The Mixing Between Narrative and Games
Games are no longer just a matter of thrill or entertainment, they are now stretching human capacities, they are translating sensitive and serious material to playable storyline.
In recent years there have been several games highlighting the Syrian conflicts, especially the refugee’s crises by applying different styles of games to show the dangerous routes refugees have travelled. The projects have shown the same subject but from different perspectives and in different formats.
For instance, Path Out, an autobiographical adventure game done by Abdullah Karam tell’s his story in collaboration with graphic designer Brian Main in 2017. The player becomes a cartoon version of Abdullah to help him escape the Syrian war from his hometown Hama to the Turkish border, in the meantime, the game will enrich the player’s knowledge about the changes after the war started and why Abdullah had to leave. All this is accompanied with a pop-up videos of Abdullah where he talks to the player to add some humour and reality to the game which will remind the player that this is a real person story which I believe they succeed in applying this.
Another project was before this, the Syrian Journey created by the BBC in 2015. This project is a text based game on web, available in four languages; English, Arabic, Russian and Farsi. It is an attempt to create an interactive project. However, the project was only text based with some illustrations. Where the player’s agency, the ability of the player to do something, was to make decisions during their way to Europe by choose between two different choices were given. By creating survivor’s game about the Syrian refugees, they tried to display the news in new way. However, from my perspective, it didn’t dig very deep into the refugee’s trauma during their journey and they missed the most important aspect which is the emotions. Another text-based game was displaying the same subject but in more social media style which I am interested in, this is Bury Me My Love, which I will analyse further in this article also taking into consideration that I am a Syrian.
Bury Me My Love, is a multiple narrative story showing a migrant’s journey by applying a reality-inspired story via a WhatsApp messaging style game. It was originally produced by Florent Maurin in 2017 with co-production from ARTE, the European cultural network with Pixel Hunt and figs. The project follows a particular tale of a couple from Homs, Syria; the wife flees Syria to Europe while the husband stays to work and look after his relatives who are unable to make the journey. The aim of this project is to show that migrants are not just numbers they are real people and they have friends and family who love them and care about them, the thing that Florent made clear in his speech with GamesIndustry.biz
“I am completely positive that our game is political, but the statement we are trying to make in the game is that migrants are humans. Which should not be considered as a political statement, it should be considered as a human being statement.”
As soon as I opened the app, a message appeared telling me that I will read a real-time conversation which is more like an agreement with the users. At first, I was a bit dubious about it, as I am that kind of player who prefers to play a game in one hit but then when I played the game I noticed its impact on telling the story and how that serves the aim of the project, I will discuss that later.
Once I started the game I was in the husband’s shoes, Majd, where I am chatting with Nour, the wife, during all of her way to Europe. The conversation between Nour and Majd was very well written, it was full of useful information about different subjects related to the Syrian conflict, it is also full of details about the routes and the refugees’ camps by mentioning different stories of their friends and relatives intent to feed the knowledge of the players about the Syrian conflict alongside the main purpose of the project which is showing the migrants as real people who have their own life like anyone else, and in my opinion, they succeeded in delivering this message in the script of the conversation where it showed the relationship between Nour and Majd, by showing their disputes and fights as well as, their longing and caring for each other. This reminded me of my personal chats with my friends and loved ones. However at some key points I had to respond to Nour’s questions by choosing between two options given to me, I had to make this choice with limited information that was supplied. In turn, this would influence her decisions and sometimes the situation might be fatal. Based on an interview with Florent, the producer, the story has 19 different endings and this is based on the choices the user makes, as Nour’s journey depends on making decisions about the road she goes through, how she spends the budget she has and the moral support from Majd, that’s define the project as having a branching narrative structure which is one of 6 interactive narrative typologyies of Benjamin Hoguet.
The idea of the project was an inspiration by an article which was published in the French newspaper Le Monde, telling a story of Dana, a young Syrian who left in 2015 and now is living in Germany. The game is based on real facts, but covers more of Dana’s story, who worked on building the project with Florent.
A clever technique was applied in this project and has a large impact on delivering the story to the audience, this was being able to play the game in real-time mode. When I played the game, I had to wait to hear from Nour, who is in a life or death situation. I didn’t know when I will hear from her. I had to wait to receive a notification on my mobile that she is online, or when she sends me a message.
Sometimes, I waited for ten minutes and on other times it took a couple of hours. This technique gave more reality to the story as I felt that I am really talking to a relative or a friend and I wanted to make sure that they are safe especially after I chose for them the way they will go. I was in a state of fear whether my choice was the right one or not. However, for those who don’t want to play a long-term game, there is a choice where you could play the game in fast mode but this will cause the real-time notifications to become disabled and from my point of view it will affect the delivery of the messages.
In this project, users are positioned as a character in the story but their agency was limited. Most of the time I was only a reader, reading Nour’s conversation and just clicking the arrow to send Majd’s reply. Although, every once in a while Majd’s reply has two different choices and I had to make a choice which will affect the story’s events but it is still within several story-lines which the author already set when he created the game, so my role as a player was to only choose which story-line I will go through.
There is an interesting detail were Nour ask Majd, which is the user, to do some research to find a hotel to sleep in or to check the road status on the news, which one is open and which one is closed and then provide her with any information about the refugees who went through her journey, at this point there is nothing to do from the user just to wait for some seconds while Majd gets back and sends Nour a message about what he found. I would prefer to give the users more agency to do the research and find by themselves this information. That would make me as a user more involved in the story but I am not sure what techniques are applicable to make this happen. However, in Florent’s interview with Family Gamer Radio he mentioned this point and here is what he said about it:
The project interface was so clear, simple and easy to navigate this was done intentionally as Florent mentioned in his interview with GamesBeat, that the game interface was designed not only for gamers but also for those who are not a fan of video games.
There is one main screen which is very similar to a chatting app where the conversation runs all the time. In this interface, there is a writing bar and two icons under it; a camera icon and emoji icon but they are not active all the time.
There are also two other screens, one is a map which I found really helpful. The map shows Nour’s location and all the places Nour has passed during her journey with some written information and/or photo about each place.
The other screen is the settings screen where I could choose the real-time mode or fast mode and control some other settings like the font size, the sound and the app language as it is available in five different languages; English, French, Dutch, Spanish and Italian.
There is also a choice to restart the journey from the beginning where I will be able to change the choices and that will take me through a different story and result in a different ending, but there is no option to restart the game from a particular phase and this is from my point of view done particularly to show that the decisions I’ve made cannot be reversed and that’s to reflect the real side of the story.
The game ended when I received a voice record from Nour, telling me that she is in a women centre in Germany after she requested asylum and now she is waiting to hear the answer.
Over all, I found the game really interesting, specially the way it was created and its structure. However, during the conversation I noticed that the main focus of chat was on Nour’s journey and the challenges she is having but in the meantime Majd is still in Syria and I was curious to hear more about the situation there. How he is living now? Why she never asked him about his situation? This point may cause the game to lose some of its credibility, my guess is they chose to do this to keep the focus on the refugee’s journey and no the situations in Syria. Also, the game is really long, it took me more than three days to play it all, this made me feel bored at some points. However, after two days I switched it to the fast mode. Actually, I would prefer to be given more agency to response to Nour’s conversation and participate more in the game which then will make it more interesting for me.
From where I am standing, having the game industry involved in tackling a range of difficult topics was really a step forward in displaying serious topics in a new way, as Janet Murry said:
“The language of video games is now transparent to us and can be employed to enter more deeply and empathetically into a wider range of human experience”
And this kind of storytelling might seduce people to engage with topics otherwise they might just look away from. But, how much can games be engaging into the political discourse, or from other side, will people accept games to be capable of breaching social and political topics or they will find this mixing between narrative and games disturbing?
