Jocoi: Three Challenges of Designing for Grief

[Music] welcome to the already unfortunately last session of the first indie game summit day there's another day tomorrow more talks in this room and the one next door I have the pleasure to introduce you to Sabina her who's gonna give you a talk titled designing for grief let's give her a big hand thanks you for the introduction and thank you everyone for showing up before I start to reminders one of them please turn off any noisemakers you might have turned on and the second one is you will receive an evaluation link so please make sure to take the evaluation later so I want to start by a little note about myself I am a cultural researcher and a game designer and I'm interested in intimate experience and how we can express them

through games and play and I'm part of something called the Copenhagen game collective which is a Denmark based multi-gender multi interest collective of artists key makers in these academics and we organize game culture event in Scandinavia but we also make small experimental games about themes which the big players in the industry candle won't address so you might maybe be familiar with 2008 darkroom sex game in which players swing custom controllers to achieve mutual orgasms but I've been involved in projects like lovebirds which is a physical multiplayer peaking experience in which players wear giant dick masks to find each other's sensitive spots and make their lights flash while accompanied by live music

I've also been working on a game called can't touch this is you heard correctly it's a a meditative coloring app based on the beautiful and conic images of t currents coloring book but today I'm gonna talk about something different namely a game called jo koy which is about love loss and grief in video games and I made it as part of my PhD research on the question how game designers can become better at designing for grief and I made it with four Austrian women who have lost a pregnancy and who were willing to explore new ways of talking about this experience and I found them via a self-help group for bereaved parents in Vienna and for the tech part I worked with an awesome student team from Alba

University Copenhagen and we had one semester to make it so for me bereavement and being a brief mother is an ordinary experience and it's sort of part of my everyday life and of many lives of women I know and it's part of who we are and how we explore life and how we also have fun so I noticed that this is although it's so common it was a very silenced experience and wherever I looked representations of it were missing so it was very important to me to go and try to make space for it in videogames which is a medium that many people of my generation are very intimate with and today I'm gonna talk about the challenges some of the challenges we encountered while trying

that out while making a grief game so these three challenges that I'm going to talk about today are how did we include lived experience real people into game design secondly how did we actually translate their experiences into gameplay and game aesthetics and thirdly of course what's the impact what can a game like this achieve or how does it work in the lives of the players but let me start from the beginning so when we look at most games today we look at this we look at look at loss death is everywhere and mortality is everywhere but mortality in most games is also a lie because mortality or game over means that we can try again and it's kind of trivializes loss or it also this disables grief experiences to to be

relevant but now as an indie and someone who knows the field you might say there's there have also been other games made about the grief experience we have games that have actually been good at portraying this experience just look at brothers for instance a game where you explore and a relationship between two brothers who go through magical and mysterious and dangerous adventures before spoilers one of them ties and you actually explore this connection of your brother relationship after death through the game mechanics and through the control scheme and then of course there has been them the game called that dragon cancer which allows us to walk a bit of the piece of the way with

a dad who is going through the experience of losing his son to cancer and these have been very important video games with which have shown that deep deep approaches to game making and grief exist but they have also used a white male sis male experience point of view to mediate this experience to mediate grief so game designers in the past or in a recent past have started to look for alternatives or for eternities to this perspective as the one perspective that's supposed to to tell us us what to feel from this this male perspective in her micro target last year's TDC and wiki Laura

for instance has argued that the majority of game developers according to IT da a white male hetero able-bodied cisgender university or college educated and have not experienced discrimination and this is also the kind of view of the heroes that are portrayed in most games so she calls them default humans and they are the one minority that is overly represented in the media not only in video games in power positions as the heroes of our stories and the people that we talk about when we don't use any modifiers the normal people so looking for non default grief experiences I was asking where all the brief mothers sisters and daughters in video games and in order to invite them I wanted to to

work with others not only to explore my own experience as bereaved mother but to actually work with other perspectives on it with other women so how did we do that when I contacted the self-help group I got responses from four Austrian white middle-class women who we were very very happy to join the project and they were like me white enough to you notice their invisibility as grieved mothers but unlike me they were not interested at all in video games they were interested in sharing their own experiences but they did not feel safe with video games they rejected what they assumed were video game values they believe that video games could never represent their experience so now I'm not the first one who has worked with people who do not like video games

game developer recode has actually written quite a lot about this and she points out that the reason she makes games with people who do not like video games is that it's inspiring to to challenge the boundaries of what is now established as as game making so because people who do not like video games expect something else to entertain them we have to change our paradigms of how we make games and I was very so but the challenge was that I would still have to talk to them somehow make agreement and address them as design partners so how did I do that so I found the muse based game design approach by really Khaled quite inspiring because it addresses the

relationship between designer and a participant in terms of artist musician ship so the artists have the responsibility of making the game but the muses can be there and expressed freely what their opinions and feelings are and that then inspires the game design constraints but sometimes it's quite difficult to talk really and openly about the experience especially if it's something as complex as your relationship to a dead child so sometimes it's easier to do so through images through metaphors that's where the august method of metaphorical game design came in handy so Doris says that

metaphors can help game designers make something very abstract and complicated tangible by translating it into symbolic images into a into symbolic system one example that she's shown is in her game allude which tackles depression and this game works with spatial metaphors of up and down to make this experience tangible so you go through happy and sad faces and you there's also the option of suicide in the end but to give you an idea of how we carried out metaphorical game design I would actually like to invite you to do a little exercise with me are you ready so I would like you to close your eyes or fixate the point in front of you

that you see on the slide and now think about a person that you loved and lost it can be anyone it can be a lover a friend a family member a pet and now think about visiting this person travel to wherever this person is right now and the planet where this person lives now what do you see what does the space look like what are you here is there something that you can do who else is there what can't you do is there something you can't do

so if you have your eyes closed I would like you to ask you to open them now so what you have done now is that you moved from a an abstract idea of grief or what it's like to be connected to someone you you lost or something you lost you translated that into a concrete image or even a system even a rule set of what you can do and you can't do and it's very likely that these images are very different these planets are very different at least that's what we experienced when we made did this exercise with with the for women so here the planet said before women made the first planet revolves around the image of a sheep that looks across a river and the river is separating the sheep from

her son and the Sheep is conflicted now what what can she do she is in the observer role but she might be able to walk through the river but it's not time yet to do that it's very important to stay connected and to admire the other side of the river but there's also a flock waiting on this side of the river which you can't see but it's there the second image is a cave a very cozy cave and in the very inner cave lives the baby and the whole family visits the planets you nurture the baby in the inner cave and there's an objective or a rule on this planet the baby needs to be fed or nurtured in order to be made strong enough to survive when the family leaves the planet in the spaceship so that's that's the objective the third

planet revolves around a fire side and the flames that illuminate at different parts of the experience some shards and some treasures that we're sometimes visible depending on where the pair stood and looked at the experience it was beauty and worry in the situation depending on on who you were whether you were the father or the mother and finally we had an a model which was all about bliss it was about staying connected on a beautiful meadow the atmosphere was very important the mother and the child explored the nature while the weather's changed from sunny to rainy to snowy and nothing was really harmful there it was only about being there in a timeless way so we had rich brainstorming materials but how to actually translate them into games

gameplay these images so the most important themes that we realized where there was nurturing and spending time with the babies and also the wish to have an ongoing connection but we also wanted to make a game about grief so we realized that we wanted to first make the mother child connection playable in a beautiful way and then throw the player into as an area where this connection could no longer be realized so enjoy you play as a sheep mother who explores her meadow with a little lamb until an earthquake's takes the baby away what is important here is that the lamb

always follows the mother everywhere she goes so they explore the meadow together and we wanted to express that there's an intimate connection that cannot really be disrupted secondly your objective is to graze and nurture the lamb by feeding the flowers on the meadow and we express this through a simple control scheme namely left and right mouse button we wanted to say you can care for yourself but you can what is most important is to care for your baby and since the left mouse button is is conventionally more used we mapped the act of caring for the baby on the left mouse button so we actually want the player to briefly forget that there is something called self care we want them to believe that all you need to do in the game is to click lift on a flower to feed the baby we also wanted to make this act of

caring important affect --fill so we added consequences so each flower has a unique color pattern and sound and when the mother feeds the flower to the baby the colors actually show up on the fur so they are get printed on the fur on the lamb and a melody is Plato's melody of the flower so we kind of wanted to evoke this this need or wish to to dress the baby to make decisions that are important as a parent to make this baby feel safe and comfortable and the warmth of an attention you give actually matters that's what we wanted to see finally the sheep mother is not alone but it's there's a flock waiting in the background and and and it waits until the mother is done with the feeding and

admiring of the fur and maybe changing the dress a little bit and when they get tired from all the exploring they can move towards the flock and lie down and cut and while they sleep the seasons will go by and players can decide when to wake up to start grazing again and explore different flowers however at some point in time at a random point there will be an earthquake and when the Sheep mother wakes up alone there's a river but the lamb is no longer there that the lamb is gone means that the left mouse button can no longer be used but when it is pressed anyways as you used to the players will hear something they will hear the desperate cry of the of the

matura but she won't budge in this moment of this is what you hear this moment of control loss was very important but when a player remembers that there's actually self-care they can click on the river and be able to access and look over the other side of the river they will see two wolves and one of them is a baby is a baby wearing something which looks a bit like the fur the lamb used to wear she can walk towards it by holding down the left mouse button but all she will see is a brief message and what she can do then is to eat the patches of grass of the flowers that now protect the flowers and can sort of nourish herself on the memories of her child and if she discovers and takes in all the flowers that she had fed to the lamb before she

can move on with the land with the flock and explore a new meadow so this is basically the game and I'll spoil it all so we wanted to see whether this actually worked and what kind of impact is had on on the mother so we we played acid in on a couple of different people we played assistants students friends but also most importantly the muses and it's this is why we made quite surprising discovery so when we asked them uses for their spontaneous responses of what they thought of the game they had very different interpretations of what was going on the for some the for some the carrot like the the wolf character the little wolf character was an enemy that had eaten the lamb and had sort of posture was the predator for others it

was clear that the small wolf was the baby the lamb baby in a different shape in afterlife some players felt guilt about feeding the wrong flowers to their lamb so it died others experienced the act of feeding flowers is something beautiful and meditative some some muses found the game a bit boring others founded engaging but here's the thing what they all said is that the game resonated with their own personal experience so how's this possible how can something that is has different meanings and is understood in widely different ways be relevant for for people personally relevant this is where where the importance of ambiguity came in and the idea that because we left the

symbolism of the game open and didn't explain to the players what this was all about they felt free to project their own narratives and their own grief stories onto the game and they were able to explore their own emotions like guilt and hope maybe for a connection after death and they used basically they used the game as a canvas for projection of their own grief so Jacque I gave them sort of a possibility to journey through loss through love and loss but it did not tell them what love and love loss is it made them it gave them a platform to explore what that was so again while we decided what went into the game ambiguities ambiguity left the

details of interpretation up to the players so here are the three ways of how we sort of tackle the challenges of designing for grief first news based game design allowed us to include people who did not believe in videogames who thought that video games were not for them secondly metaphors helped us to to not only make something come something abstract concrete but to translate these images in action into actual gameplay and thirdly and most importantly to me ambiguity was a way of actually connecting the game to the players lives without telling them what to feel and to

conclude it's maybe most important that designing for grief opened a space for the exploration of different feelings and opening a space in which we as bereaved mothers did not only feel comfortable but also visible and choco was kind of like a monument for this visibility but in order to make grief generally more more speakable it's important to create a lot of these safe spaces safe spaces that are safe for different people with different grief experiences so if you want to join this effort I hope that this talk if you a small idea of where to start thank you very much [Applause] [Music] I think there's time for some questions

interesting talk when you were play testing the game with people that had not had grief experiences what was their reaction to the game how did they connect with it it was kind of difficult to tell what a grief experience is and what isn't so there were people who talked about other experiences rather than grief like we could not really see of course if someone who plays the game and does not talk directly about their grief experience we don't know whether they have a grief experience but there were people are connected for instance the role of the flock to the ignorant role of society when something goes wrong you were kind of left alone so there were different interpretations I don't know if that answers your question but he said yeah he said yes good job

so the exercise where we closed our eyes and imagined the you know the thought experiment that you guided us through that seemed like exactly the right exercise to kind of help generate content for an experience like this where did that exercise come from how did you know to use just that one that's awesome I came up with it and I felt also that thanks for this question because I think that especially when it comes to this two images that we that we generate as a group and if you have a group for to inspire your design constraints it's useful to use a planet metaphor because it has something in common with games it has a space it has an atmosphere planets have atmospheres planet have planets have rules so that that was quite a surprise for me also that that worked so well thank you

when you were playing the game yourself I know that obviously you were part of the design did you have a similar experience to the other muses since you've been through losing a child yourself it differs like I have played it a couple of times and it's different every time last time I played it it was it was really touching to me at other times I felt it it is too colorful for me I would maybe prefer something more dark so but we wanted to sort of represent the taste of the muses and personally I think that interpretations can change depending on on your current

life situation so as a player you can also move into modes of where you like the game more and less or where it makes more or less sense to you thank you he said that you had the muses like involved in the design process was that um something that was like an ongoing thing that you'd like show them parts of it or what when they saw it for the first time was that like without having seen any of the development we made them play it twice so first we gave them an early build and we actually wanted to include some of their ideas or just also things like usability questions and consider them into into in the final build so we did have like a first round where we just observed what worked and what didn't work in terms of usability and whether the controls were clear or not and then the final the final round it was surprising that they had actually

forgotten a lot of things so it was almost like a new game for them and yeah there was that was quite a process actually kind of a follow-up question was like did you struggle with your like input scheme as far as like working with people who are not used to normal like game it's at all like was it hard to develop a control scheme that was like legible for people who don't play games I guess yeah I mean if I would do it again I think I would use tablet rather than the mouse controls but all of them had had a kind of basic office setup at home so that that's where we went for it was clear that like in the first in a very first iteration so we had three iterations in a very first situation we we used we just casually used keyboard controls and that didn't work at all because I was too gamey there was there was not something that

they would intuitively feel inclined to do so so that's why we moved to something more simple and thank you I think those it or is there another question so oftentimes oftentimes when there are [Music] themes that themes that people are especially hesitant to approach with art and especially with with games which have a reputation for being a vulgar art for better or worse those things are

things that kind of exist in the realm of the highly personal or the highly sacred or the closely connected with a particular identity which is which can be problematic to to speak for I guess I I guess this is why I was so hesitant to ask us because it's a half-formed question but it's it's rooted in strong feelings do you think that for especially those matters which which feel important to talk about but fall well outside the realm of someone's experience that that that the muse approach is an effective way of approaching these heavy topics a

resounding yes yes it is very clear answer because again my experience is quite different all the way I processed it was quite different from what the muses chose to chose as appropriate images for their own experiences so I felt like had I did I have the chance to do this project again I would invite people who are very different from from my own experience because I feel that especially because you invite the muses as inspiration partners and because you have this division of roles between who creates and who in buyers and who is kind of constrained as an artist and do as free as as a partner as a dialog partner it is very very you know useful to or helpful to reach out

experiences that you don't you yourself do not have or cannot even start to understand and I think news based design is a good approach to starting that dialogue thank you okay so if there's any questions coming up later I'm available for chats and most available in the wrap-up room with something comes up so thank you so much for attending have a good conference [Applause] you