Unravel: Using Empathy as a Game Mechanic

[Music] my name is Marvin I am the creative director at cold wood and I made a game called unravel and I will be talking about this today first off just a quick summary of what unravel is for those of you who might not know unravel is a game about love and about the bonds between people and it uses yarn to represent those things and the premise is that were bound to the things we love we were literally bound to the things that we love and when we loose them we start to unravel and the goal is to help someone whose life has come apart they're in pieces and you are the red thread that ties all those missing parts back together and it's most definitely not a

power fantasy you play this tiny little creature in a big and dangerous world and you got lots of heart but beyond that you're not really that powerful you're just doing what you can to help because it's the right thing to do and you don't get to save the world either you're just helping someone deal with their pain and loss so it's not this like big extravagant doomsday plot but it is something that we can recognize because we all get lonely and we could all use some help reaching out sometimes so we can empathize with that and that's really what it's all about empathy you do nice things because it's it's the nice thing to do so you might not get to

be traditionally powerful but you get to do some proper good and I think that's pretty powerful in its own way and I think games in general are really powerful things they can make a huge impact the bonds that they make with the audience are super strong they just it can absorb our attention for hours and hours and take us places and transport us into an experience and they can be emotional and inspiring and educational and provocative and beautiful and very intensely so and games let us see things from new perspectives they give us a chance to walk in someone else's shoes and share their experiences and the way that they totally immerse us in a situation can help give us a deeper understanding of it so games can be

great at inspiring empathy it can also be kind of crap at it too often I think game is settled for Less they they choose distraction over deeper engagement and and too often they just don't have anything interesting to say or anything nice to say or perhaps even worse sometimes when they do have something good to say when they do have an important message they kind of say it so clumsily that people just stop listening and I've made a ton of pointless games like that games that I'm not necessarily proud of and I was fed up with it I wanted to make something that was meaningful and enriching something that

might be a positive influence because I believe that games do influences our culture shapes us as much as we shape it and whatever impact our game might have as a simple or insignificant as that might be I wanted it to be something positive but I also knew that we had to do it kind of gently so that it wouldn't just put people off because whenever we sense that there's a message there we tend to get kind of defensive it's almost like we've been kind of conditioned to resist messages and I wanted to tell the story about love and empathy but I didn't want to talk about it necessarily I just wanted it to be something that you felt that you understood kind of intuitively so in unravel we try to turn empathy into a game mechanic or maybe that's

kind of like the wrong word for it I don't know but but the whole purpose and the point of the game was was to inspire empathy and I figured that the best way to do that was actually to get just a little bit mean because first we give you this this irresistible sweet thing just this this absolutely gorgeous game that just immediately draws you in and it's so friendly and it's charming and it's inviting and I mean I'm sorry for like bragging but it really is it's super beautiful and the atmosphere is just magical and it's full of details and there's this cute endearing little character and I wanted you to fall in love I wanted you to fall head-over-heels in love with it at first sight and then

just turn everything around and snatch all that loveliness away and just like rip up all that sweetness rip it to shreds and just drop you down the deepest darkest hole it's cruel but I mean I wanted to break your hearts I wanted to push you to the point of nearly giving up just because then we could make it all right again at the end you emerge from that darkness into a life that just feels redeeming everything we took away we give it all back again but better and lovelier and friendlier so he wanted maximum contrast moving from the lowest of the low to the highest of the high and just moments before every single step was a struggle and then you suddenly find yourself flying and those sharp turns between light and dark it

made a real impact you suffer in the dark parts because you remember what the light was like we gave you something beautiful to lose we made sure that you lost it and then when your amended again you can appreciate what it means to behold because you know what it's like to be broken and for some that experience was quite profound but it only works if people care so how did we make them do that step one was to give people someone to care about of course and not the typical hero but someone vulnerable someone that would need their help to get through this journey I wanted players to feel protective like they were leading this character instead of just following or observing and to make that work that

character yarny had to feel like a real living breathing thing something that was more than just pixels and looks were a big part of that I don't think that's a rule like it's not like more realistic visuals necessarily makes things more relatable but in unravel it definitely helped one of the core themes of the game is that you're tethered to the things that you love and the further away from them you get the weaker you become and we wanted players to be able to like actually see that to see yarny unraveling in this like vivid almost like gory detail loosing loop after loop of yarn and gradually just wasting away and really suffering so that when players saw that they fell compassion they feel bad about seeing that little creature hurting and and they were here to set things right so realism really helped us set the

right tone it helped us get people in the right mindset unravel tells this story without words or mostly without words anyway so yarny doesn't actually speak but still has to be able to say a lot there is lots of discussion early on about the character design people worried that it might not be expressive enough so so I used the yarn in the home that I made before it it shows just how much you can say through body language and the cool thing about body language is that it's always on every single animation or lack of animation says something about the character so the way yarny stumbles after a long jump for instance or or struggles to clamber over a Ledge it's it's quite endearing and it builds the character and we wanted to enforce this idea that you were playing as someone rather small and weak that nothing you did should be easy we did

tweak it though because it has to be fun to play as well so he already got progressively more and more capable but we still wanted to enforce that notion that that like you're not a superhero you're a fragile little thing on a really dangerous quest and we had to let your knee have some fun sometimes as well and be just a little bit silly but there was one big rule that it couldn't turn cartoonish that was like a super important rule everything had to stay dignified because I think it is difficult to empathize with someone if you don't take them seriously and situational awareness was incredibly important as well like whatever happened yarny had to react to it like a living intelligent being so if there's a point of interest your knee looks at it and when you swing on your yarn there's ragdoll to give you proper weight and there's water you can see your knee kind

of wading through it and when you get out of the water you only fix the water off and like when you land hard after a jump you see like this little stumbling steps and there are tons and tons and tons of contextual animations and physics tweaks throughout the game for all kinds of different animations our animator some Aldo and the shock of my Clint who made all the code they just like did a beautiful job of bringing yarny to life and you only had to react emotionally as well let me see if I can play this video we wanted players to feel what yarny was feeling so we had to communicate that so we use the thing called mood zones these artists defined areas where we could swap out any part of your knees move set for a more emotionally charged version so here when the lightning strikes in a minute or in a second you can see how

the mood changes from the neutral to a more worried and scared version and we use those moods sounds a lot both in like subtle and more dramatic ways and this is from the darkest and and most desperate level this is this constant battle against the wind and if you if you leave the light there you're gonna freeze to death and every time the wind picks up you can see yarny struggling or or stumbling if you're facing the other way and then that lamb when you pull it along with you it's meant to feel like you're dragging your whole past behind you so we made it look really really heavy and the lamp is your only safe spot in the level so so it has its own moon zone as well so when you stand close to it you can see yarning kind of warming up huddling closer to it and you can see the snow starting to

melt off as well and without all of those animations levels none of this would have worked at this level would have been pretty much pointless but because your knee looks and acts like a real living being it works and it works really well and once again about looks really obsessed with this the game world of unravel had to be fiercely lovely one one look at it should be enough to draw you in and keep you in I went in that first impression of the game to be like a gut punch she's just dropping you into this achingly beautiful place that's full of love and sadness and and so many memories and the goal was to create a place that that felt like home like a place to love and to come back to so we wanted realism but but above all we wanted to capture how things feel not just how they look and we put the camera really low away down a ground level so

you can get super close to everything and see and appreciate just how beautiful even the most ordinary things can be I mean want to saturate every area with detail so the world looked alive and lived in and so that the world could tell stories unravel is a game about mending broken bonds and things like that don't happen without effort so the gameplay had to reflect that things had to be a little bit difficult so you had to face some real dangers we wanted it to feel like a real accomplishment when you got to the end but we had to balance it so we wouldn't scare everyone off so what we did was we try to make things seem harder than they really were near misses and narrow escapes are very useful if a chase ends with a narrow escape then then that excitement that last-minute excitement is the only thing to remember I wouldn't say we always got it right we

didn't in sight is probably a better example if you want to like see how to use narrow escapes but we kind of made it work and also a note on danger in general I guess death is like the most common fail state in in games like this but it kind of sucks as a tool when you're trying to build empathy for your character if you just keep killing it all the time it's okay if it happens sometimes it can even be a good thing but if it happens too frequently then players just get emotionally detached so you can't ever treat your character like it's disposable what we did was that we try to fetishize that a bit instead so when it did happen they would have maximum impact like death shouldn't be used just as a quick reset it should be like a WoW moment or a cringe moment it should make you react and feel like oh dear what did I do to that for a little thing like as weird as it sounds to say

death has to be a rewarding and as much as we love brutal challenges and cruel deaths we also had to leave space for things just to be nice sometimes I had to give you some breathing room places where everything was just lovely and peaceful places where you didn't have to figure anything out or wonder what might come next places that were just there for you to enjoy the game does get progressively darker but we still give you these little moments every now and then of hope sweetness just to keep your spirits up so we went through all those steps to try to make people care we had had their attention and and what would we do with it how would we get our message across especially since we wanted to tell the story without words well it's important to remember that unravels story was meant to be more like a painting or a

poem than a film or a comic I had certain Myton things in mind when I was writing it but I try to move away from the details and focus on the themes instead I didn't want there to be one correct interpretation I just I just wanted to inspire people to think for themselves and and hopefully it would make them feel good things and I think that it did so what we did was just trying to fill the world with details and things that would inspire stories you could say it's like scattered notes that you could just pick up and find and arrange into music yourselves and and speaking of music unravels soundtrack was so important for the story Freda you want some and panic oh yeah they did an absolutely amazing job creating the music music one of the team members joked that I all we really needed to do together an emotional reaction was just like slap some violence on it and people

are gonna cry and and I think turns a little bit more to it than that but he's not entirely wrong either the whole purpose of unravel stories to inspire certain emotions and and to make people think and music is just a beautiful tool to do that it's kind of like a one-two punch combo with gameplay music and gameplay one is the setup and the other is the knockout because game gameplay gives us a super direct way to control the players emotional journey if you take a scene like this one the kite flight for instance it's just it's bound to make you smile even the first iteration we had when the gameplay was like super bland it still worked emotionally it still made people smile because it feels light feels fun it's maybe a little bit thrilling as well it's like we have this big happy button we can just press to make people happy and and I guess we

press the nostalgia button quite a bit as well like this scene from the summer garden of your childhood and now it's all unkempt and overgrown and old and full of these links to the past that you lost and and using nostalgia and sentimentality it's a balancing act because it can easily end up just drivel but I think at least I hope we stayed on the right side of okay and I think it's worth trying because it is something that everyone can relate to in their own way it's it's a universal thing but it still feels personal I'm pressing the unhappy button works pretty well too and it's so easy to use actually it's kind of almost too easy I mean it's not that hard to make someone's scared or worried or anxious it's like kicking in an open door I prefer to try to make people happy and and not just like happy happy

but profoundly happy and we just used all that negative stuff in unravel as a means to enhance the positive stuff we needed that contrast so things had to get a bit dark at times and sorry for that but it was it was necessary and I'm not sorry about the mosquitoes if you played the game you probably hate these things and you should because they're meant to be annoying because sometimes messing with you is the best way to get the right reaction to me that level is basically me as a kid picking berries with my mom and being like cold and wet and miserable and getting eaten alive and generally hating things but it's I was also learning that good things don't come easy and that when you get past the hard part the effort sweetness the reward and I mean I know it sounds like something I would know you put on a card

but it's still true and it applies to a lot of things and getting rid of those mosquitos at the end of the level it feels like sweet relief it wouldn't have felt like that without the pain before or like you know in our later level where there's this big huge noisy grinding churning booming roaring machine let's just get louder and louder and progressively through the level when you finally shut that thing down the silence feels like an embrace it's so sweet it's that contrast that makes it good so don't worry too much about the flow state because it's alright to mess with people sometimes but you can't push it too far it didn't it didn't always work everything wasn't balanced

perfectly in the game we should have tested more I know for instance like my son kept God he got to a section on the last level were yarn each is kept dying repeatedly it was one of those sections that was meant to feel really dangerous but not actually meant to be that dangerous I think he might have stumbled onto a bug I'm not sure but up until didn't and then he'd had like this perfect journey he seemed to feel just exactly what I hoped that he would feel but then you come to a section like that and takes you completely out of the illusion and once you lose someone like that you can't really count on winning them back luckily I think we did but I mean you you can't count on it so it's a fine balance and you have to test a lot constantly much more than what we did so you you can't test too much it's really so it wasn't perfect but the good thing

is when it worked it really worked we've heard back from so many players who have had super strong reactions to the game I know I joked that that like the the purpose of the game was to make people call their mothers and and I mean that happened and it's not like half of what happened it's like it's humbling to hear just how much the game has meant to some people and how deeply it has affected them it probably wasn't that profound for everyone but still it's just it's surreal to think that our little game did some actual proper good for people and unravel was just our first attempt at it we were learning and making up the rules as we went along and we're only going to get better we're gonna try harder to make games that matter and we're just one small part of this movement to games could have huge impact if we make it so and I think we need

that impact now more than ever because the world has turned into a really scary place lately there are all kinds of wrongs out there that need to be set right and no games won't fix all that I mean as much as I would like them to games won't crush fascism at least not on their own but someone has to and maybe we could help tip the scales in the right direction because we do have a platform we have a voice and it's our responsibility to use it through our games we can talk to literally millions of people reaching out is easier now than it ever was and I I just can't see how we could not try to use that voice for something good there's zero harm in trying and maybe we can actually make a difference because I think that game do affect us we know that people who

play games are much more likely to have lucid dreams for instance you know the dreams that you can control and I have those things a lot dreams that would be like horrible nightmares but I always seem to find a way to win I don't know why that is but I think it's because people who play games expect every problem to be solvable we always want there to be a solution and we refuse to give up until we've found that solution and we eventually figure out how to overcome any difficulty and that's a beautiful way of looking at things and if games can do that if they can change how we dream and how we think what's to say that they can't change how we act that's pretty powerful and it's definitely an opportunity and it would be nice if more of us try to make something good out of that opportunity thank you for listening

I do think we have time for like some questions if people have questions we have like three minutes sure hi beautiful game I'm rebel I haven't played it but so it's a beautiful game what I got from this is that unravel is a game about empathy for oneself so you play this game and probably you project yourself onto I don't remember yarny and so this is a game that helps you probably self heal it probably was a healing journey for you as well maybe people can empathize with the Creator as well those are all facets of the empathy expose here what I

would ask you is if in the future you are thinking of fostering empathy for strangers so actually using empathy in multiplayer context because of course saving the world or impacting the world starts in oneself you have to empathize with yourself you have to love yourself before you can love others but like deeper change in the world is born from empathy with strangers in general so I wonder if you could elaborate on this and if you if this is something on your mind do you want me to repeat the question or or actually I'll just say this yes it's true to say that that the first the the this game is very much about building empathy for for yourself and those close to you and if there was

one thing that I could like add to it and and improve on it it would be just that to expand that circle and to include more people in that feeling of empathy to make sure that you know build solidarity build you know teach people to be nice teach people to be inclusive so yes I would do exactly that yeah thank you okay thank you this looks a stunning game I have to say I can imagine this could be very good for developing empathy for young children and with that in mind you're going to produce this for Google Play or IRS sorry are you going to reduce this product for Android it's it's not that it's not really for me to say because I'm not the most technically minded person I certainly wouldn't mind like

every platform we can be honest it's nice just make it more accessible for young children yes device but okay thank you hi I just wanted to ask for a game whose narrative is so strongly visual what was the writing process like did it involve lots of storyboarding or photography or mood boards or a combination of all different sorts of elements photography was very much a big part of it it sort of started with how the concept was created I was basically I mean I don't know if you've heard this but I was out camping in the woods and and made this little doll and just ran around with it and started taking pictures of it doing strange things because I didn't have any other tools except for camera and what I could find so photography was always like a big

part of the process and since the whole thing about family bonds was was also such like an important part right from the start I actually like started with our photo albums so a lot of the content was not actually created for the gamers which is things that I found that felt appropriate and so so it was more yeah I don't know that I'm rambling a bit but it was pretty much like my photo album and scissors and lots of glue I appreciated what you said about building games that matter this is something that's been on my mind for the last few years and I wondered if you have been able to find any communities or groups that connect around these topics that

that you'd be able to point out I'd love to join the conversation in the broader sense of the gaming community if that's something you know I feel like it's it's animal movement within the entire gaming community right now and I think that's a really beautiful thing that people are trying to be more inclusive and trying to be more responsible about what they make so what I can't point you to a specific thing I know there are some but I can't figure them out right now up here but yeah I mean it feels like the entire industry is shifting towards that and it makes me really happy to see that that people care more about what they make and care more about the impact of what they make absolutely thank you and thank you for making this game thank you I guess that's all we have time for so thanks a lot for coming [Applause]