The Message from Gris
The ability to communicate social and/or political messages in the design of a game can be a difficult task but Mary Flanagan and Helen Nissenbaum in their journal “A Game Design Methodology to Incorporate Social Activist Themes” discuss the Values at Play (VAP) approach. VAP has three parts: “1. Discovery… identify the values that might be relevant in (first), the initial stages of a given project, as well as (second) each iterative stage of development,” “2. Translation… embodying or expressing values in systems design” or the game features/mechanics, and “3. Verification… the appraisal of whether and to what extent designers have successfully embedded the target values in a given system” (183, 185, 186). Taking this method, let’s analyze a game with a message and see how it fits.
Perusing the Games For Change website, I was instantly drawn to a beautiful watercolor image with the tag “grief mental health.” I knew I had to play the game and that game is GRIS, a link to more details on the game is below the gameplay video, named after the main character. Mental health is really hard to portray, especially because it’s hidden, so I wanted to see how grief was going to be portrayed. The art, including the visuals and music, are astounding. Starting off black and white, the color is minimal, and then throughout the game Gris slowly gains color back to her and her environment. I think these stand for different stages of her mental health, I know that there are stages of grief and I think the developers used those colors to portray them. The music is also wonderful, starting off with a strong song of Gris singing and then being cut off, unable to sing anymore and the music continues with swells and nuances of emotion throughout the game. At one point I felt like I was going to cry just based off of the visuals and music, and I think that means the creators succeeded in the emotions they were trying to portray.
As well as a visual cue for the stages of grief, the colors show the mechanics of the game develop. Gris starts off very slow, actually collapsing multiple times as the player attempts to have her walk, but slowly becomes swifter with her movements. I think what these colors and the strength Gris develops over the course of the game is supposed to symbolize how these experiences, while difficult and taxing, make you stronger. It feels like power or healing.
As for the VAP system though, I believe Gris successfully passes the bar of being a game with a social message. The game has people experience grief to the best of their ability without actually going through grief. For Discovery, I believe the values were Creativity, Expression, Trust, Inclusion, Privacy, and Liberty. I can see all of those values in Gris. As for Translation, I think it was portrayed through movement. Grief/mental health I feel like is usually described as heavy, drowning, a weight, a burden, so Gris becoming so light on her feet is almost a liberation. As for Verification, that usually comes through playtesting and user research and I, a user who played and watched the game, can confirm I feel like the game portrayed the message the developers were trying to get across. Therefore, Gris is a successful VAP game.
Flanagan, Mary, and Helen Nissenbaum. “A Game Design Methodology to Incorporate Social Activist Themes.” Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems — CHI ’07, 2007, doi:10.1145/1240624.1240654.