Given that I am graduating this semester I knew that what I really wanted to work on would involve grief. Especially since it feels like I am saying goodbye to a lot of my closest friends. I met a lot of people that I really cherish here at Northeastern and I think I went through a small version of the stages of grief where I have not fully processed the loss of everyone yet given that I am still on campus but I am already very aware of the effects that I will experience once I am fully gone. It wasn’t until this semester that it has truly clicked that I am gone after this and I will realistically lose touch with a lot of the people here which is such a shame but also I think part of the reason that processing the feeling of companionship and love are worth feeling at all. To this extent I knew I wanted to do something like marriage where I wanted to present the concept of an idea like grief and similarly to the game and the feeling of grief I want it to be ambiguous until a certain point. I know marriage very early on tells you the point in the title but my experience similarly does it when it reaches its climax.
Jumping into the premise of my game I started out by initially asking people to leave the room when I pitched my idea to a small group of people and then I would ask those who were not there for the presentation to actually play the game. I didn’t want them to enter the game starting with the concept that they were going to lose their buddy because I thought that then the love might be disingenuous to the actual experience that I was going for. People don’t begin to make friends with the thought that they are eventually going to lose them. I would actually be really interested to see what that would look like but that’s not what I was going for. I wanted to present the concept of someone you love being suddenly lost. I did get some feedback that I still think is pretty note worthy like are people going to have enough time to create a bond with an object or would it be better for it to be an object that they already love but if that’s the case how do you represent the aspect of grief without actually taking it away from them. All really good points so I developed three different versions that I would playtest and see which would best represent my goal. I asked people to bring an item that had a strong sentimental value to them, I asked people to make a “buddy” that represented a being that they were really close to and that meant a lot to them and finally I asked the final group to make a buddy that was an item that meant a lot. They would then spend time with their specific buddy doing activities that I thought would present ways to bond with your buddy and bring about closer relationships with all of the players and their buddies.
I had quite a few people playtesting so I will group them here are some of the players bonding with their newly made buddy they had varying time with them
I had varying stories told to me about the buddies that were made hoping that this would expedite the fact that the players would have more affection for their buddies given that some of them are long time friends/favorite foods/favorite extinct animal/most cherished item/ pets/ first item created from a hobby/ a special gift from a loved one. All of these items meant something to the players and I hope that this would make it so that the players would explore the idea that made them love this item and cherish that thing before the next part.
Finally I asked people to return their buddies to me for a while so that I could “use them for the project”. I do think that people suspected that they might lose their buddies but I think what surprised them was the severity of the loss. I sent very gruesome deaths to the players that had returned their buddies to me.
I didn’t show any of them this until after they saw it during the presentation when I had asked one of my players to step up and talk about their experience spending time with their buddies which made it so that it was very gruesome because I thought that it would have the largest impact on the people that created their buddies. A lot of people were very shocked to see the atrocities that had occurred when they participated in my game. I even felt bad as I was really going through the memories that my players had collected and all of the time that they had spent together just to see something that represents something you love be absolutely destroyed in a horrible almost tortuous way. Even the people that hadn’t participated in my game were aghast from the horror of seeing something someone “loves” be destroyed. I had also described to the people that brought me items that meant lots to them the act of me doing horrendous things to their items and they gave me very vivid anger and mournful speeches. I think that makes a lot of sense because these items were irreplaceable unlike the buddies which represented something else. However overall I think people definitely got to experience grief in the way that I was going for so I would definitely consider it a success. I probably wouldn’t run this score or game again because even though I think grief is something that we as humans should be more comfortable with and not necessarily be scared of. I don’t like how heartless it felt to have people forge bonds with something just so I could “take it away” from them. I would absolutely love this game to be continued and expanded upon I dont think it would be me but I would love to see a spin on what I did and some variation that captures the same end goal.
As I mentioned earlier I had some inspiration from marriage for the way that I was executing the concept but the idea of Dys4ia was really nice and although the games themselves are very different the concept or execution I think is pretty similar. I enjoy the fact that it’s the designer putting across their perspective on a certain topic and I wanted to do something similar getting the player to get my perspective not through multiple mini games discussing the topic in various ways but through one long game that makes the player “feel” the experience. I think overall my biggest inspiration was from Blast Theory. I really like a lot of their projects, one of which being Uncle Roy all around you. I like the way that in the midst of what appears to be a fun different game they end up asking serious questions. I wanted to do something that followed that same idea where it appears to just appears to be something more light hearted and fun being the do fun things with this item you love, learn to appreciate it and be more mindful of the time you have with people and aspects of your life because it won’t be that way forever. Then like Uncle Roy I ask the hard hitting question of forcing them to lose this item or thing they love like Uncle Roy asked if you are willing to commit yourself to someone for the next year which I think helps present like the aspect of community and makes people less likely to be depressed or want to take their own lives. Finally I also had some inspiration from Kidnap by Blast Theory. Honestly I could relate my project to a lot of Blast Theory but I specifically like this one for the fact that people were consenting to being kidnapped and they would pay for this “service”. I wanted to attempt something similar with grief but the issue is that I think that loss often comes as a surprise which is what I was going for but I did ask people if they were okay with experiencing some intense emotion which I painted as happiness as in spending time with your buddy. However over all the fact that they made the kidnapping incredibly real to the point where people would ask themselves is this the service I paid for or am I really being human trafficked right now. I would love to go for something similar and have a very serious representation of ask someone to consent to losing someone and then have an extremely realistic sudden death and then bring them back into their life like a month after but again I think very serious issues could arise with that but I would like to see something like that play out.
