Lore, Don't Tell: A Guide for Telling Culturally Rooted Stories Like 'Venba'

[Music] thank you all so much for coming uh my name is ABI uh I'm the designer and writer of venba uh and this is my talk I'm calling it low don't tell uh a guide for telling culturally rooted stories so what is VBA WBA is a narrative cooking game where you play as a immigrant Indian mother who moves to Canada in the late 1980s with her family in her travel to Canada her recipe book gets damaged so as a result players have to cook various South Indian dishes to restore these lost recipes while also exploring this family Story the game explores the relationships within a family and how it grows and changes over time but it does that through the lens of food the problem I see a lot is that showcasing a culture in media can be very challenging especially if it's a culture that uh an intern National

audience isn't necessarily familiar with uh if it's a culture that's familiar you can just focus on telling the story but when it's not you feel a need to tell not just a story but also educate uh in the ways of the culture in addition to telling the story you almost want to set up the context so that players can understand the story you're telling um but ironically I find that this leads to worse storytelling um the story and plot now serve two purposes not only does it have to do justice to the characters it also has to educate and and anytime you could do that you could be telling the story instead so the solution to this problem already exists it's what we call Lore uh with WBA I got a lot of praise for how it portrayed the culture in a very unassuming way someone said WBA just exists it doesn't say or do what it is uh it just presents itself right and people asked a lot of uh questions about like how I wasn't worried about uh the specific hypers specific details that I showed about players missing those details uh etc etc and when I was trying

to explain why it felt right for me to tell the story in this way um and add these details in this way I realized I was essentially describing uh what we all understand to be lore uh in most media there's plot and there's lore right um plot is St to the player but lore exists for the player to discover um in fantasy settings we're often thrust into Worlds and cultures that are drastically different from ours but in those settings not everything is explained to the player often things are left uh unsa the author alone might know these details to flesh out the world but they heavily leveraged the lore uh to do it instead of using the plot so why should real world cultures be any different before I start going into specific examples I want to address one thing I think when we try to tell culturally rooted stories we put a lot of pressure on ourselves um to make sure we capture all of it right and I definitely understand uh this responsibility I think this also causes an insecurity in us because we know that

uh to tell this uh this culture is not something people might be familiar with uh but I think we need to let go of that insecurity my favorite uh Tam movie director uh vetri Martin would often say the more local you are the more International you become um so to me that means tell a very hyp specific story and somehow it feels more Universal that way um and the strength of the stories we tell is that it's different uh and unique and we shouldn't dumb it down and risk losing that um let me start by going into specific examples um so one thing I see uh is that a lot of times we in in an eagerness um to communicate to the player we start creating the familiar as unfamiliar um what I mean by that is that if we want the players to engage with our world and the things in our world and as if they are familiar cornerstones we have to treat it as familiar first so when a player is trusted into the world of VBA they may or not May not be familiar with

t culture and T cuine but benai and pavin are experts right uh and there's a dissonance here between the knowledge of the players and the knowledge of the characters but if I write the game uh in a way that the characters explain the different aspects of the culture then these characters themselves are acting as if the culture is something that needs to be explained um I never talk about uh Italy or Dosa in a way that oh it's a fermented rice batter uh that R you know like I don't talk about it that way I just say and Dosa right because I know what it is um but if I try to account for players who don't uh Bena and pavin are starting to act like they don't know what it and those are um so instead I think it's better to lean into the dissonance instead aggressively don't explain anything uh and um don't explain anything that these characters normally wouldn't if this is not a conversation that they would normally have then uh don't bother and I think this actually creates a feeling that these characters aren't here for the player or in service of the player they're here regardless and the player

is just here along for the journey um there is one level in Bena where uh Bena Cooks a variety of dishes uh like a marathon um and I don't tell the players what the name of these dishes are in English um so a lot of times during play testing players are like these dishes look so good I want to cook them uh what are they called right and this is the most common feedback I got for this particular level um the feeling I wanted to recreate in this level is uh V back creating uh dish after dish after dish right so uh it's complete contrast to the other dish other levels where there's only one dish you create um so the way to address that feedback is some people said why don't you put a title um at top of the dish when the final thing is presented so players know what they're cooking and this is a completely valid ask and we almost considered it uh but then it struck me how absurd would it be if I showed pizza and large letters showed up saying pizza right um so here game the game itself from the UI itself it's

trying to acknowledge that uh if I showed those titles that these dishes are not something uh you should be familiar with instead if you go the other way yes it leads to some player frustration but uh it at least uh cements the fact that these are uh the bread and butter for venba and pavin um and just like how it's important to familiarize uh keep familiar things familiar you can do the opposite to reinforce what is unfamiliar for the characters um so when when bu speaks in thummer the default text color is white um and throughout the game uh that's how it remains but when a character speaks in English the text color changes um this treats speaking English as a special occurrence uh which makes sense for these characters and it's not something normal to the players right but by default uh when one of the members were was implementing the language tags um by default it would be English and you'd have to tag it to make it thummer um so that also led to the

different uh colors right but I had to reverse that very consciously because it it makes sense for all of us growing up here the English does feel like the default but we have to make sure that that doesn't bleed into the game itself um the other thing um I want to bring up is um what where does all of this stem from um I think it stems from an eagerness for the game to be uh a good representation but often it leads into it trying to be representative the responsibilities of showing a culture when it's not been showcased before it's very much present however there's like a million things to consider so it feels like whenever you show one aspect of your culture you're not showing another aspect of your culture and trying to cater to all of the aspects will leave you spread too thin and it's important to remember that we are a representation we are not the representation um but you might be seen as the representation by the players but that's a problem of not enough pieces

like uh pbell or other games existing but if you do try to be representative uh it leads to the game feeling more like a tour guide than than a story that you're saying um this line can actually get really really blurry when you're in production so uh with venba I knew that a lot of the players were interested in it for the story but I also know that a lot more players were interested in it because it's about South Indian food and they were really excited about um so a lot of the feature requests that we got were things like can we uh understand what these dishes are can we get trivia about them can you get facts can you get their recipes and all these things right um and these are very very reasonable uh asks um and um I felt the need to cater to them a bit and Catering to these things might seem innocent enough and in fact it makes the game much more commercially viable if we say that oh play VBA to learn how to cook um but I specifically was very careful about avoiding um this and whenever people ask

can we uh play V to learn how to cook I would just say no I don't think that's possible like the recipes are accurate but um I intentionally designed uh the game play in a way that um it only gives them the spirit of the dish um and gives them a nice idea about what are the challenges in the dish but um they can't walk away with a complete understanding of the dish itself um and you have to be specific specifically careful about this when working with publishers uh or merchandising because these are the aspects that appeals to them and these are the things that they might push for uh but you're not creating a product you're trying to tell a story um so instead uh what I did was the thing is that I'm also very very passionate about uh South Indian food and I do like to tell people oh Italy is made of three days rice fermented batter and things like that right and similarly Bena is also very passionate so I I was able to find uh organic ways of um when by geeking out about food and treating

that as the way to give a players more insight and more trivia about the recipe um so there are ways to find uh find it it just has to be more subtle um if you're not giving players uh these things but what what you can do is Inspire them to seek more for themselves uh especially when it's a real world culture um so for example this uh is how every level in the game starts uh by showing this calendar and there's a small proverb um I never explain what the Proverbs are called what these collections of Proverbs are called why are they here um I don't explain any of these things but the thing is that proverb uh it's actually called a venba um and venba is named after these poems um so there is a question of is this game named after these poems or after the main character and even though it's so subtle like this I saw so many people um looking up these Proverbs trying to find out where they're from uh people found like

thummer subreddits and they were like oh can you translate this for me where can I read more of this right and um that just comes from them attaching um like getting the meaning from this and being inspired to go look for it themselves um it this kind of thing happened uh in every aspect of the game there's a Spotify play there's many Spotify playlists where people are finding BBA like music uh to make for themselves um and this is important because these gaps are important for us to leave if I made a playlist then it becomes much more authoritative um and it becomes the One Source right and if I make a guide for go look at these things um it it mutes that discussion but when players have questions it actually generates more discussion um so I think it's really it's actually effective to leave these gaps um yeah sorry um that's essentially yeah so when you uh capture these things it's you give little Snippets you leave a little break Trail and you try to arm

the player with enough information that they can go up and look for those things themselves but what you can do is convey how passionate you are about these things get them as excited as you are about that uh and you can do that either with the framing so with the food like it was really important for me to make it look really delicious and um you know sound really good and all of that because whenever I cook I I know which part of the recipes step I get excited about right so uh visually it was very easy to push for that um so and similarly the characters in menba are also deeply passionate about th culture um so just seeing that passion is infectious and that's what uh leaves a lasting impression on the player so players might not always uh see lore but they'll definitely feel it um and I'll give you some examples of that um every level in MBA also starts with this photo wall right and on the left side you'll see a photo frame of vba's venba and her parents and on the right side you see more more Day photos

of uh her family in Canada um so I really really like that I did this because uh photos in India especially back in the day they people just took them and they would uh you know cut them out out of uh pictures they weren't really made to any standard sizes um so it's very clear to me that whena brought pictures of her family uh from India to Canada there's no frames that fit in so she you know put two photos in and made a frame out of it um and as the photos tooken Canada they come for a very specific frame size right um for a lot of Indian players when they see this they're like yeah I absolutely have a photo like this in my home they immediately catch that but players who are not necessarily from the same culture they still get this same feeling I don't I don't have to explain all of these things uh they're able to connect connect the gaps um and this gives so much personality uh and like if I shy away from showing something like that because players wouldn't understand it um they wouldn't be thinking about it in this way and if I did explain it it

would be boring so um I think this is a really nice line to walk um so another thing I did that was very subtle is once again bringing back this example between English and thummer is that uh something that really bothers me about diaspora media um is when people write dialogues in English um and there's a very uh first generation immigrants speaking um I can tell when it was written by an assimilated person and not an assimilated person because uh sentence structures change when your language changes your thoughts change when your language changes um so if you write in English from the get-go BBA is speaking English So to avoid that I actually wrote All The Tam dialogues in Tam first and then I translated them into English this might seem like a lot of effort but uh language is thoughts right like sometimes I have to consciously switch in which language I'm thinking to flush out that thought better um so it was much easier to capture that authenticity if uh the

dialogs were written in t first and similarly for uh T who's more assimilated uh he would translate English from his head into tumer right so the opposite process happened um and I I don't know if players noticed this specifically but recently when I was talking to somebody they said um when even though she spoke English even though the game is UN localized it felt like she was speaking thummer um and she was able to recognize that very consciously because she's thummer but I think every player still feels the same feel um there like all these feelings add up right um into flushing out this world it might just not be that explicit so if culture is lore we should also make peace with the fact that lore is meant to be missible um a Core Essence of flushing out a world is giving the players a feeling that they don't fully understand this world yet uh and there's parts that they haven't seen yet U there's a lot of details and subtext that I've crammed into Vena but that by definition means players won't

see everything they won't they'll Miss some things uh they won't connect things individually but this means more to the players that don't miss it right because they're able to connect it because they have had a certain similar experience or maybe they're from that culture but even for the players that do miss it this Gap actually creates a lot of depth um so I'm really wory about filling the Gap just because people miss it so in the spoilers in the fifth level um um bba's husband pavin passes away way and the way I communicate that is by a single shot of uh pin's uh photo uh and his glasses and in the book because he's a writer um culturally um this is a big difference between the West uh and uh South India specifically um we don't hang photos or we don't use to hang photos of ourselves unless a person passes away um and especially when it's framed this way uh as a singular photo of him uh people who saw that in his black and white they immediately got if they're from tamado they immediately got that oh pin passed away um but for a lot

of other players they didn't get that um until maybe the level ended or maybe even after when they see coven wearing pavins classes um and this might seem like a issue to address and to make it more explicit but it's not the worst thing if they don't connect the dots immediately right if you let the question linger in their head that actually creates a lot of interest like if they're playing the game Thinking wait what happened to that what happened to that and then they finally find out they're more engaged also so it's not absolutely the worst thing um and uh and then they're like okay so that photo then retroactively they can make uh make the connection and when you make connections like that you really learn uh the culture you really feel the culture um we might all feel this when we go to different countries or different cultures um we just observe certain things that are different and we don't we're not quite sure why they're different and then we'll understand it slowly so playing VBA essentially gives that same experience um there's also okay I know I said lur

is meant to be missable and all of that but I'm just going to go through uh some details that I'm a little annoyed that not enough people noticed so um so this one is when they revealed the putu scene and I really love it uh but it's a direct reference um to this movie uh and even though you didn't you didn't have to have seen this movie uh like The Comedy of the scene uh is captured here um and similarly um the um the dad pavin is uh very has a very striking resemblance to one of my favorite actors uh so much so that from the beginning that's been the the reference um and then here vba's cooking Biryani uh which is one of the most complicated recipes but WBA is such a good cook her confidence comes through just in the way the the dishes and utensils come in right um she she's excited to cook and therefore the player is excited to cook and when she the oil uh she's just she's

just um you know shotgunning it right but when cin cooks for the first time it's a very different animation right things tumble over and he's not confident about how much oil to pour and stuff like that it's very tiny um but all of these things really add a lot of Personality um and finally this might be the most subtle one um in um one of the levels where you cook with ghee in Canada uh you the ghee is semi-solid and you put it into into the pan and then it melts but when you cook with ghee in India because the room temperature is higher it's already melted to start with um and when I asked my uh Team they're like oh we already have a g assd I'm like no it needs to be liquid they're like no one's going to notice but it's important for it's important for me um so a lot of these details might feel very self-indulgent uh and it is all these movie references and everything is very very self- intelligent for me but it makes it so much more worth it than even one person notices and the main

point is that even if other people don't notice it they will feel it they will feel that when we're stacked with details and there is this world that they haven't quite discovered yet um every opportunity every I I know Indie developers sometimes grown at achievements but for me achievements were just so liberating because they were just this window of places where I can gram even more references even more details um and uh showcase what are the things I like uh about my culture um yeah and that's pretty much it that's how I approached venba um and yeah I I think I definitely understand that we all feel the need to um make sure that players understand what's cool about our culture and make sure that we convey What's um what we find uh interesting and do it properly but if we let go of that a bit and um we make peace with the fact that um some players might miss it I think it does make for a better product um thank you so much

oh we can do questions if anybody wants to do questions um if not um please be uh please remember to fill out your evaluation forms um yeah thank you yes hi uh I'm Yan Tong from uh Electronic Arts I I really enjoy this uh talk thank you so much and I really like the visual and I really like the use of color and and yeah I I think the food I I can't wait to go to the game and start making those Foods myself um which platform is this game available also um Canada was referred in the presentation are you did you make it in Canada yeah so I came to Canada when I was uh 12 um and when was inspired by a lot of the families um I saw in Canada uh we're out on pretty much every platform uh PC switch PS5

Xbox we're also on a massive sale right now so awesome I'm buying it tonight um did you get any feedback from um Indian audiences yeah whether in Canada or in India yeah so one thing I was super worried about is um my friends back uh back home will roast the out of diaspora media they're and I was like oh no I hope that does doesn't happen uh with VBA but um thankfully like I think I was really committed to keeping things very authentic and uh important so much so that uh when the Biryani level one of the things that most players struggle with uh there's a there's a live stream of uh um one of the streamers a thumer streamer playing it with his mom and she didn't even look at the recipe she was just like yeah go do this go do that like and the fact that her instincts were like right in the game uh I think uh is really good so uh they're all really happy with it and uh that's something I'm very grateful

for yeah hi um I have been I've played VBA actually a while ago I've been following it for a few years now actually because I um I one of my research areas as a professor of game design is um food in games so oh nice very relevant um and one of the questions that I had for you was how did you approach the design of the cooking itself and then a follow-up to that would be how did you balance the story elements with the cooking levels What was what how did you figure out what was a good balance between those two yeah um so for me uh that was a really really hard problem to figure out because uh Indian recipes are very very complicated uh like the ingred ingredient list itself is like like even compositionally putting all the ingredients in a table is overwhelming for the players uh but I think once I let go of the idea once again that um oh I have to show oh if it's a thummer food then I have to show all the Staples I have to show all these things things right um instead I was able to focus on what I think make for

cool recipes um so I didn't crack it until I made idly into a puzzle um and itly has like uh these plates and these um ways you rotate and place them and it felt like a physical uh turn the object around kind of game so that became much easier uh to start making so I started to find puzzles within the recipes themselves uh they were simpler but um I think they were more fun to solve um and I also tried to keep in mind like which dishes doesn't make sense for the family to cook so in the 1980s making something like Biryani would be very expensive uh because those speciality spices are really hard to come by but in the 2006 the explosion of the immigration community in Toronto makes those things more possible right so it nicely aligned with the recipes are getting more difficult and complex but it's also because WBA can now actually cook these uh dishes thank you so yeah hi ABI thank you so much for the talk yeah and uh as Taman big congratulations for the igf awards

yesterday I was screaming my lungs out may have heard me thank you uh so my question is that around the world there are a lot of local games made by local Debs for local audiences but we see that these are not as popular in the west especially like games from Iran from India um whereas venba is something that as you mentioned instantly kind of appealed to the global audience in a way that other games haven't so if you didn't try to do this consciously then you know why did it work what's your opinion on how it yeah um I think a lot of it is in we were in the right place right time um also being in Canada being in uh so close to a Game Dev scene comes with massive massive privileges um so I don't think I think if I didn't make Ben it's a matter of time before someone else did um and uh yeah I think right now uh the India game that scene is exploding um and I can't wait till um so many more cooking games come out that whenb becomes irrelevant uh I'll be able

to breathe freely then I think it's just a matter of time yeah okay thank you so much hi thank you so much for the talk it was so incredible I particularly loved how uh you had the two different assets for the ghee the solid and the liquid I was wondering how did you negotiate that uh with the extra asset with the t Team yeah uh my producer is sitting in the front row um so yeah I think what I really like about working with my team is that um they will first understand what I'm going for um if I am able to convey why it's important to me they'll be like okay fine we'll we'll do it uh but it's just about finding um like the way to do it it's a lot of compromises a lot of compromises for sure um we can keep adding details right uh but uh those like those uh kind of small details go a long way so it becomes a big uh compromise thing uh I'm really bad at scope scoping and all of those things so

um I will I'll keep putting ideas on the board and uh my team will um you know ruthlessly cut it and sometimes we get into debates and stuff like that but I think that's when uh that's when that's how the game is made yeah my followup is is there anything that was cut for scope that you still wish could have made it yeah um so initially I wanted way more levels to begin with so that cut down to seven um and I think um things like I wanted the player to have the feel like once you cook idley it's stuck especially if you use a cloth it's very satisfying when you peel that idly off the clo very very satisfying and I wanted the player to be able to do that physically uh but I also suggested this idea after we had already pass certification and we had a month um so yeah like there's so many things like that I made an entire document um like after we passed SE we like okay we have 3 weeks for day one patch um my lead programmer made uh here's some bugs and polishes that we

have to do my producer made an even smaller list I wrote entire features and story Arts um that they ruthlessly shot down as they should yeah thank you so much and congratulations again thank you hi um I'm wondering how you went about um Canadian culture was there anything you wanted to highlight from there or did you kind of want to undersell that to highlight the Indian culture yeah uh so I think this goes back to the original question of like if venba is about something what is what is it not about right um so you're absolutely right like that is something I struggled with also um there's so much in Canada that I love and um want to show to um but I think uh by focusing just on uh venba and pavin uh I think a lot of immigrants especially who come in the 80s um they don't assimilate ever right so they live in a cocoon kind of thing so um it actually benefited the game to not show so much of Canada and

the entire game happens inside the home for most of it um and that was uh intentional so that when menba finally goes back to India that's when we show that they're sitting out in the open in the Terrace um so to VBA like immigration was very um suffocating um so and it it's U and that's exactly what we wanted to show yeah thank you hey good talk um I do uh games that's has a focus on the African diaspora so a lot of the creative uh challenges I very much understand um one of the things that I've struggled with uh recently or the past couple years is U sourcing uh the wanting to the things that you kind of mentioned wanting to show and make sure people kind of get an understanding of certain aspects and details the aspect of they'll miss things but you know is it okay if they missed this

thing or will they get it later um and of course a lot of big titles do a lot of lore yeah stuff to fill in those gaps yeah for a small project like this in that in that way in your creative decisions you know um going forward would you still kind of do something similar or would you find think think it would be valuable to find ways to provide that kind of inspiration or sourcing maybe outside of the core experience you know yeah I see uh you're saying like as the project gets bigger it's hard to let more things be missed right like yeah um so I don't know so sometimes I think about uh anime uh and um when I started watching anime I had no idea uh what was going on like they were just so um authentic and people they didn't make it for us they made it for themselves right uh but we put up with that right like we would we would look up everything I would go to the wiki pages and like what does that mean what does this mean um so if they can do that like for me um that's what I wanted to do with venba is like get like if I

read I don't know like a manga about go now I want to play go or like even if there's like oh uh if they show like a very small thing in one chapter I'm like what is that I want to when I go to Japan I want to go see it right um and what's funny is that uh for some reason MBA is doing really well in Japan um and even though like we ran out of budget and we couldn't localize it uh but people are literally taking screenshots to translate it themselves with Google translate um and they're like oh this dish I'm going to go cook it I don't quite understand it but I'm going to find the ingredients so they're doing uh that I'm really really happy about that so I think um like your passion for whatever you want to show is organic um you trying to make it accessible to them is inorganic and I think as long as we stay organic it will it will shine through for the people who want to engage with it appreciate it yeah awesome thank you I think that's it um thank you so much for coming [Music]