Death by Video Game: Tales of Obsession From the Virtual Frontline (26 page)

The game has no win condition: you cannot evade a broken heart and, once you’ve been kicked out of your home, your only choice is whether to collect healing relationships, or dodge them and remain broken-hearted. Without Reid’s backstory, it’s a game you’d probably ignore, but with context, it’s a powerful illustration of his experience. But Reid didn’t make the game for us. He made it for himself and, crucially, for his mother.

‘To this day I’m not sure if my mother played it,’ he says. ‘I doubt she has. But I took a printout of some press coverage of the game to dinner with my father. He’s never really been that interested in my games. But when he found out
Dear Mother
was about my mum, he read the article. It opened up a conversation. I’d broken a big rule in our family—to never discuss my mother’s failings or abuse outside of the home.’

Reid wanted his mother to play the game in order to understand, most simply, how her actions had affected him. But he did so knowing that it was unlikely she would take an interest. As such, he also made the game for his own benefit.

‘By making
Dear Mother
, I was able to finally say goodbye to someone who had been a constant source of abuse, and I was able to open the door into how I felt, without having to tell anyone directly,’ he says. ‘I was able to move on, having distilled my feelings into the game, and allowed people to walk a mile in my shoes by handing them a set of controls and a window into my life.’

Reid found the experience so worthwhile and helpful that he has continued to make games as a way to examine and work through things that happen to him. He is currently working on
OCDEMONS
, a game about his experience of living with OCD and
experiencing cognitive behavioural therapy in order to minimise the disorder’s negative effects on his life.

‘Every time I finish one of these games, I feel like I can take that issue, that part of my day-to-day that harms me, and breathe it out,’ he explains. ‘It’s a way to take all the trials of life and turn them into a series of mechanics, both to deal with my pain in the way my artistic leanings allow me to, and to have people go “Wow, that was hard,” so I can turn around and say: “Yeah, it was.” ’

It’s not only independent creators who are willing to externalise their struggles in this way.
Papo & Yo
is a fantasy adventure game released in 2012 that was part-funded by Sony Computer Entertainment. The game was created by a team of developers led by creative director Vander Caballero, who, at the start of the game, dedicates the work to ‘my mother, brothers and sister, with whom I survived the monster in my father.’

Papo & Yo
begins with a rooftop chase, your schoolboy character pursuing a girl through streets filled with the mundane—wilting plants in terracotta pots, discarded footballs—but underpinned by heavy magic. Arcane symbols chalked on walls conjure staircases where there were none, while concrete walls peel back to reveal bright, ethereal nooks and cellars.

Move a discarded box two feet to the left and the building in front of you might just move in kind. It’s the kind of awesome power that only a child would apply in such a modest manner—creating pathways through the city where there were none in order to win a game of chase. It’s innocent and beguiling, and it acts as a metaphor for the greater message: a boy trying his best to navigate and change the landscape of an indifferent, harsh environment.

Soon enough you meet the monster that represents Caballero’s
father’s alcoholism, a lumbering, ugly giant who is entirely docile at rest, but who becomes enraged when he licks one of the frogs that pepper the game world.

The story is lightly told, the cut-scenes sparse, and the dialogue fleeting. Every so often, the director breaks to a flashback, a scene that makes clear the tragic consequence of his father’s addiction in real life. But the gentle tone elsewhere ensures that the moments when the elephant in the room is addressed are all the more affecting.

‘He cannot control himself,’ says the boy after the monster’s first uncontrollable rage—one part statement of fact, one part defence.

‘There is a cure,’ says his companion, a young girl.

‘Cure? How?’ he asks her.

‘Only you can cure the monster.’

‘But I don’t know anything,’ he pleads.

It’s unclear whether the scene is supposed to be a conversation between the boy and his conscience—that hopeful, yearning side to any child who lives with a parent who cannot control their demons. But this is inescapably a game about a child trying to save the unsaveable, assuming a confused role and an impossible task that no child should ever have to take on, and yet which so many do.

When asked by a journalist why he chose to turn his experiences into a game, Caballero said: ‘It was my love for games, I think. When I was a kid and going through difficult times, games actually saved me. It was the only space where I could be in control and experience safety, and predictability in a way. Everything outside was crazy.’

As with
That Dragon, Cancer
, there’s a sense of discomfort when playing
Papo & Yo
. You have been invited into a cathartic exercise (Caballero’s therapist even makes a cameo in the game). When film directors work out their grief, anger, or resentment on
the screen, you spectate. With
Papo & Yo
, you participate in this therapeutic endeavour, and while that can lead to a sense of disquiet, it also elicits empathy as you enter into the healing process.

For Green, Reid, and Caballero, game-making has been a way to externalise their experiences, a way, perhaps, to recreate the situation in virtual form so that it can be examined, replayed, maybe even controlled. It seems clear that the medium’s power is not only in allowing us to experience the world from another’s perspective, but also in providing us with a way to replay our own experiences in order to better understand them, much like a patient in a psychotherapist’s chair, revisiting past moments in a safe place.

If video games are able to help us to understand complex systems and positions in life that are different to our own, it’s logical that some would try to use them as a way to make sense of their grief and trauma and to invite others into their experience. The creators of
Papo & Yo, Dear Mother
, and
That Dragon, Cancer
have decided to make their games public. In this way and to different degrees of vulnerability—and, arguably, success—they share their burden, life, and story with others.

But therapeutic game-making is not only a performative art. In some cases, it’s both deeply personal and entirely private.

In the autumn of 2006, the game designer Brenda Romero suffered what she describes as a severe assault. In the weeks following the attack she lay numb in bed.

‘I chain-watched
Grey’s Anatomy
because I couldn’t think,’ she said during a talk entitled ‘The prototyping of tragedy’ delivered at the 2011 Game Developers Conference, the only time that she has
spoken publicly, albeit in brief, about the attack. Her mind, she recalled at the time, was immobile in the shadow of one unanswerable question: ‘Why the
fuck
would someone like that do something like this to someone like me?’

After a while lying with the pain and confusion, she began to tackle the question in the only way that she knew how: through game design.

‘I didn’t want to live with this thing in me, so I started to explore pain and evil as a system,’ she tells me. ‘I started designing a video-game level in my head. I thought maybe this would help me to understand.’

That Romero would try to make sense of her trauma within the framework of a game is, she says today, entirely understandable.

‘When you join the games industry at the age of fifteen, it’s the way that you make sense of the world. If I were a musician I might write a song. If I were a writer I might write an article. But I am a game designer: I
have
to process systemically.’

As the weeks passed, more games began to come to Romero, games that sought to explain the systems that drove the world’s tragedies and injustices both contemporary and historical: the slave trade, Oliver Cromwell’s invasion of Ireland in the seventeenth century and that most imponderable of all humanity’s great blights: the Holocaust. Her suffering seeded in her a new approach to game design, a hopeful way to make sense of the senseless.

Then, in 2009, she played
The Path
, a psychological horror game inspired in part by the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale, and another of the art games released by
Endless Forest
creators Tale of Tales.

‘There’s a part in the woods when a guy walks up to you,’ she recalls. ‘The only thing I could think was: “Fuck, I am going to get raped.” ’

It was a feeling that Romero had not experienced in a video game before.

‘It was a painful and repellent trigger,’ she says now, ‘but for reasons I don’t recall, I didn’t shut down and shut out. For some reason, I stayed there and felt through it … and I began to feel some kind of relief, some kind of peace.’

Romero has been working on video games for most of her life. She joined Sir Tech, a developer based in Ogdensburg, a small dairy town on the outskirts of New York, in 1981 at the age of fifteen. Romero—née Garno—spent the next twenty years working at the company, first manning the tips phone line to give gamers who were stuck in one of the company’s games guidance, and later as a game designer and programmer. In 1987, she met John Romero, the co-creator of the seminal first-person shooter
Doom
and the man who, twenty-five years later, she would marry.

Just one year before the attack she spoke about at the 2011 Game Developers Conference, Romero was working on a crass
Playboy
game. A few years later,
Train
, Romero’s board game about the systemic and systematic extermination of the Jews in Nazi death camps, was celebrated by a rabbi as a work of Torah, a part of the canon of Jewish teaching and culture. She has become game designer in residence at the University of California, Santa Cruz’s Center for Games and Playable Media. But despite all of this success, today, after she returns home from her day job at the social-game company Loot Drop, which she co-founded with her husband in 2010, she works on
Black Box
.

‘It’s the game with which I wanted to first understand evil
systems and the bad things that happen to us,’ she says, a ‘Ground Zero’ game, from which all of the others have sprung.

Black Box
is the last of a suite of six deeply personal games, which Romero groups together under the title ‘The mechanic is the message.’ Each of the games is a physical creation, something between a board game and an art installation, and in each case the player is provided with a framing narrative, but free to draw their own conclusions.

To date, three have been made public:
The New World
, a game about slavery created in 2008;
Síochán leat
(Gaelic for ‘Peace be with you’), Romero’s 2009 release about Oliver Cromwell’s invasion of Ireland; and, most famously,
Train
, the board game about the Holocaust.

In
Train
, the player is presented with a set of miniature train tracks and sixty small yellow pegs that represent people. The player is asked to efficiently load those people onto the trains. You can follow the rules, if you wish, but maybe you don’t have to. At the point at which the player successfully completes the game, they overturn a card that reveals the train’s destination: Auschwitz. The player’s high of winning is immediately punctured by the stark realisation that they have been complicit in loading Jews into boxcars (one yellow peg represents 100,000 Jews) en route to the infamous concentration camp where 1.1 million were killed in gas chambers or burned in ovens during the Second World War.

Romero researched the Holocaust extensively. Each day during the nine months that it took to design
Train
, she stared at a picture of two boys wearing the Star of David that the Nazis required that Jews wear for identification. She imagined that she was the boys’ mother. She’d mentally straighten their clothes. She’d project.

Most feel shame when they play the game. Some hide, some cry, some attempt to subvert the rules. Holocaust survivors have played
Train
. For Romero, post-2006, tragic subject matter is not taboo.

‘You can’t have human tragedy at any scale without a system,’ she says. ‘And if you give me a system, I can make you a game.’

Some have not shared her point of view. ‘I had people telling me I should fucking leave the games industry,’ she tells me, ‘or that I should be punched in the face, or that they hope I realise how much pain I’ve brought to people.’ Many others, including the rabbi, responded more positively. The game was featured in museums, lauded by educators, and given a Vanguard award at the IndieCade festival for ‘pushing the boundaries of game design and showing us what games can do.’

Having explored human tragedy at the macro scale, now, at last, Romero is circling
Black Box
, the most ‘difficult’ game in the series and the most localised and personal. It’s a game designed to be played one time, by one player. Romero intends to be that player. Once the game has been played, it cannot be played again, although others will be able to view the endgame state.

‘
Black Box
is about the worst experience of my life,’ she says. ‘I am not going to talk about what the game is about; that’s why it’s in a black box. When I finish the game, I may invite several of my friends and explain what it’s about.’

For Romero, these are the games that she has to birth into the world, to get them out of her.
Black Box
has cost more than a thousand dollars to make, and it’s something that cannot be sold. It’s played inside a two-foot-by-two-foot black Plexiglas cube. It sits on a platform and is subtly lit from underneath. ‘When you look inside, you can see forty figures,’ she explains.