Wayward Strand is a game set in a hospital – specifically the aged care ward, where many patients are struggling with age-related health problems, such as dementia.
Before the game’s July 21 release, we spoke with the game’s co-narrative director, Georgia Symons, about writing about a sensitive topic and how the game can help players learn more on elderly health care and other weighty topics without trivializing fact.
Nintendo Life: Why did you decide to make a game set in a hospital?
Georgia Symons, Co-Director of Reporting: Basically, Wayward Strand is a game about interest. And as a group, we’re particularly interested in how our relationships of interest to each other are influenced by things like structural strength, the economy, and social factors. other. So a hospital – especially an aged care unit – is the perfect place to explore those themes of care in a sometimes compromising context.
Are there any storylines in Wayward Strand that involve the elderly, specifically dementia, Alzheimer’s, and other age-related illnesses?
Almost all of our storylines feature older characters! Because the game is set in a nursing home for the elderly, our 6 main characters are patients in that area. Our aim with Wayward Strand was to portray these older characters in their full life experience, showing them a rich inner world. So they may struggle with back pain or forgetfulness, but they also have friendships with other patients, with staff, and with their own preferences, desires, etc.
One of our characters, Tomi, lives with some form of amnesia, and is considered by hospital staff to be completely speechless. Without giving too much away, she has storylines that relate to her former career, her continued love for plants, and her connection to her family on the other side of the world.
What is your approach to writing about dementia sensitively?
While we have several team members with family members who have lived with dementia, no one on our team has that direct experience. And so, before locking down our scenarios, we wanted to talk to someone who has had experience with dementia and get their perspective on the game.
The wonderful Carly Findlay put us in touch with Kate Swaffer, CEO and Co-Founder of Dementia Alliance International. Kate lives with dementia and consulted with us about the portrayal of the Tomi character. In a game with so much conversation, we were faced with the challenge of portraying this wordless character with the same sensitivity and dignity as her patients in the hospital.
But Kate has some great suggestions for how we can better understand and portray Tomi’s experience, as well as find opportunities in the game to tell a contrasting story about dementia, to bring Tomi’s experience is a bit more contextual.
What other research did you do before starting on the Wayward Strand?
So many! The game is set in the 1970s, in Victoria, on a spaceship and features characters from around the world, as well as a Bunurong character. Luckily, our team loves our research and process, which involves everything from desktop research to field trips to years-long consulting relationships with fellow professionals. People with live experience are deeply informed about our game.
Have you played games like Spiritfarer, To the moonand Before I forget, which also deals with dementia, death and memory? If so, what do you think of the way those games handle the theme?
Personally (says Georgia, co-director of the narrative), of these games, I’ve only played Spiritfarer. I found it very touching! Perhaps because of the themes I’m thinking about in Wayward Strand, I’m less interested in the depiction of death, and more interested in the depiction of care. Some souls that come aboard your boat are wretches. They’re cocky and they’re demanding – and you still care about them.
Our game is very different from Spiritfarer, but we have some of the same essence – it’s the idea of creating characters that are real people and encouraging players to think about when and how care can be made for people we may not want to care for, or who may not be able to reciprocate in any way.
Games have the potential to be tools for empathy and education, but they also run the risk of trivializing matters – how do you avoid that?
We have at least one very clear strategy to avoid trivializing the serious themes of our game: make it less gamey. A game set in a hospital is going to be horribly mediocre if you have some points to take care of, or if treating someone’s cancer is a winnable quest, or something like so.
Our game design took care of how player agency is not always available and how the player character doesn’t need to feel at the center of the world for the game to work. In Wayward Strand, you can take care of the characters and you can help them with small things. But you can’t cure them, and you can’t collect points to earn their respect.
How do you write characters with character, personality, and dignity, while portraying their fatal illnesses?
Our consultation process is a huge part of this. With such a heterogeneous cast, we will always write far beyond our own life experiences. And so, from day one, we invested time and money talking to people whose living experiences were closer to our characters.
And for each patient character, we made sure we portrayed them fully by understanding three things: who were they before they got sick? Who are they now? And what is their attitude towards their illness? These questions can help us strike a balance between portraying the gravity of these illnesses, without turning the disease into its own personality trait that overshadows people.
Wayward Strand is set in 1978 – how was medical treatment for the elderly different then, and how did this inform the game?
The treatments are very different and we were faced with a real challenge in deciding how to make this difference. First, health professionals have less information to go on. The types of checks and scans that are possible now are not available before. This means that medical professionals must be more attuned to their patients as they are and interact more with their patients’ bodies.
It also means, quite simply, that medical outcomes are often worse. We have several storylines that portray this – patients with what is now considered a mild or preventable illness. But we also have some stories that herald questions regarding quality of life and hospice, where attitudes have evolved over the years.
Do you have a personal experience with group dementia? If so, how did that affect the creation of Wayward Strand?
Some of us have family members who have lived with dementia, and this influenced our initial desire to include a character with dementia. But our conversations with amazing consultant Kate Swaffer were definitely the brightest part of the making of this character.
What do you hope people can learn or discover about dementia through your and others’ games?
Dementia is a disease with a lot of misconceptions. People living with dementia are often considered to have lost their personality – along with the dignity and rights associated with that personality – early in their illness.
Like all of our other characters, Tomi is an individual with a history, interests and a rich inner world. We hope that our game players who are living with dementia find some comfort or companionship from the game in general and from Tomi in particular; and other players can sit with Tomi and reflect on the many ways they relate to anyone in their lives living with dementia.
Thanks to Georgia for talking to us and the team for hosting the interview! Wayward Strand will launch on the Nintendo Switch eShop on July 21, 2022.
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