Stories that Haunt and Heal: Mental Health and Game Narrative

[Music] i am jean leggett this is gabriella logan and jessica fong and thank you for coming to our session called stories that haunt and heal mental health and game narrative we ask that you hold your questions and applause to your end we only have half an hour for this session and it is pretty deep we're going to have a breakout area which is mentioned on the last slide for us to continue the conversation if you would like to join us we just want to talk to to let you all know that we are going to be discussing some pretty heavy subject matter here it is some mental health issues uh post-traumatic stress disorder and domestic abuse disordered eating and sexual assault and one of the reasons why we need to talk about serious games is because we all have a preconceived idea of what a game is in serious games the primary purpose is to not just entertain but also to explore subjects that are different from us

all right so we're going to go in order to be myself then gabriella and then jessica so if you ladies would like to have a seat i'm going to be talking a little bit about our game called lily bard the body in shakespeare park i run an indie studio north of toronto and i focus on making narrative games for women over 30. in fact my target demographic are women who enjoy reading more than they enjoy playing games and they all focus on female protagonists i often get asked why why not i have to say so our focus is on making impactful stories that will make people cry make people have emotions and most importantly we have built a narrative game engine to help empower storytellers we've worked with children as young as eight and adults into their 60s and 70s so let's talk a little bit about the body in shakespeare park it is a point-and-click narrative game and the center character her name is lily bard and she is a sexual assault survivor so quick story when i first

read the novel from so this is based from charlaine harris's series the lily bard series and i remember asking you know we'd like to have the rights to this and i read the book i'm like wow you know what games needs a kick-ass woman and not to exploit but to explore the subject matter of ptsd and sexual violence and how do we craft this game specifically to make sure that we are not re-triggering survivors what are the narrative devices that we use in the game who gets to write this story well when you're an indie games company sometimes you run out of money and then you take the people that are willing to work on your anybody ever had that experience sometimes you take on people that might not be the best fit well we ended up having two guys starting to write this game that wasn't going to go very well because i felt like that would really not fit the authenticity piece and we've gone through a couple of writers i am now writing the game and i'm also a survivor of sexual assault so it's

really important that we are mindful of who is the telling the narrative of these atypical stories so some of the elements in the game itself that we are trying to imbue the player with a sense of what is the trauma what is the anxiety that lily is going through are the use of her daily diaries so for those of you not familiar with the story itself it opens up on a body in the park hence the name of the game and lily has a choice that deviates from the novel so think of it as your choose your own adventure and every decision that she makes does have a knock-on effect including in her diaries in her the flashbacks that she has also how do you craft the character relationships between the players and the npcs is heavily stated by the kind of relationship that she has with them everything of her history and her past judges so she there's slut-shaming in

this book which is kind of interesting there are complex relationships between lily being an older woman and a younger man now we could dive really deep into that we don't have time for that but you know it's it's lily trying to explore and understand her own relationship with her sexuality the idea being that by the end of this game she will have found her way through herself she will have healed herself or you the players will have a strong feeling that she has done that so the artistic approach i'm actually going to be showing quite a bit of the art from the game and when we first started out you know small budget it grew the scale of the game grew haha and um so we started off with full color and initially our our trigger art was going to be in black and white and somebody had made a comment i think it was like an indycade judge and they're like i don't like that and i realized i don't like it either so i'm going to show you the monochromatic instead and we tried to move away from this idea

that ptsd was horrific because i think we can agree that a lot of people are dealing with trauma on a regular basis let's normalize it rather than make it horrify it i'm also going to talk a little bit about the intentional camera angles that we used and very importantly even though in the book in chapter 5 it explicitly details her abduction and her assault by multiple people we made a choice as narrative designers not to include that we also made the choice not to include specific images which i will be showing you but i will add a trigger warning prior to showing that to you because we've all seen those images before in film and tv we do not need to see it again so this is when she first goes to the park she sees the hand if she chooses to unwrap the body this was originally the art style that we had which as you can sort of see is like like this walking dead kind of zombie image and we ultimately went to the monochromatic with this image it's a flashback of her

when she hears a radio announcement about an abduction and if you notice where the barrel of the gun is aimed at it's not aimed at you the player it's just slightly off to the side so while you are playing as lily you are not meant to be lily it is not your experience you are experiencing a story outside of yourself the same thing with this when lily attacks somebody leaves a gun for her and she does kill her attacker you are seeing it as an out-of-body experience just quickly i was at the grace hopper conference as a speaker last october and i don't know if you'll recall the christine blasey ford testimony against the supreme court judge kavanaugh i was showing this slide the day that she was giving testimony it is a fantasy scene of lily's because she did not get to testify against her kidnapper and assault people so it's very powerful and i think we have an opportunity in our games to share powerful stories

so the next slide does have the graphic depiction of rape and i think i may have forgot to say at the beginning of the talk if you feel like you need to leave the room and take care of yourself we understand there's no judgment because we will be diving a little bit more into other topics that might be disturbing as well so this image specifically i chose not to include in the game you can see the 3d render at the top and then the painted image on the bottom and again as a woman who has experienced this i didn't feel it was necessary to include that in a game about sexual assault we have seen it time and time again we do not need to reinforce it and for me it just it doesn't need it's damaging to survivors and it made me come uncomfortable and that ultimately is not the intent of the story so lily like many survivors is haunted by her past and the narrative structure of the game is meant to be the holistic approach so that players can understand healing mechanisms and coping mechanisms we all

have coping mechanisms whether or not we realize it or not and i think having them in game form is very healing for a lot of people so there are nods to therapy cognitive behavior physical behavior and also underlines that we're all on our own journey and there's no specific timeline for healing so i'm going to pass this over to ella hi everyone i'm gabriela logan though if you decide you want to come and have a chat to me later please feel free to call me ella so just a little bit about me before i move on to talk about shrinking pains is that i am a communications manager by day and by night i run a small indie team and we focus on making games that explore mental health issues basically our goal is to release these games for free because i don't want them to ever be pay gated so that anyone can access them and have an experience also i believe that games are an amazing tool to build empathy and understanding in players and that is my primary goal when i make these mental health games for

free the first game that we made is the one i'm going to be talking about and that is oh well we're still here we'll talk about shrinking pains so very quickly i'll give you a brief rundown of what it's about it is a semi-autobiographical visual novel and it is about disordered eating like specifically anorexia and one thing that is important to note is that i wrote this very much from a place of my own experience because i'm a recovered anorexic the visual novel itself is written in second person because i think it's really important to explore the idea and to show that disordered eating is not an explicitly gendered mental illness it's actually something that affects a lot more people and a lot like a lot more diverse people than the public is necessarily aware of and more and more men and people that identify as non-binary are actually seen having it within like the last five years there's been a significant rise i was also very interested by the impact of mental health issues on relationships it's almost like we frame mental illness

sometimes as something that happens in a vacuum as if it has its own space but the reality is when someone suffers the people around them have to pick up the slack and take on a lot more than they necessarily are able to at a time if they also have issues in their lives and i wanted to explore that in this game the game is also a series of snapshots it's not a fun game to play in fact it can be quite harrowing it is a little bit disturbing i also believe that games don't have to be fun to be valuable and we can make these experiences without exploiting them while also showcasing the reality of what someone is suffering or experiencing also having these sustained little moments within the game mimics what it's like to have an eating disorder because stereotypically you lose time and you lose moments and it keeps the game moving quite quickly and the playtime's short because the game is not fun to play and it can be quite triggering i didn't want it to be too long in length so it'd be a bit more easily digestible

so the artistic approach i will go through this a little bit more quickly my art is not as beautiful as jeans art so just heads up on that one shrinking paints is actually a game jam game that we then polished and released so all of the art assets were made in 48 hours so just keep that in mind everyone there are a few things that i'm really happy with with the art and that is how it mimics having an eating disorder as we go through you'll notice that a lot of key details are dropped from frames as the protagonist and their illness gets worse through the narrative you'll see that the field of vision closes in and though you won't be able to see it here there are sound effects that signal when the player is engaging in destructive and risky behavior so this is from the beginning of the game this is one of the options for your partner you can choose the gender expression of your partner as well it's all written in second person and the writing is not explicitly gendered so anyone that plays the game can feel more attached to the protagonist and have a

closer sense of what they're experiencing and as you play through you'll notice see got some details oh now they're going away and then as you keep playing through it gets special and special and they start losing more and more time between each of the snapshots you can see it here too a lot of people didn't realize that the detail was going away even though i purposely brought it back to the ceiling fan but that's fine it's all good you can see it again here there's food in the fridge which is already not very detailed and then you can see it's nearly completely gone here one thing that i also want to note is that there are two options on the screen there's eat nothing or down here it actually says eat celery but it is completely blurred out and when you go to click that bubble it actually gets smaller and smaller until you can't click it anymore and i wanted to do this to demonstrate the lack of agency that people that have eating disorders suffer in their own life as well so this game has a lot of illusion of choice but there are two possible endings

these are some steam reviews because i'm going to move on and talk a little bit about the impact that it had on the players as well as the impact that had on me as a creator steam reviews are an interesting place okay i've just picked a few my favorite is the one on the top left that says nine out of ten would depress again i thought that one was quite funny what i was really surprised by were the people that actually ended up playing this game i wasn't sure if it would be played by people that were more mentally healthy or people that had suffered themselves but what i experienced when i released this game because i released it for free there was like no marketing i just put it out there i wanted it to be as accessible as possible and a lot of people that ended up playing the game and then reviewing it said that it helped them feel closer to someone who was experiencing this mental illness which i thought was very beautiful and some people messaged me privately as well to say that they had been shown by their partners or significant people in their lives that had suffered and it just helped deepen

their understanding and even for 20 or 30 minutes like really empathize and understand what was happening which i thought was really really beautiful so it's really used as a tool to help connect people got a little bit more here so as i mentioned earlier of course it helped build empathy in the people that played it one thing that is interesting too is that this game had a much more significant impact on me than i thought it would when i released this game i had to sit down and think if i wanted to come clean about the fact that it's semi-autobiographical because a game like this is lent a lot of credibility when someone who is behind it is actually like standing up and saying yes this is something that i've suffered and i have put my experiences into this game and yes i'm an authority to speak on this subject because i have this lived experience however i knew that doing that would mean that forever i would have to come to terms with the fact that i had suffered from my quite severe eating disorder and i would be opening myself

up to that discussion with so many people all throughout my life and that would just be something that everyone would forever know about me and i think that i finally came to the decision to like commit to it and to put that on the branding of the game because i want to destigmatize these issues as well and it's okay to talk about them and it's okay to recover from them and it's okay to share these experiences with others so it was actually really good for me and it kept me really accountable for my own recovery so releasing this game and making this game actually helped with my recovery which is not something that i expected but is something that i am extremely grateful for so yeah that's your the shortest spiel ever about shrinking pains i hope you enjoyed it and i'm gonna i'm gonna pass it over [Applause]

hi my name is jessica fong and i'm an illustrator co-founder of only egg studio and game director of our first title in the keeper shadow to talk about our work i'm starting from when i was young when i was little my father was often away at work and traveling i was at home balancing my small world against my mother's unpredictable mood and her tiger mother discipline to the outside world she seemed kind and nice the mask that my mother wore was so convincing that few ever thought anything wrong i didn't talk about what happened behind closed doors with no other eyes watching i felt stuck in a limbo resigned to the fact that this is how things have been and always will be early on i had a primal need to draw it was a constant that i could control i drew characters that i liked are ones that i wish to be and a particular girl avatar started to form i could not draw well but it didn't matter because it made sense when nothing else did

in high school an art teacher saw something in the lines that needed to be expressed with a safe space and support i began to build a visual library drawing the things that haunted me to have tangible evidence that what i was feeling living with my mother was valid i did a collection of artwork and story notes of a girl forever wandering a city trying to find reason and purpose behind herself and her cluttered surroundings eventually an investigation into our life spread revelations among our family all of this led to my father mother and i having a confrontation around our dinner table confessions of the years of mental and physical abuse my younger sister and i had enjoyed were met unapologetically by my mother who told my father just be happy you were not there i recall the time she and i were the only ones at home arguing about my academics and i found myself standing in the kitchen holding a knife to my stomach the impossibility of overcoming disappointment and her wishing i had never been born and telling me to go

ahead and do it i had wanted to end my life so badly in that moment to prove the lengths i would go wanting her to be proud or satisfied with me in an incident where my father thought he was having a heart attack after days of arguing with her mother and high blood pressure telling her to call an ambulance and she told him to call them yourself and left him alone his blood had almost turned white when the nurse was able to see him learning of my sister's past with thoughts of suicide all of this was terrifying to us coming to terms with the things that we felt we had needed to handle alone and how close we all came to losing each other and no one the wiser i asked our mother something i had never asked her before do you love us and it was just silence life is war she tells us and no one is on your side telling me that when i am old i will remember and appreciate that i am here because of her as she had for her father people talk about moments where their life ended and began again that was one for me i committed myself to pursuing studio

art in college and i cut myself off from her the writings of christine ann lawson taught me how children of abusive parents can understand and manage in the aftermath i learned from abe arkhoff's publications on the psychology of growth and art history became a never-ending stream of resources and inspiration the memories of people preserved by their artistry i had also grown up with games and i thought that i could translate my visual expressions that had once been a fairly lonely endeavor into a shareable one i started developing concept art game designs and story under the title keeper and the girl i scrolled annotations in every line and margin in my class notebook the girl in my artwork had discovered a new place an experience with plant life and color and one that i had not painted before she was there meeting other characters and she wasn't entirely alone after college i founded lonely egg studio with my partner and we worked on in the keeper's shadow with a small team where my previous keeper in the girl work and personal

experiences would be retold it's an intimate hand-painted adventure game currently in development where you play as a young inquisitive girl named emmy as she explores the crumbling and war-torn city that she's called home the narrative touches on themes of parental relationship and legacy the game focuses on emmy's inner dialogue understanding and grasp of her own agency as the player explores and pushes the narrative momentum forward in the early concepting stage my intention for the game was for it to be a window into my experience of what i remember and how i lived and survived but the creative team noticed uncertainty in the premise they asked whether or not the game story was a one-to-one reflection of what happened to me and to this i was defensive and confused after i had time to think though i felt that repeating the experiences was not the answer to me i don't want to just relive my past there were many nights that i broke down and debated with my partner over this question because it was hard coming to terms with

it because i felt that not portraying the experiences as they were very close to it was somehow betraying my younger me or leaving her behind i realized i was still restricted by the story of what happened in that house with my mother that i had trapped myself in what i knew because it was comfortable what was beyond the walls of that home i saw emmy myself going somewhere and becoming someone the story would draw from and evolve from my past emmy lives in a city partially cared for by a mechanical keeper named idna our team is focused on ways in which idna has a mental control over emmy there are no graphic depictions of violence to the main character and even though those things may have happened to me we felt it did not serve to meaningfully betray the depths of their relationship in the game story our game uses dark surrealism pulling from lovecraftian folkloric and cosmic horror using the idea of the terribly sublime things that hover between being beautiful and unsettling to push the

appearance of it almost being a psychological mindscape outside of a place or time these metaphors could translate my feelings to others better than a true to life betrayal and the gameplay mechanics are tailored around the narrative and symbolic context of each story arc or scene like using a moth to light the darkness or point a click-style examination to find clues solving puzzles and learning more about the world but more important than any specific action is emmy's blossoming confidence and growing agency we shared the game's progress at a local convention and an attendee named audrey a gamer and blossoming creator leaves this message for our team in devs i'm glad there are people brave enough to bring up the concept of mental health into games especially if it's driven from personal experience to those who are unaware it brings the issue into a new light and for those who find specific things familiar it tells them that they aren't alone i have looked hard at myself and found something beautiful to pursue that grounds me while i battle with the things that wish to drown me

it provides a tangible way for me to connect with the world and myself that i can understand i would not be here if not for the support of people in my life and people like our team who strive for better but to those that do not have those privileges the number of voices that we have lost or may lose and settles me i think back to when i was little with no platform to express or belittled from my work and not truly listened to or even put down by peers the line between life and art for me is blurred and i cannot forget that the act of expressing a personal story can be equally if not more important than the product that might result from it i want to support fellow creators as we not just make empathetic games but strive together to build a more empathetic development process thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] so i think you can get a sense that the three of us are trying to tackle some pretty heavy stuff in our games and we are building in fun elements to our game

so that it's not a dour fest uh i'm particularly fond of really bad puns so you will you will laugh at least once or twice when you play our games um why do we need to be talking about this kind of content it is time you know we're seeing cultural shifts we're seeing the emergence of indie games turning into a space with tools that are easy for creators to use to tell biographical stories we're coming on the edge of the wave of depression quest and that dragon cancer there's so many great stories out there stories are what make us human and digital media is the future one thing that makes it a lot easier to get these games out there to have them respected is also that there is a really big push within video games right now i'm sure you're all aware of this but a lot of creators are really trying to get video games recognized as an art form more so than just as a mode of entertainment which is why we mentioned serious games earlier and how an experience can be playable without the

need to be fun and we're seeing a lot of like push and we're seeing a lot of results like you know the baftas just like you know gave out heaps of awards for games which was fantastic and acknowledges that it has a really important place in our societal consciousness as well also there's a lot of research emerging about the empathy building power of games and how unlike more traditional forms of media such as tv television radio where you're passively consuming a narrative in a video game you are actively participating in a narrative and you are that much closer to an experience and you can build empathy a lot more rapidly because of that when you're the one that is living the experience to a certain degree you can get so much closer than when you are just hearing about it or reading it or digesting something else that somebody has already presented for you so if you're looking to find us you can find us on our twitter we're fairly active the three of us and um we would invite you to come to

the wrap up area which is in the west hall overlook 3022 and 3024 is where we'll be if you have questions please bring them to us we're happy to answer them and i hope that you enjoyed our our conversation this afternoon you will be getting your emails with your evaluations if you'd like to see us dive deeper into this next year please rate us accordingly so that we'll be invited back to speak um we actually smashed through this pretty quickly we have a few more minutes than we'd realized i think we have like four whole minutes for questions if anyone wants to i'm assuming that you come to the microphone um if you want to run to the microphone i see one give it up [Applause] hello oh okay so i noticed um amongst the three of you you guys had a really interesting range of um this i sound so weird on this sorry

of artwork being very literal versus being very figurative and i was wondering how do you kind of draw that line and how do you think it affects the player in terms of like like you were saying initially like you didn't want to show a lot of the images because you found them too graphic and stuff um do you think that the the more figurative showing and illustrative style is a little better at guiding the player toward like a healing space or i just want to hear what you're thinking i think for me when we went with the art style i was thinking about my target demographic women over 40 and the kinds of games that they're currently playing um that's one thing that i love about being a developer and a publisher is seeing a lot of different art styles but i felt like this is a nancy drew meets girl with a dragon tattoo i need to stay in that realism space but one of the reasons why i wanted to speak with these two beautiful ladies is because i'm madly in love with their stories and i'm particularly obsessed with this woman's art i love that we can tell

deep meaningful stories with such a range of aesthetic you know it's very effective what she's done in shrinking pains just on the note of shrinking pains quickly i made one big stylistic choice aside from making the details disappear as you play through and that is that we never show the player character's body and i thought this was really important because we didn't want to like romanticize an eating disorder we didn't want to promote that you had to look a certain way or weigh a certain amount to have an eating disorder as well so it's not always just like the figurative versus the literal it's also what you choose to show and what you choose not to show which i think is something that is important to also consider do you want to add to that no we still have a minute and a half like i can't believe we got through three games in half an hour but we have time for one more question oh oh please um that was all wonderful thank you very much for sharing uh such personal things

and um my question is sort of related to what you were just talking about um but maybe more from either research or resources perspective how do you know what might be a trigger i mean some is obvious but the more subtle um of how much you should present and how much while still remaining creative did you have consultants or was there resources that you had thank you very much for asking that question because as ella was speaking i was thinking i forgot to mention that so specifically with us we are also speaking with other rape survivors and people who experience ptsd but as well we are working with counselors to make sure that we're doing our due diligence because i think it's very important when all of us are trying to tackle this content that the people who tell the story is very important but that we're backing it up by knowledgeable resources when we are digging this deep to the human psyche that's something that um so i'm going to jump in here too yeah it's something that could have an entire talk unto

itself as whereas the moral line with creators when we are going through these issues and talking about some really heavy subject material and the reality is you do need to consult with people if you don't have lived experiences and it is hard to know where to draw the line i mentioned that shrinking pains is it's hard to play it's harrowing it's why it's short it's why i don't show the sufferers body but it is something that is likely exceedingly triggering to someone who has had an eating disorder and a big part of that is being really upfront with your content warnings and being honest about what is going to happen in the game and that might just be highlighting everything like very quickly the beginning of the game or having a way that you can access that information easily and it's really down to a case-by-case basis and as i said if you don't have lived experiences obviously consult with people like personally shrinking pains is something that has a lot of my own story in it but more than half the team had suffered from disordered eating so it was a collective effort of our experiences and what we felt was like the core underlying issue when you have

an eating disorder so yeah i think that it is a bit of a case-by-case basis but as long as we approach it with like kindness we can make experiences that are like easier to digest or we can make experiences for art's sake that is harder as long as there is value in it if that makes sense yeah just so well all right so if you'd like to join us for a wrap-up please do and please don't forget to fill out those evaluation forms they really mean a lot to us and thank you for taking the time to come to our talk thank you