The Game
I played the single-player game Babbdi on Steam. This game is available for Mac, Windows, and Linux and was created by Sirius and Léonard Lemaitre (Lemaitre Brothers). It is designed for bored people who are enamored by weird, strange, creepy places. Bonus points if their eyes can easily navigate dark, inaccessible screens. I would say the target audience for this game has either a lot of time or a lot of patience. It is probably best if they have both! I wouldn’t recommend this game to people below the age of 10. This game is creepy.
If the question is “How does walking tell the story in Babbdi?”, my answer is “very poorly”.
While I could see the allure of incorporating storytelling into a game, this walking simulator was virtually unusable for me. I had to Google what the controls were, as I didn’t see them displayed until I went to completely exit the game. I am used to using reverse scroll on my laptop, so turning the wrong way and accidentally jumping off a ledge I had painstakingly walked up over the course of 3-5 minutes crushed my soul. I did like the fact that we could talk to the NPCs in the game, but there wasn’t enough reward to keep me invested. Having to press [E] to engage with them took me out of game play because I had to look down at my keyboard. I wish they just began speaking when I entered their radius. In CS278, we learned about commitment loops. I wish I would have achieved something in 30 seconds, then something in 5 minutes, then something in 15 minutes, etc. Over the course of nearly an hour, all I managed to do was pick up a baseball bat and a random item whose value remains unknown. I would see other objects around the world, but I wouldn’t know how to get to them and felt low motivation due to not understanding how things fit together. I tried jumping off the top of buildings, but I became easily frustrated by the idea that I could be doing all this work for something that isn’t a real object.
Mystery object on top of stone ledge.
I also didn’t understand the layout of the world at all. I rode the elevator 3-4 times and still couldn’t imagine how I would get to train station. It would be nice if there was a floating map in one of the corners to orient you. I think the sparse reward mechanisms combined with the clunky controls leave a lot on the table in terms of immersion and entertainment.
While this particular game was not for me, I do understand how walking sims tell a story. There was a weird cognitive dissonance for me in the game since it looked so unrealistic and I had such a hard time controlling my character. I picked up a bat while walking around, and when I came up to a graphic nightmare of a dog, I tried to give it a little tap with the bat to see if anything would happen. This is something I would never do in real life. It was almost as if the clunkiness of traversing the area separated me from my avatar’s actions.
Interacting with this creepy dog.
Ethics Question
While I was able to do violent things in the game (jump off tall buildings, hit people and objects with a bat, etc.), there wasn’t any corresponding outcome to this violence. No blood or NPC reaction resulted from my violence, which is an interesting design choice. I can’t see a clear reason why I would be able to mime hitting people and animals with a bat, whereas I do see how jumping off of a tall building relates to game play. Jumping off a balcony is like a shortcut to get to the ground-level floor, but carrying around a bat felt like a waste of time. Perhaps later in the game I needed the bat to defend myself. Its presence was almost ominous, and I was afraid not to pick it up.
I think violence in the context of Babbdi is unethical. It is a dangerous design choice to have no outcome from hitting something with a bat. Regardless of if this game has a minimum age, there is nothing stopping a free-reign child from downloading and playing this game. That child can then go on and hit their family pet with a baseball bat. This game would have been funner, more inviting, and less frustrating for me if there were stricter controls around violence. I would have liked to be blocked from walking off the edge of a tall staircase, and it would have been nice if there was a popup warning me not to use the bat as a weapon. Without it, the world just seems disorienting, but perhaps that is the point.
