Thoughts on Go and Come Back
Yes, this post contains spoilers — and much of what (and who) I’m writing about might not make as much sense without the context of the game.
Who am I? (and my experience with the Sri Lankan civil war)
I am a Sr̶i̶ ̶L̶a̶n̶k̶a̶n E̶e̶z̶h̶a̶m Il̶a̶n̶k̶a̶i Ta̶m̶i̶l̶ ̶A̶m̶e̶r̶i̶c̶a̶n̶.
Ok, none of that is probably that helpful. Hmm… which of my identities is most relevant to this game?
I am a grandson.
Or, to put it less dramatically, I was raised by grandparents when growing up in Central Florida. I try to remember them for how strong and caring they were — for how integral they were to my childhood. But, I also remember them for how they were long past their glory days, gradually losing their language, memories, and identity in a nursing home.
Needless to say, I’ve been long interested in narratively exploring the nursing home experience, perhaps partially so I could understand my grandparents’ final years better. As such, I’ve been eyeing the opportunity to develop a game that features a nursing home setting for a while now; and when I was assigned a visual novel project for my Game Studio I course, I quickly knew what I wanted to do. This isn’t to say that my ethnic identity is completely irrelevant to Go and Come Back, but it’s just that the initial premise of the story is extremely motivated by my experiences with my grandparents.
In some ways, the visual novel medium is quite amenable to depicting nursing home life. The genre is practically infamous for its visually static perspectives, and nursing home life is not too different— especially if you are physically incapacitated.
But as much as it’s inspired by my grandparents and nursing home life, Go and Come Back also significantly features the Sri Lankan civil war — a war that my grandparents had limited involvement with (due to much of the conflict happening a bit after their time in Sri Lanka). The fictional characters’ experiences with the war are more similar to other people in my family.
My mother grew up in the northern part of the island in Jaffna (which used to be the second largest city in Sri Lanka before the devastation of the war) with her cousin Esha, the daughter of the Jaffna mayor Alfred Duraiappah. In 1975, Alfred was shot dead outside of a Hindu temple by masked men. He was among the first few people to be assassinated by the Tamil Tigers — these assassinations ultimately led to the overall rise of the Tigers and all-out war. Understandably, my mother and much of her immediate family held quite a bit of resentment for the Tigers, but there are other people in my family who actually supported and joined them.
Given my family’s complicated relationship with the war, my parents didn’t say much about it while I was growing up far away in Central Florida. There were family members we didn’t talk about, names we didn’t mention, places we didn’t go to. My father encouraged me to assimilate into American culture and urged me to get rid of my accent and speak more English, pushing back against my grandparents efforts to raise a Tamil child. My mom did her best to keep us safe from the past and wanted us to look forward to the future, pressuring us to focus and excel in our academic studies.
Reflecting on my childhood and my grandparents growing older, I wanted to draw a link between personal and historical memory loss. The diasporated silence I grew up with is not at all uncommon, and among many Sri Lankan Tamil immigrant communities, people are hesitant to speak openly about the war (though there are quite a few vocal Tamil nationalists in larger communities). But in this culture of oblivion and silence, people are able to quietly rewrite or re-remember history in a way that supports their own bias. From early on in development, I wanted to metaphorically address this dangerous form of quiet mis-information in Go and Come Back: a game about remembering, even when it is so much easier to forget.
Let me be clear: I have never lived in Sri Lanka long-term, and have not experienced any of the war-time atrocities first-hand. As such, developing Go and Come Back has placed me in a rather awkward position. I’m speaking about a conflict that I can’t fully understand, but also a conflict that has influenced every aspect of my life. There is an inherent powerless frustration to being diasporated, as it makes one bound to distant problems beyond their control or understanding. Yet, it is only natural to harbor strong feelings or opinions about these problem despite being unable to fully “understand.” I tried to channel much of this diasporated frustration when writing for the character Zaheed, and this textual motif of “understanding” is heavily used in the game alongside the more apparent themes of memory and denial.
Who are they? (and linguistic prescriptivism)
The Tamil word for name (பெயார் : /pejaɾ̪/) and person (பேர் : /peɾ̪/) are homophones, so it is only appropriate that this game approaches the topic of remembering people and history through calling back names. The names and people from the game are entirely fictional, inspired by amalgamations of first-hand accounts I’ve collected over the years from listening to family and friends. Despite none of the people being real, some of the names are taken from my real life — most notably Puvaneswary (which was also my grandmother’s given name) and Pathmanathan (which was my grandparents’ surname). The characters with those names were only slightly inspired by my grandparents. I mixed around names from my real life into this work similar to how my grandmother used to scatter and misplace names and identities in her later years. I tried to be thoughtful when naming the characters, keeping in mind that this constituted a major part of the game’s design and difficulty curve. As such, there were certain things I had to especially consider.
Like names from any other part of the world, the names of Go and Come Back carry quite a bit of ethnic information (and considering the circumstances of the war, ethnic tension). Knowing that much of this tension and foreshadowing would be lost on someone not as familiar with Sri Lankan names, I tried to gradually introduce people to basic Tamil phonology through the Tamil lesson. But I also didn’t want Sri Lankan people to immediately know one of the major plot moments (that Loga’s adopted daughter is Nadia Musthapa’s biological daughter), so I spelt some names in ways that wouldn’t reveal crucial information (e.g. Musthapa, not Mustafa — which is more obviously Islamic). Because Yasmina is depicted early on in the game as wearing a hijab, players might be misled into thinking that Loga is a Muslim (which seems to be corroborated by his apparent abstinence from alcohol), and I wanted to preserve this ambiguity and obfuscate the link between Yasmina and the Musthapas for as long as possible.
I also wanted to carry a theme of people having a “proper” full name and a shorter “casual” name. This was primarily intended to balance the difficulty of the game (especially as the majority of players do not have much experience with Sri Lankan names), but also implicitly fights back against the prescriptive notion of “proper” language pervasive in contemporary Tamil culture. This linguistic prescriptivism is more directly depicted in the Tamil lesson sequence, when the concept of “foreign” Vadamozhi (வடமொழி — lit. “Northern Language”) characters are introduced (characters being a double entendre here). In many Tamil education circles, students are encouraged to pursue classical purity in Chenthamizh (செந்தமிழ் — lit. “Pure Tamil”), and Tamil that eschews this purity is often stigmatized (even the Tamil that these students may natively speak). This quest for linguistic purity is amplified in Sri Lanka, as Sri Lankan Tamil, particularly the Jaffna dialect, is often seen as a “purer” form of the language compared to Indian Tamil. This even goes as far as hesitating to use certain characters in the Tamil script due to their association with being foreign. My name, for example, contains the “foreign” sounds sh and j, despite me belonging to a very Sri Lankan Tamil family. Though a more phonetic way to spell this name (and the way that many people — especially Indians — spell it) is கிரிஷான் ராஜரத்தினம் (kirishaan raajaraththinam), I am often told that a more Tamil way to write this name is கிரிசான் இராசரத்தினம் (kirichaan iraasaraththinam), as it avoids those pesky foreign-sounding letters ஜ (ja) and ஷா (shaa) — those letters should only be used to write names or words that are actually foreign.
This push towards linguistic purity and “dravidianization” may be seen as one part reaction to colonialism, and another an attempt to regionally define the Tamil languageas being distinct from Hindi in India, and Sinhala in Sri Lanka — both of which are Indo-European languages with ties to the ultimate vadamozhi: Sanskrit. However, this trend can marginalize and alienate minorities within the Sri Lankan Tamil community — particularly Sri Lankan Moors, who speak a unique dialect of Tamil, and often have names that would be naturally written with quite a few vadamozhi letters. Go and Come Back attempted to frame rampant prescriptivism and an over-glorification of a mythological past defined by classical epics as being a potential road to radical ethnic ultranationalism, while painting a believable picture and context for Loga’s role in the Islamophobic evictions of October 1990. The prescription label dialog box stylization is not just an allusion to the nursing home setting and the role of the player as the drug, but also is meant to serve as a more literal symbol of linguistic prescriptivism.
Who are you? (and what went right)
Towards the end of the game, it is revealed that you, as the player, are actually diegetically acting through the role of a drug named rivastigmine, prescribed to Loga to “help him remember.” This decision to make the audience an active part of the story is largely informed by why I think these types of stories should be told. I think that people who listen to these difficult stories have a duty to not be completely passive, and must be simultaneously respectfully supportive and critical of mis-information. If the disease is historical memory loss and chronic mis-information, then the treatment is documentation through media (with the audience serving as the drug) Like any drug, it can be used to both productive and harmful ends, and requires meticulous responsibility to administer.
I tried to be as responsible as possible when writing Go and Come Back, and sought out to charitably represent a variety of perspectives as best as I reasonably could, with a slight artistic license of course. Sri Lankan people who have played the game have commented on its technical accuracy and plausibility, whereas people who are less familiar with the conflict have praised the game’s ability to explain the conflict, represent the culture, and transport the player to another time and place — all while encoding the whole process through game mechanics. Generally, people have reacted well to the overall arc and resolution, and some even had strong emotional reactions to the game. It seems that most people who get through the game are able to understand, by and large, the overall narrative — and quite a few people are able to latch onto the themes of memory, denial, and understanding . Stepping away from the writing, I’ve also received some praise for the choice in music (despite the current version of the game not having an OST — instead featuring instrumental covers of 1950’s WD Amaradeva classics by Nimesh Herath).
What question should I even write here? (and what went wrong)
One major problem I’ve faced with the game ever since I first demo’d it in September 2019 is that of attrition. Many people are able to start the game, but a solid majority of people lose interest before even getting past the second name. Many of the players who’ve played the game in its entirety compliment the game on its pay-off, but quite a bit of this is built up on slow, comparatively tedious set-up and build-up. I’ve recently since attempted to address this issue by making the game exclusively downloadable (as I think that a browser-based game invites and encourages distraction and attrition), but I do not yet have enough data or feedback to see if this has improved things.
Additionally, people who identify as “being into VNs” are more likely to pick up the game, but less likely to finish it, whereas people who don’t identify as such are less likely to pick up the game, but more likely to finish. This might be, in part, due to my conscious decision to place the player in a more active role when compared to more traditional visual novels (as mentioned before). It also might be because of me perhaps underestimating the importance of the first word in this genre’s name.
I’ve received a fair bit of criticism regarding the visual design of the game. Many people have expressed interest in the photograph-based aesthetic, but find the execution in the game a bit unrefined and unpleasant. Many of the photo filters I’ve used are a bit harsh, and many players have not responded well to these visual decisions.
The initial design of the game was also quite unforgiving, giving players only one opportunity to spell names perfectly (or risk being thrown into a long un-skippable dialog loop). This has since been somewhat remedied (as players are not outright kicked out for typos), but I think I still have a bit of work regarding balancing the difficulty of the game.
I’ve also received feedback from some people who describe the dialog as sometimes dragging on a bit too much, or overly cheesy. Though quite a bit of this criticism might also be influenced by how frustrating it might be to get through this unforgivingly-designed early pass of the game.
There are also a fair amount of minor typos and technical issues that still need to be fixed, as the game is still a work in progress, and much of the writing was rushed within a one-month period. In a future pass of the game, these careless mistakes should be completely ironed out.
This section is still not complete, as I’m completely open to new feedback and am working on improving this game to the best of my ability. Please let me know if you have some feedback you’d like to give me, as I’m compiling a list of notes for my eventual rework of the game.
