Games
The team working on The Red Strings Club tell us more about the opportunities created from criticism and the ways that games can make a massive difference when dealing with mental health.
If you’ve played Gods Will Be Watching, 2014’s polarising indie release, then you’ll know that Spanish studio Deconstructeam are not afraid to let words and feelings do the talking. The game was as much about interpreting the meaning behind your interactions as much as it was about making them, giving the game an aura of intellectualism that encouraged hooked players to ponder and understand its crushing difficulty level as opposed to feel oppressed by it.
The next release from the Valencia-based team is The Red Strings Club, a game that continues Deconstructeams' love of words and emotions but does away with the Dark Souls-level of challenge embraced by Gods Will Be Watching. Both games are driven by your decisions regarding how to interact with the respective worlds’ characters, but here the goal is to embrace a larger player base.
“Gods Will Be Watching left me with a bit of trauma after it was released and we get feedback in because of the reaction some players had to its high difficulty level, which is why The Red Strings Club doesn’t have a fail state,” explains Jordi de Paco, founder and creative lead at Decontructeam.
“Lots of people were put off by the difficulty of Gods Will Be Watching – which is okay, because lots of other people loved the challenge – but with this game I wanted to make something that more players could see through to the end and try to understand.”
In The Red Strings Club, then, you can’t ‘lose’ in the traditional videogaming sense – the decisions you make leading to one of a number of wide ranging endings. You might be disappointed in the ending you make for yourself, but you will get to the ending no matter what you do.
Self-determination is all-important here, with much of your time spent in the shoes of information broker and bartender Donovan. The cocktails you make influence the emotional state of the drinking, allowing you to draw more information from them if you are paying attention enough to ask the right questions.
This is a game that revolves around asking questions of its players about their perspective on the morality of altering one’s state of mind and embracing the power to allow us to alter each other’s minds.
If you were lacking the courage to reveal a secret that you thought needed to be revealed, would you allow your mind to be altered in order to do so? If your friend were suffering from depression, would you alter their state in a bid to help them?
This last example is particularly poignant for de Paco: “The Red Strings Club is a reflection on depression, people’s psyche and how we can alter that and a lot of other heavy stuff that I wanted to look at.
“Some friends have been going through depression and are taking anti-depressants and that sort of thing, so creating a game that touches on these things has been helpful for me as a way to deal with that. That’s part of why I want all players to be able to see the end of the game, so that the message isn’t lost on people.”
However, de Paco is keen to stress that “the message” can be interpreted in a number of different ways and that the important thing to take from The Red Strings Club is that players internalise and consider the questions the game presents.
“I’ve come to terms with the idea that players will extract their own meaning from your game, and that’s fine,” he says.
“I want to make our games more accessible, but I still want people to be able to extract their own meanings and not just all think the same thing about everything all of the time. I’m not interested in judging you when you answer the questions that the game is presenting to you, I just want players to think about what the game is asking them and why they are reacting to it in a certain way.”
You’ll also be unsurprised to hear that de Paco believes that this is not a game you’re going to get anything from if you’re looking for something casual to pass the time between meals. The Red Strings Club is a game to be thought about and contemplated beyond its running time.
The big question for a game aiming for this kind of lofty intellectual achievement is whether it’s going to make enough money to allow its developers to continue creating in this mould. This is an endeavour that's deeply philosophical and political in nature, probing concepts relating to our very existence as a society and how we interact with one another.
Such games don’t always tend to do very well, with many in the industry lamenting the idea that games should be political at all. De Paco disagrees strongly with such an outlook, though, and believes that those who believe games aren’t already deeply political should look again:
“The public is growing up and I think we need more games that are not afraid to be political. Games have always been political, but there has been a tendency to not want to think about them in that way.
“Even the slightest design decision about a headshot or how a life bar works is doing something that changes the narrative that the player is experiencing and how the player is perceiving the world. That means those decisions are political in nature.
“Games have always been political in that way, but only now are we becoming more aware about how political they are and what these design decisions are doing to the player.”
You can discover what De Paco’s design decisions do to you when The Red Strings Club is released in January 2018.
