Leah Isobel is tapping into the future of play during the annual Game Development Conference, which takes over the Moscone Center this week. This first installment takes a look at incoming games with a social message. Stay tuned for more of her reports.
Nonprofit organization Day of the Devs, which was cofounded by the storied San Francisco-based game studio Double Fine, held a Sunday showcase event in which indie developers in town for this week’s annual Game Development Conference could show off their work for curious players. As I walked the floor, I was impressed by Take Us North, an early-in-development game from the studio Anima Interactive that gamifies the experiences of migrants and asylum-seekers attempting to cross the US-Mexico border.
I was struck by the application of video games—which multiple politicians have blamed for violent and antisocial behavior—towards educational and empathetic ends.
“We are collaborating closely with migrants with lived experience, with anthropologists and experts in migration, in order to ensure that we’re honoring migrants who have gone on the trail,” Karla Reyes, the studio’s creative director, told 48hills. “We’re trying to take a human approach to these stories and capture the nuance and complexity behind them.”
Take Us North features several different systems to articulate the multivalent experiences that migrants encounter on their journeys. The game’s segments incorporate survival and stealth elements as players navigate a group through the dangers of the Sonoran desert, with limited inventory space for first aid supplies and border patrol agents lurking in the background.
Portions of the game are broken up by narrative elements, as characters rest and share their stories with each other—its team conducted interviews with immigrants to ensure the project’s experiential accuracy. Gameplay is wrapped up in an approachable art style featuring warm, flat shading and low-polygonal 3D models.
“We want to balance this tension—you have to navigate this really treacherous terrain, extreme heat, extreme cold at night, limited food and water, evading border patrol—with meditation and reprieve,” says Reyes. The studio seeks to counter simplistic mainstream narratives around immigration, and after receiving early support from Microsoft Xbox, Cinereach, and Clever Endeavour Games, is planning a Kickstarter campaign to fund the game’s production.
“There’s such a myriad of different issues and a complex web we’re trying to capture. So all of this nuance that you don’t really read about in mainstream media, we want to be able to show,” explains Reyes. “Empathy, really, is what we’re trying to foster.”
Help us save local journalism!
Every tax-deductible donation helps us grow to cover the issues that mean the most to our community. Become a 48 Hills Hero and support the only daily progressive news source in the Bay Area.
Educational, empathetic video games came up again the following day as I spoke with Jonathan Lau, who works on creating augmented and virtual-reality tours for the San Francisco Chinese Historical Society, at the Bay Area Developers’ Collective lunch meetup. When I asked how he first became interested in VR, he told me about a game idea he’d been unable to get funding for. In it, players would be able to explore a virtual recreation of an asylum-seeker’s lost home.
“To me, it was a way to learn about other people’s lives,” Lau said.
Both Lau and Reyes are interested in using tech to tell people’s stories in ways that are interesting and respectful. Lau’s proposed VR game would have focused on relatability—it’s hard to think of a more intimate or human experience than walking through another person’s house.
“I think showing how people’s lives were normal before the trauma happened is also valuable,” he said. “A lot of what I saw in VR was suffering porn. And I don’t think that’s the only use for VR, or for gaming.”
Later on Monday, I attended a talk by Spencer Bambrick, a developer whose game Bird is slated for release later this year. Bird was developed in collaboration with Darrell Fair, an activist and artist who has been incarcerated in Illinois for nearly 30 years.
Fair has maintained that the confession that led to his incarceration was coerced via physical and emotional torture, a claim that the state itself found credible in 2013. Yet despite this, Fair is still incarcerated.
After reading Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow—specifically, its quote from Iris Marion Young comparing structural racism to a birdcage—Bambrick set out to make a game that would explore issues of mass incarceration and the prison-industrial complex.
He learned about Fair’s case after seeing his art in a gallery dedicated to work by incarcerated artists. “His art spoke to me the most, so I reached out to him first, thinking he would be one of many [subjects],” Bambrick said when I interviewed him on Tuesday. “But we connected and he was really into the project. So I decided to make him the focus [of the game].”
In Bird, players walk around a blank, white space, learning about Fair’s memories via his art and clips of his phone calls with Bambrick. Each memory that a player views helps to fill out an illustration of a birdcage; when all the memories are viewed, the cage is complete and the bird inside can be freed, leaving behind one feather.
During his talk, Bambrick explained, “The feather was Darrell’s own idea to include, and it represents the piece of him that will always be trapped in the prison system.”
He then played a clip of the game showing the player walking through a room full of feathers, each one symbolizing a person like Fair who is stuck in the system.
Bambrick said that he believed that games can tell stories like no other medium can.
“With games, you have this element of participation… Because you’re participating in a more locked-in way than almost any other medium, it gives you the opportunity to engage your players on a deeper level,” he said in our interview.
He hopes that the interaction that happens when players hear Fair’s words and see his artwork firsthand will prompt them to learn more about Fair’s story specifically and about the prison system more generally.
“The whole point of Bird is to start with the story, and then expand it out into the data. Start small with this one person’s incredible story, build out into this wider issue of incarceration,” Bambrick said.
And the next steps? “In terms of action, [I encourage players to] look into these organizations that are actually helping people.” He specifically shouted out The Exoneration Project, which has been representing Fair in his legal battle against the state of Illinois.
While we spoke, I brought up what Lau said about “suffering porn” and recalled that during Bambrick’s talk, he mentioned that one of his goals was to do “the most good” and represent Fair’s story as accurately as possible. I asked him how he might know if he avoided that particular pitfall.
“I don’t know,” he responded with a laugh. “I definitely am cognizant of it, though. We don’t want to leave players feeling beaten down. My question is, can something like this encourage or inspire, or lead directly to action?”
He pointed to Becoming Homeless, an interactive experience created by Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab as a part of their broader studies on whether or not VR experiences can foster empathy.
“They built that game to see if it would encourage folks to volunteer or to sign petitions to increase the likelihood of affordable housing,” Bambrick said. “And the short results of that kind of research is, if you do it well, it can.”
