Detention: Devotion to Representation
One Taiwanese game shows how to use culture and history for more than a backdrop.
By all possible accounts, martial law can be a terrifying thing.
The suspension of civil rights and military control of government, temporary or not, is an unstable combination in which some of the fundamental notions of a modern working society are challenged: people’s trust in state and the prevalence of justice when the laws that protect the people are swept under a rug under the premise of maintaining national integrity. The practices and boundaries of martial law vary from country to country, and no application of the law is reprehensible in itself without context, but history has shown the relative ease of abuse the state can empower under its effect, a last resort able to be turned into a legal backdoor for a military junta.
Asia in particular has had a rocky history with martial law, with the most severe set in the background of Cold War under the fear of proxied communist intervention from People’s Republic of China.
Philippines is one notable example, when in 1972 the then current president Ferdinand Marcos signed Proclamation No. 1081, which defined the domestic policies of the nation for the next decade as it transformed into a kleptocratic regime.
Then there’s Taiwan. From 1949, the small island to which the right-wing government of China fled after incurring heavy losses to the communist revolt led by Mao Zedong, around four decades of martial law occurred, and alongside it an unprecedented violent suppression of all suspected political dissidents known as White Terror.
Detention is a game about that period.
“ …it’s rather rare to stumble upon a title that represents our own culture.”
For an independent point-and-click horror adventure title with four hours of runtime, Detention has a surprisingly lot going on with its origins, the context it was developed in and the genres it accommodates.
Set in the 1960s, it explores the effects of Taiwan’s authoritarianism in the life of Fang Ray Shin and the people closest to her, her family and friends.
Ray is a senior high school student who grows up as an adult in a world where responsibility is a matter of life and death, failure to comply leads to inordinate punishment and hollow, contrived patriotism rules over the things that truly matter to people. Stark contrasting feelings of desire and uncertainty are used to explore Ray’s personal identity, dealing with her growing responsibilities, and the crumbling of families under nationalist values. The bleakness and ambivalence of reality is the horror that Ray so dearly wants to find solace from.
White Terror isn’t just a set-up Detention piggybacks on its shoulders to excuse for its dark, occasionally brutal subject matter.
The game shows notably strong success in adapting its source material of real-life events into historical fiction with an interactive layer that supports the narrative rather than detracts from it. Achieving this narrative-gameplay balance makes all the difference between a good point-and-click adventure game and a stellar one. Puzzles have allegorical messages, while obstacles represent the actual flow of Ray’s emotions.
Meanwhile, the horror elements are used to back up the tense, suppressive conditions in which the Taiwanese lived at the time. Like in other variants of Asian horror, religion and mythology are omnipresent in concretizing these feelings. Spiritual afterlife and fears from the real-world blur into a balance where the silent terror feels tangible, sympathetic yet also otherworldly and paranoia-inducing in nature.
As a rare example of very smart design decisions, Detention has narrative and gameplay that are both purposeful and intertwining with one another. The result is something like a snapshot that epitomizes the dread the people of Taiwan had to go through and transferring it over to the audience. Dramatized, sure, but the background of the game and the people behind it give it an air of legibility that is paramount in its interpretation.
Much of Detention’s narrative success owes to the fact that the setting of the game was one that shaped the very lives of its developers and their families, the context they grew in and the aftermath in which they learned about it retrospectively. The studio behind the game, Red Candle Games is made up of a younger generation of Taiwanese developers and artists who wish to present their culture and history to a larger audience outside their homeland when the existing media is inaccessible to foreigners.
“The original idea was simple: growing up playing and getting influenced by video games, it’s rather rare to stumble upon a title that represents our own culture.”
said Red Candle members in an interview with Con Freaks and Geeks.
“This thought inspired [co-founder] Coffee to tell a story of Taiwan. Thus, Detention was born.”
Indeed, in an industry that prefers to opt for fantastical settings or alternate realities, games that aspire to depict cultures are scarce. In case of Taiwan, acclaimed works in other mediums like A City of Sadness exist — a movie that actually shares thematic similarities with Detention — but these works tend to deliberately obfuscate the narrative to disconnect the results from the conditions it came from. Hence, the Taiwanese may understand the message as they’re aware of the political and historical context, but outside the primary audience it can get lost.
And this is where the power of video games come into play.
The ideas and thoughts that are the result of our connection with our cultures shouldn’t be underplayed on the basis that the audience for them is non-existent.
Detention has several factors that turn out in its favor.
Utilizing this relatively unexplored interactive medium that attracts younger people. Being offered on a globally accessible digital storefront.
Being developed by young artists and programmers who grew up a in an ever less secluded world.
If there is good to be found on the Internet and the lowering barrier in content creation, it’s that people from broad variety of backgrounds have the possibility to produce work that represents those backgrounds — their culture and history — in accuracy and detail that would otherwise be harder to materialize in the larger publishing space.
This is particularly evident in case of Red Candle’s work.
One of the game’s biggest strengths is its use of interactive storytelling in meaningful ways to spur an emotional reaction that not only links the player with the avatar of the game, but with what some of the Taiwanese might have felt with the state of their contemporary environment. With this in mind, there are heavier implications to what Detention has achieved here.
Namely, it proves the underused potential of video games being used for things like education, empathizing with the real-life counterparts of their narratives and sparking wider interest in subjects of history and culture that don’t have a great deal of exposure outside their roots.
As game development is becoming more prevalent with demographics who don’t have strong footing in the interregional media space, it’s important to recognize that the different cultures and environments we live in can be used for more than nods of inspiration or backdrops for combat scenarios.
This is not about tools, but a part of our lives that affect us on a deep, personal level. The ideas and thoughts that are the result of our connection with our cultures shouldn’t be underplayed on the basis that the audience for them is non-existent.
The audience exists, thanks to recent shifting attitudes in indie games of uncommon nature, the resurging interest in niche genres like adventure games and the aging demographics to whom these types of games are more appealing to. It’s mostly a matter of the laborious task that is reaching out to that audience, and even then, breaking out of niche recognition is an exception rather than a rule. And while major titles like Assassin’s Creed and Sleeping Dogs have aroused interest for their diverse and colorful settings, they are, in essence, a work of extensive research rather than cultural context. This means these settings and what they contain are closer to tourist attractions or theme parks, where safe gameplay loops trump visions of cultural representation on any deeper-than-surface level.
Now, this doesn’t mean developers don’t use research when they make games based on their culture and history, nor are research-based game worlds bad in and of itself. The thing is, games about foreign cultures that rely solely on research tend to overlook important details, the people who live in those cultures and instead focus on superficiality over substance because that might distinguish those cultures at a first glance.
Using games to portray history and represent culture authentically is certainly ambitious and carries risks that carry on top of ones every game already goes through, but the medium has upsides that makes exploring the possibilities a worthy endeavor. The fact that the volition and input of the player pace games gives opportunity to educate the audience through activities and choices — mundane or extraordinary — and with environmental storytelling that exposes details naturally.
Furthermore, while it may be concerning for some that the gamifying of historical events and cultures may reduce them to misrepresented scenarios that are used to merely house systems, this is something that should be judged on a game-to-game basis due to the subjective nature of certain mechanics being utilized in varying scenarios. For the people who make them, every game that tries something new is a learning process, and without an open atmosphere where developers can freely make games about their cultures or history, the industry-at-large cannot learn how to handle those topics properly.
Fortunately, this is becoming the case, and an increasing number of studios have strived to experiment with these ideas.
1979 Revolution: Black Friday is one such example that goes one step further from historical fiction to establish a documentary-style, choice-driven adventure game about the Iranian Revolution, developed and directed partly by people who have first-hand experience of the event.
Never Alone, on the other hand, is a platformer made in close collaboration with Iñupiat people that explores themes of destiny and wisdom through folktales of Alaskan indigenous people.
Year Walk and the Yakuza series are also worthy mentions, but perhaps most famously, The Witcher franchise has been a hotbed for not just introducing people to the original books but to aspects of Slavic mythology that were crafted in vivid detail by its Polish developers over the years.
It is through all of these games that developers get to represent and preserve some of the most impactful aspects of their lives for generations, their experiences, their feelings, their history, all of which coalesce into an composition that is not only engaging to the player, but one that shares a voice from the context it came from. In the end we may never get to experience a life under martial law, but thanks to people like the ones at Red Candle Games, we have accounts.
Written by Filippus, with love, for Ludic Dream.
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Special thanks to all my friends who assisted me and gave feedback during the writing process. This wouldn’t have been possible without your help.
