have to make our blind I mean when you make them you don't know that they are actually important decision you you just know that they are decision that might seem trivial or that might seem not very important but that might have very

important consequences later on we keep you in the dark on that for it for the very same reason we want you to not feel in control and also there will be decision that you will not even be aware you are making because you will not make a conscious choice for instance very often in the game you will answer nor with an emoji and you see in this example that you can answer with three different images and two of them will give her a plus two plus two in a love for you and one will will give her minus six points in love for you that's actually very small values it's not a lot but it's cumulative and decision after decision after decision your relationship with her will will evolve and a moral will evolve and then she will reach a point in our journey when she will need a special a certain level of morale or a certain level of love for you to take a decision or another decision and she will reach that point

and take the decision accordingly so you will not have a direct control on the choice but the choice will happen anyway cause it's cumulative all the time but in any case those variable are never displayed there are never visible to the player we don't want you to check for every choice you make like you like you would do in rains for instance when you have a direct feedbacks over the variables of the game we want you to follow your guts and to give her the best advice you think at the advice you think are best and we we came up with this idea after long thinking process in the beginning we thought we would add to the status bar a mood indicator that would vary depending on the level of love and develop morale that Nora would feel and that would give you a little clue about how she felt but we felt that it would be two extra diegetic that it

would feel too much like a game and not enough like talking to a real person so we decided to put put this away but we did it at some moment in the game script we changed some expressions of north depending on her condition so the only way you have to know how she feels is to really really pay attention to how she talks to you the third thing we wanted to put in the game to make you feel this helplessness is that we wanted to be clear that for migrants life is not fair and also that death is part of the journey we actually add a very long discussion among the team about this question after all we spend a lot of time building the relationship between you as a player and nor so making a die can be terrible and also we are talking about the real lives of real people who really are risking their lives so would it be disrespectful to

put death in the game but actually we we thought that it was the contrary the other way around it would have been disrespectful not to put in the game because they are risking their lives and you should not ignore that so there are 19 different endings in the game and some of them are everybody including death situation and that 39 ways to reach one of those 19 endings and as you can see some of them some of them are really bad but the majority of them are somewhere in between and that comes directly from the documentation phase where we noted that for most migrants when they stopped migrating that's because they are stuck somewhere they have to wait for in the camp for their admins and administrative status to evolve and they don't know they are stuck in limbo and we wanted to render that in the game also but let me give you an example of how death can

occur in the game and you will see Oh unfair this is this is the smuggler sequence I'm sorry but it's a slight spoiler to the game but again it's a conference so I have to unveil things and in the smuggler seconds you are in is me it's a Turkish city not far away from Mediterranean Sea and nor wants to take a boat to cross to lesbos in Greece so the first choice you have to make his decide together which smuggler she is going to to see - to cross the sea she can decide between smuggler she doesn't know but as met on the ground or another smuggler that was that she vaguely knows through mutual acquaintance so you have to choose that and you don't know which one is the best you just have to trust your gates once again then she asks you did I forget something do you think about something I should take on my journey on my boat journey and you can

advise her to take seasickness medicine or a flashlight why should you decide to tell her one thing or another I don't know you should decide because you think when one tick is best made but you have no no no reason no particular reason to decide and depending on those two choices you can reach three four different endings to each sequence in one of the combination nor unzip okay she crosses the sea and it's tough but it's she arrives fine in two of them she makes it but the the journey is very very complicated and she she's in a trauma because she sees things that are about tough and in the last one you get to an ending and in Bernville of every engine is an audio log and this is the audio log you get

[Music] let me tell you something if I was a player and I play the game like that that's after two choices that I didn't have any idea of how to take them or to make them ended up like that I would want to patch the game designer in the face please don't punch me in the face as the game designer I think it's important to make you feel helpless and frustrated and feel that it's terribly

unfair because it is but simply because what we are talking about here is a terribly unfair situation so sorry actually the only thing migrants have is to live by the moment they know better than everyone that's it's not the destination that matters it will matter at at a time but they take one day after another and it's the journey that matters and that's what we tried to do also in bearing my love we wanted you to feel that way to care about the journey to care about the good moments that you may encounter to care about the bad moments that you may also encounter and to understand that there will be many expected expected ones many surprises many moments where you will have to adapt to compensate for your lack of control so to render that we

made another thing that any good game design teacher would advise strongly against is that there is no safe points in Burma my love even when you reach an ending you cannot start back from one part of the story and decide I made this decision but it was very wrong I want to go back there and change my decision you cannot do that in Burma love you have only two solutions when you reach an ending the first one is to restart from day one and why is that that is because for us nor is not a real person contrary to what I told you for us nor is a metaphor for the thousand and hundreds of thousands of persons who actually did this journey and we wanted you to feel that way that every time you play burr in my love you play someone else you play a new a new person that is

trying to face a new situation but you have another possibility you can also never play the game again and that's not a troll I really mean it I really am completely ok with that you can never play the game again because ultimately bury my love is a game about coming to terms with the idea that no matter how much you love someone there are times when you simply cannot save them thank you I hope you have questions because I've been rushing through the presentation to have be lucky enough to discuss it with you hi hi uh my name is Jeremy it's great to meet you thank you so much for for doing this and presenting its I

don't even know how to word z' I have a lot of questions I'll ask one for now why is it important for you for players to feel helpless when playing this game and how does how does getting your players to feel that make them care about the situation um another how to put that um this is not advocacy I don't care about changing the players mind or anything I'm I'm not an NGO I don't have an injured a an agenda I'm nor do I have not want to make a political statement when I documented for this game I was so overwhelmed by all unfair and terrible those situations where and I thought to myself if we in in the situation we are in privileged

situation we are in can have a game that can make give us a glimpse of what it is to go through those situations it is worth it we should do we should try to again like that so that's the main reason why I wanted to make this game and that's why I decided to design the whole game around this idea that the player should feel the same way Thanks welcome hi I'm so first of all Congrats on like having the guts to make all those like tough decisions like going against the usual conventions of the game design but my question is about so that audio a log thing was very powerful very emotional when you when you built that how did the community or you react to it and did they reaction affect how you guys ended up like handling that

kind of thing that that emotional stuff actually it didn't have any impact because we weren't in an open development so we didn't have any feedback on the game or way yes we run play tests but they were mostly functional play tests and we had some questions in the play tests on the writing styles and the endings but we didn't really care about those we really wanted to be sure that people knew how to go where to click but the story was ours and I think that it's important you know I have lots of this discussion with the people in the games industry in France about are there outlaws in video games and they say no it's a common work there's no authors with not filmmakers or anything and I get that but I also think that some games should should be the work of authors and they should decide what they want to make and regardless of what the audience may or

may not think and if we make bad choices then the game will be bad and it will be honest but you know that's like every piece of art it's always been civility okay thank you hey I actually have really two really quick questions first I want to say a really good presentation it was cool seeing how you treated noir as a person and you're able to have her like maybe decide not to text you which is really cool but my first question is as a journalist do you see yourself having more stories maybe in a similar context maybe not in the future with more games coming up with pixel hunt and my second question is where'd you get that shirt that's pretty rad Threadless okay it's good shirt okay for the first question I definitely intend to make only reality inspired games but that doesn't mean that it's only only inspired by the news or the or the the real events actually my my next

project is about something much more intimate what it means to be a person and what is important for us so it wouldn't be directly linked to something that happens in the world but I think we are all part of the world so we are all something that happens in the world cool sounds great thank you welcome he asked what I wanted to ask him really so I just wanted to congratulate you and almost make an entire room of grown-up people cry with that audio by Chloe Hollings and she's a very very talented voice actor and the French voice actor Bay Area's is like I cried in while recording the audio whether it was amazing of our reasons but it's very sad actually but you know what I mean and I do agree that's a really rad shirt I [Laughter] almost came with another one so I'm pretty glad I know thank you thank our

man chose of our presentation he'll question for you is the game actually waiting for you to make a decision or it's like an ongoing process so basically whether you interact with up with a character or whether you not it's like it's like continuous journey do you have to play the game for it to for it to complete yes and that's actually something that's a bit subtle and I'm very frustrated with my English right now because I don't I can't explain it the way I would I would want it to be explained but the idea that you choosing an emoji over another can completely change the whole story such a mundane thing as an emoji can have a little little impact on newer but that's just the thing that makes her drop or that helps her to keep going this is really important and lots of people have told us but this is a leaner game I don't have the gym pressure I'm not under the

impression of making any choice and they did not replay the game so they did not notice that they could have to play through and never see one single ceiling and that's actually a compliment because I don't want them to have the feeling that they have power and control over the story I want them to leave the story and and and and just leave it in the moment as those guys in in the real life do you understand thank you very much thank you so thanks everybody that's it I had something else I I should tell you but I don't remember what it is oh yeah don't forget to rate this this talk thank you very much [Applause]