Critical Play
I decided to play Babbdi, a walking simulator for PC developed by Sirius and Leonard Lemaitre. This first-person adventure centers around a character looking for a train ticket to leave the bleak and sad city of Babbdi. Given the game’s themes of emptiness and death, it is suitable for players 13 and older. In this post, I will explain how Babbdi employs a simple walking mechanic and environmental storytelling to immerse the player into a city of emptiness and lifelessness.
The game forces the player to travel on foot at a relatively slow pace in respect to the size of the world. This mechanic reinforces the designers’ goal to inflict a feeling of emptiness. Encountering new scenery or NPCs requires travelling a great distance. Additionally, the slow pace causes the player to expect meaningful interactions when they find NPCs, but the short and useless dialogue that the player is met with creates this sense of futility. Below is an example of such an interaction:
This character, Jeanine, has a face void of detail, an incomprehensible and inhuman voice, unhelpful dialogue, and a head hung down. This is typical of many NPCs in Babbdi, whose purpose is to remind the player of the lifelessness and loneliness of the city.
While the game’s walking mechanic plays an important role in establishing tone, the city’s physical environment arguably has more to tell about the city of Babbdi. One design feature that immediately struck me was the vastly elaborate and intricate but colorless architecture of the city. As Henry Jenkins describes it in “Game Design as Narrative Architecture,” Babbdi’s use of environmental storytelling effectively “[embeds] narrative information within [its] mise-en scene.” Here is an example:
The urban space that the designers created suggests that the city of Babbdi was once very organized and full of people but is now a hollow shell of what it used to be. Additionally, the guard towers visible in the distance suggest that Babbdi was once under some kind of authoritarian or military rule, suggesting that the people who lived there lived lifeless lives. I did not come to these conclusions as a result of any textual cues, but rather as a result of Babbdi’s environmental storytelling. This phenomenon can also be described by Jenkins’s section on embedded narratives which he describes as game environments that are also “information spaces” or “memory palaces.”
Overall, walking through Babbdi, interacting with NPCs, and observing the environment tell the story of Babbdi’s loneliness, bleakness, and emptiness. Unlike other types of story games, walking simulators require few mechanics to immerse a player into a rich narrative. Walking simulators, through environmental storytelling and forcing the player to explore a world on their own, are fantastic storytellers.
Ethics:
A notable part of Babbdi was its vivid and overt theme of death. One location features a decaying corpse. Another location near the start of the game features this dead woman in a pool of water:
This has led me to wonder what considerations a designer must take in choosing game elements that may be unsettling or triggering to their audiences. One thing that Babbdi’s designers did well to alleviate this was in their character designs. The NPCs in the game look like mannequins, making elements of death in the game less disturbing. If the characters were instead hyper-realistic, it would be an exceptionally disturbing game and would have to be branded for a different audience. Additionally, the trailer for the game on Steam opens with the scene of the dead woman in the water. This was an important choice because it made clear to the audience the themes they should expect before downloading the game. Overall, I believe that a game can include unsettling themes as long as the game effectively communicates its themes to its audience and chooses its audience appropriately.
