Video games can serve different purposes, though primarily we think of the medium as entertainment or as an escape. They can be a space to live a power fantasy and achieve things you might not be able to in reality, or indeed be a source of comfort in challenging times, especially so during the pandemic.
There are, however, also developers, often in the indie space, who have been able to use games to explore important themes and issues that are rarely addressed in video games. We spoke to the developers behind Before I Forget, Citizen Sleeper, and Alba: A Wildlife Adventure, which have all previously been nominated for BAFTA's Games Beyond Entertainment award – a testament to how their games' subject matter have successfully resonated with audiences.
Before I Forget, a narrative-based first-person adventure about a woman suffering from early onset dementia, was the result of a game jam that Chella Ramanan, narrative designer and co-game designer, had participated in. "It was very topical at the time. It was constantly in the news as a future major health concern, and the pressure it will put on an already pressurised NHS," she explains.
Chella Ramanan
One of the mechanics that had been there from its inception in the game jam is how as protagonist Sunita, you would start in a house in grayscale but as you interacted with certain objects that brought back memories, colour would also return. It was an artistic interpretation of experiencing what it's like to live with dementia, even while striving to represent the disease respectfully and authentically.
Making the game was challenging as some people were quick to assume it was designed for educational purposes. "'Is this for care workers? Is this a training tool?' No, it's just art," Ramanan laughs, while pointing out these sorts of questions wouldn't be asked about books and movies (incidentally, one of the game's influences was Still Alice, a film adaptation of a novel about a woman with early onset dementia).
As it was meant to be a short narrative experience that could be played through in one sitting, finding funding was a challenge as Ramanan was told that it was too short, complicated by the then-new Steam policy that let players refund a game they have played for less than two hours.
"We thought about how we could enlarge the scope, but then it was actually diminishing the experience," she explains. "It's quite an emotional game, so either it would sort of remove that emotional weight or it would just become interminable."
As a result, Before I Forget was developed as a part-time project, though it did receive completion funding from Humble Games while publisher Plug-In Digital also offered to port it to console following its release on PC.
Another initial concern was whether there would be an audience about what is a serious topic about a serious illness but also with an older female protagonist that doesn't conform to the norm of your typical gaming protagonist. Yet those concerns were fortunately rebuffed with the game's very first showing at a local comic convention in Taunton, Somerset, where Ramanan lived at the time.
"When we first went in we were like, this really isn't going to be our audience because it's loads of kids dressed up as stormtroopers and stuff, but we had people playing all day, and kids of all kinds of ages," she says. "We underestimated kids and their interest in an older person, which I think we all do a lot in the industry, but obviously kids have grandparents and elderly relatives. I was also overwhelmed by people who had direct experience of dementia who were really moved by it, and we got lots of reassurance that our representation was going in the right direction."
While Citizen Sleeper is a sci-fi RPG, the themes and issues it deals with are felt very closely by solo developer Gareth Damian Martin. "I think that's kind of my natural inclination towards making things anyway," they say. "I like things to be relatable and human and I think that's the thing I often look for in games."
Unlike most RPGs where you typically create a character that becomes more powerful, you're cast as a 'Sleeper', a human whose mind has been digitally transplanted into the artificial body of a robot slave who has escaped their corporate servitude. You try to survive each day aboard a space station, all while your parts gradually break down. Fundamentally, it serves as an analogue to the precariousness of the gig economy faced by many people today, which Martin had firsthand experience.
Gareth Damian Martin
"When I first got out of university and worked for employment agencies, I'd be sent around to different jobs, often on zero-hour contracts," they explain. "You're always being passed around and you never know where your next pay cheque's going to come from or what's going to happen."
But Martin is also a fan of science fiction, in that it's often not about the future but more of a "refracting mirror" of our reality in a more fantastical scenario. They believe it's also from their background from having a PhD in literature, working in theatre, as well as being a solo developer, that it's been possible for them to not only think from an artistic and high concept perspective but also have the authorship and control to realise it. "Thematic coherence is relatively easy to achieve for me versus trying to achieve that with a team of 200 people."
Their approach of portraying this dystopian sci-fi future is also different to the more superficial corporate satire you often see in games or other media, which sometimes has an unintended effect.
"It's like that weird thing that Alien fans wear Weyland-Yutani T-shirts. Why are we all wearing the bad guys' logo? There's something really sticky about corporate branding that means that even if they're the bad guys, the branding is still something we want," says Martin.
"Even though corporations feature very heavily in Citizen Sleeper, they're kept offscreen intentionally because I really don't want them to become the central symbol. I'm much more focused on the people who are having to deal with the ruin and the difficulty created by these structures rather than on the people at the top of the structure doing that to everybody else."
Instead, the symbol that resonates most, which Martin says some fans actually have tattoos of, is of the game's core mechanic, the two dice that players roll at the start of each day. "They represent the idea of waking up every morning and having a roll of dice, you have what you've got and you figure out how to deal with it. I think the really beautiful thing is that people have really engaged with this feeling of actually having pride and hope, and are able to come up with what they have each day and then build a life out of that. I think that's been a really beautiful process of daily resistance."
Finally, the development of Alba: A Wildlife Adventure is different to the previous two examples, as it was a result of Ustwo Games growing after the success of its mobile puzzle series Monument Valley, allowing more teams to work on different projects. Alba's creative director David Fernández Huerta says the project faced relatively low pressure, allowing him and programmer Kirsty Keach to create something that reflected their interests in nature and the outdoors, as well as the setting: a fictional Spanish island that feels authentic since they both grew up in Spain.
Playing as a young girl named Alba on holiday visiting her grandparents, the game is about loving nature, where you can also use a camera to take pictures of the islands' real wildlife, a mechanic that existed in the prototyping stage. Yet as the story developed, it also became apparent that it was also a game about our role in nature.
Huerta explains: "We took that extra step forward and said, actually, this is a game about our duty as people in the natural world. What can I do? What can we do about it? And from a game developer point of view, what is the message that we want to send out?"
At the same time, he was scared that having a strong environmental message might also have people assuming it was an educational game, and he was also conscious not to make it 'preachy'. "It is a game first. It's fun, exciting, and then there's a layer of all this reality wrapped around it," he says. "We try to give characters different voices in the conflict that is presented in the game. So it's not the bad guys doing a bad thing and we're all fighting against it. You have all the secondary characters having different opinions about what's going on and what to do about it."
David Fernández Huerta
Alba's strength lies in there being fun interactions that also reinforce positive messages, such as the ability to pick up rubbish – a feature that Keach had added, as Huerta explains, "because she enjoys the quick interactions." Similarly, by photographing different species in the game and sometimes encountering them caught up in man-made pollution and rubbish, it also resonates more that there are small actions the player can do in the real world to make the world a better place.
While simpler than a typical open world game, there had been attempts to add more features into the game, with almost six months spent on working in additional mechanics. "Then we eventually realised none of that is what we need in the game, and all the things that we tried to make it more deep made the game worse," Huerta says.
Although that more pure and simple approach meant Alba took a while to find its audience, Huerta has also been encouraged by the positivity the game spread, such as players telling him how their kids also started to pick up litter just like Alba after playing the game. "It also came out after lockdown, so people were interested in games that were about enjoying nature and being outside!"
Considering not just the themes but also the circumstances of how these games are made, there's a sense that only indie or smaller studios can explore ideas that larger studios cannot. Now working as a senior narrative designer at Ubisoft Massive, Ramanan believes that there are nonetheless people who want to explore those more nuanced and personal stories in the triple-A space, even if it might at times be through optional audio logs or written lore.
"I think people are interested in exploring all those facets of humanity," she says. "But it's tough because you’re usually telling a big story, and you have to pull the player along, so there's not much time to slow down."
Martin meanwhile still takes influences from triple-A such as the Mass Effect series, even if they find the core structure of role-playing as "a secret policeman who goes around murdering people" antithetical to what they find meaningful. "I take a lot of inspiration from small parts of games where I can really see the humanity coming through," they say, while also acknowledging how more accessible tools in game development, such as visual scripting, enables more new voices to get involved in the industry.
Huerta concludes: "I believe that an optimistic message has the power to reach people in a more meaningful way than a pessimistic one. If you tell people the world is going to end tomorrow, people are going to think, 'Well, there's nothing for me to do'. But if you tell people this is what we can do to save the world today, they might be more inclined to do it."