This is my contribution to the Blogs Of The Round Table for April 2009. The topic this month was to deal with a social issue that personally troubles you. Contributors were invited to design a game that focused on racism, rape, domestic violence, cruelty to animals, genocide, or any other serious, and potentially hot-button, topic.
I have chosen to deal with the topic of domestic violence and abuse. I had originally started out with a more graphic concept however upon further examination I felt that depicting acts of direct violence only served to obscure the underlying psychological violence involved and it is this often hidden aspect of domestic abuse, as an act of control and domination, that I have chosen to look at. The current concept is fairly high level and contains no explicit acts of violence.
No Way Out is a game concept built around an interaction model very similar to The Sims, in fact it could actually exist as a modification to The Sims itself. It takes places within a single house, the player takes on the role of one person in a relationship, they can choose their gender, appearance and sexual orientation none of this directly affects the way the game develops beyond defining the gender of their partner.
Once this customisation stage is complete the game begins and for all intents and purposes players are playing The Sims. They are in a house full of furniture and items with which to interact, they can move freely around the house and use objects at will. Exploring the house they can see pictures on the walls of them and their partner and other objects scattered around that make it explicitly clear this is their home.
After the player has been free to explore the house a faint buzzing sounds develops in the background, it starts barely audible and increases in volume slowly over the next few minutes. At some point after the buzzing has begun the player’s partner returns home. Once their partner returns they will begin to interact with the environment in their own way and the player is free to continue as their wish. However from the moment their partner arrives all interactions that the player takes that don’t directly involve the partner or aren’t in some way connected to them will cause the buzzing to increase. The more they choose to do things on their own the louder the buzzing will get. At any time if the player chooses to cease that action and begin interacting with their partner the buzzing will cease increasing and will remain at the current level. If the player choose to stop interacting with their partner the buzzing will begin to increase once more.
As the player spends more time interacting with their partner the number and range of options available to them to interact with the game that don’t involve their partner are slowly removed, until eventually the options available are to continuing interacting with their partner, doing exactly what they are doing, or do nothing. If they choose the former the buzzing will begin to increase again. If they choose the latter they can continue playing, provided they keep doing what their partner is doing and the day will end with both the player and their partner going to bed.
When the next day starts the partner will go to work and the player is left alone in the house, they are free to interact with the house as they wish however this time the moment they start to interact with the environment the buzzing will begin. It will remain at a very low level throughout the day however only increase once their partner is about to arrive. Once they do arrive the buzzing will operate in the same manner it did during the first day: increasing when the player is interacting on their own and only remaining the same when they choose to interact with their partner. The game will continue like this with the buzzing starting off slightly louder each day.
At any point during the game the player can choose to exit the house, once they open the door the buzzing will instantly rise to an extreme level and all forward progression will become difficult. If the player’s partner is in the house they will react by immediately rushing towards them and trying to engage them in conversation. They will tell them (In The Sims style thought bubbles) about all the things they can do together if they remain in the house and how much fun they will have together. If the player chooses to close the door and return to the house the buzzing will return to the level it was at before they had opened the door.
If the player chooses to continue and leave the house, the buzzing will remain at it’s extreme level, forward movement will get progressively harder and the player’s partner will get progressively more agitated alternatively pleading and threatening. If players are able to keep going, leaving the house and making it all the way to the street the buzzing will start to drop off rapidly and their partner will stop on the threshold of their home.
At this point the player will be free to leave their house complete,they will be able to find a new house of their own and be free to interact with the game in whatever manner they wish from then on.
Please visit the Blogs of the Round Table’s main hall for links to the rest of this month’s entries.
April 23, 2009 at 3:38 pm
This is an interesting way to represent the dynamic of psychological abuse. It leads me to imagine a lot of ways it could be extended. I hope you won’t mind me ‘making improvements’. I offer them because I think your idea is really good and has inspired my imagination. A bunch of things occur to me:
A problem I see with your current idea is that it lacks a motivation for the player to keep playing at all. In the Sims, the motivation is self-expression through collecting and consumerism and relationship building. The dynamic you introduce would severely limit the room for this kind of play, which may be realistic but I fear it would make the game less engaging.
Perhaps if you allowed the dynamic to increase over a longer time period, so that early play was much closer in nature to the Sims and the abuse dynamic was only introduced later in the relationship. This would also allow you to represent the early stage of a relationship in which things are still good and create more attachment to the partner before it is obvious that they are abusive. This attachment is important to give significance to the later separation.
It could be interesting to incorporate more of the Sims-style process of furnishing your home including from your partner. The partner’s ’suggestions’ could become more and more controlling as play goes on. Especially if they are the one whose income you are spending. The player should find themselves creating a home more and more to please the partner than to express themselves. At first this could be seen as a loving thing to do, but over time it should be realised as a trap.
It would be interesting also to incorporate some more post-separation dynamics. The ‘game’ of abuse is certainly not over when the player leaves. Coping on your own would mean changing your lifestyle and leaving behind a lot of the things you have built before. Your new home should be significantly less attractive than the one you left.
You could take it further by incorporating some of the third-party friends dynamics — having your Sim-friends take sides in the relationship, but that would probably extend the game too far. This is not a game that anyone would want to play for too long, so keeping it short important.
Of course now you’ve made me think about the game I’d really like to do: the same dynamic but from the point of view of the abuser. Not to glorify abuse in any way but to realise that this relationship is just as much a trap for them; to have them realise that they are slowly turning into a monster. Getting that to work would be a real challenge.
April 23, 2009 at 4:42 pm
Thank you for the comment and your suggestions. I’ll be the first to admit that my concept falls apart in places and making it part of a much larger relationship would certainly help to better contextualise the abuse itself.
My initial version did include the abuser as an alternative perspective. It was built around a very similar mechanic however as the buzzing grew, the partner would slowly change to become more “othered” less distinct, less individual. The range of interaction options available would begin as very broad and each interaction that led to their partner staying with them would lead to some audio visual reward and a slight drop in the intensity of the buzzing.
Slowly, over a much longer course of time (Several days or weeks) these interaction options would be restricted down to one of direct physical violence. The only apparent option available to stop the increasing buzzing (Which would simply continue to get louder and more abrasive) would be to engage in direct violence. It would also be possible to stop the buzzing through simply refraining from any action but it would require the player to actively not interact for a long time going against everything the game has been leading them to believe is required, which is that action and exercise of power is rewarded.
The concept being that as their dominant and controlling behaviour is rewarded they would continue to perform more of it eventually coming to the belief that such behaviour was justified.
At the time I was having trouble with that version and it was only after working on the current version that I was able to solidify my ideas for the alternate version in my head. By that point I didn’t want to complicate the concept with an additional perspective.