My Final Piece is a video game that’s an adaptation of an Aesop’s Fable ‘The Lion, The Boar and The Vultures’. My purpose and methodology for this comes from a lot of different places so I’ll break down exactly what I was attempting and why I was attempting it:
From the age of 12, when I first played the video game Mass Effect 2, I’ve wanted to make video games. At the time I could feel myself being inextricably drawn to the medium without knowing why. My answer came 2 years later with the release of this episode from online video game education show called Extra Credits: narrative mechanics. This concept, and the story they used to tell it, enamored me. The concept of telling story though play, not just having the story play alongside or in between the game mechanics, but having the most fundamental, revolutionary and unique medium of experience: interaction and play being used to tell story, or rather giving the player the tools to tell the story to themselves, it was spellbinding.
I’ve spent years planning and theorizing about narrative mechanics. How interactivity is so engaging that the standard of quality for storytelling in video games can be well bellow other mediums, but not matter. Or how games like Spec Ops: The Line, an adaptation of Hearts Of Darkness, can use the interactivity of video games to put the player in the position of a war criminal, giving me a more harrowing and resonant experience than any film, book or piece of music can do. Simply because instead of you watching atrocities be committed and being told it’s wrong, you are committing these atrocities, you feel how wrong it is. This idea, that games could leave such a personal, profound impact on you that you would learn the lessons that stories have been attempting to teach us since stories were first told: war is bad, death happens to everyone, be compassionate, don’t take life too seriously, don’t lose your integrity.
This concept stuck with me, as I began theorizing that stories are truly what makes are species more than just primates. That humans are the only life form who has sequential and exponential culture, intelligence and society, and the reason for that is stories. We have the ability to pass information down to younger generations and as each generation comes and goes, the volume, depth and quality of that information increases. And the medium for passing information? stories. People (especially young people) will take in much more information if they’re entertained. From tribes telling stories round campfires to religious texts to historical texts to accessible fiction, theater film and now video games. The ability for a story to immerse and entertain and information density has increased with every medium, with video games being the newest, most immersive, most entertaining medium that is able to communicate more information at once then any other medium. It’s because of this rambling theory that i sincerely belive that video games can save the world by educating people. A personal example of this for me would be when I played the game Viva Pinata at the age of 10. The game is a colorful farming simulator where you have a garden and can attract various pinata animals to make residence in your garden. The game was slow paced enough for me to play it and be good at it (as my dyspraxia made playing video games extremely difficult when I was younger (incidentally, my hand-eye coordination has undoubtedly been improved by video games)), this meant that I had a very over-populated digital garden with all the rarest animals. But my favourite animal was a wolf that I named Noah, after myself. At the time I didn’t understand the complexities of the game, such as the individual quirks of the animals, namely, the fact that wolves need a lot of space in their garden. I didn’t have space and so one day, suddenly, my wolf began to leave my garden. I completely freaked out as I was helpless to stop it from leaving. Within the game, when animals leave your garden they cry, and so I was weeping and hitting my wolf in attempt to stop it from leaving (because I still had no idea what was happening) and my wolf was crying and as silly as it sounds, I was completely traumatized. I had never felt any loss or powerlessness like that before and I’m certain it made me better prepared for events in my life where I lost something which wasn’t a cartoon wolf.
This idea of video games being a safe space to experience trauma and learn life lessons has been briefly talked about in the games industry but not extensively and with the acknowledgment of the implications this could have for the future of the medium. What has been researched more is how video games can be used in the classroom, with the most recent data showing that the addition of video games raised a pupils grade by an entire letter grade. This is undeniable proof of how interactivity is the best method for teaching, and linking with my previous theory, why can’t that same rule apply for ethics and morals?
That was the inception of my idea for this first video game. Aesop’s fables, while having been adapted into perfunctory point and click adventure games, have never had their morality lessons adapted to the medium of play. Aesop’s fables are some of the oldest and most enduring moral lessons in existence and I felt that if I’m going to try and teach a moral through play, why not start with the Classics? Brief aside, my mother is currently getting her PHD in anthropology and evolutionary psychology, and through osmosis I’ve absorbed a lot of this topic, namely Game Theory and how this field of mathematics is affected by human cooperation and biological self serving imperatives, a zero sum game as it were. this made deciding the fable I was going to adapt very easy when I came across The Lion The Boar and The Vultures, the story of which is perhaps the oldest example of a zero sum game, where the titular Boar and Lion realise that fighting for water will leave them both dead, the only way to win is to not fight.
After deciding this was the fable I was going to adapt, i then started the process of planning how I would adapt the moral into the medium of play. First I decided that the game needs to be two player, so that, just like the fable, two individuals have to agree on not fighting. As young as games are, there’s still an established language that people subconsciously follow, and so I decided to make my game a fighting game, or rather a subversion of a fighting game. Where the game will suggest to both players that they are supposed to fight each other when in reality the only way to succeed is to not fight and drink instead. I designed the game so that both players have to decide not to fight if they want to win, if neither players stops fighting or just one player keeps fighting, both players will lose. Though I don’t tell the players this, so where they think it’s a fighting game upon first looking at the game, it is actually a cooperative puzzle game where both players have to work together to work out how to win, ensuring that if they win they have learnt the moral. My animator/artist Harry Coke is a genius and so was able to draw whatever I asked for within days of me asking,I wouldn’t have been able to make this game without him. Cooperation triumphs again.
Making a video game is something I’ve literally dreamed about for almost a decade. Working Men’s College gave me the opportunity to put my years of day dreaming to use. I realised that all that time that had once been wasted was now vital as I managed to adapt to problems that would stop other first time developers. I say with utter seriousness that making this video game, having made my video game, I know that this is what I’m supposed to do with my life. To try and teach empathy through play.
Redneck Aliens 