Introduction
During the early days of 2020, I was sitting at home. It was a lockdown, baby. And I thought, "Fuck it, the rest of my GI Bill is gonna go to waste if I don't use it. So I'm gonna do what I want." What I want is history. I've always loved learning and teaching history. Teaching in this case means teaching in places other than academia. I love learning. I legitimately love it. I've had the immense pleasure to experience history classes which are not what you might call conventional. Last week, I started my last semester as I get ready to earn my degree in history with a minor in public history. As is often the case during one's final semester, they need some elective credits. As is not often the case, there's a new professor who is teaching a class on history as told through the medium of video games.
Over the years, I've dabbled in writing about games. It's fun. I enjoy talking about games. I enjoy writing up a GoTY list. But I haven't really done so in the past couple years as much as I wanted to. I'm sure everyone reading this can name half a dozen contributors to this forum who excel at writing fun, thoughtful, engaging commentary on games. What could I say that they haven't already said?
Well, here we go: I'm gonna write about games that tell history. We have some fun ones we're doing in this class (apparently one week is gonna be a 20-player Crusader Kings 3 game). Each week, I'm gonna tell you about a game that I played and talk about how that game portrays history. Consider this an act of public history. I hope you'll be entertained. I hope you'll learn something. I hope I get an A in this class, my GPA took a hit after that fucking geology class last semester.
Bury Me, My Love
The Syrian Civil War is the sort of thing that many people are somewhat familiar with but don’t follow intently. It has receded into the background violence of life in the modern era, the sort of thing we all know is going on but can go weeks without hearing any specific story about. Bury Me, My Love is not about the Syrian Civil War. Like all good stories, it is about people. In this case, the people are Nour and Majd, a Syrian couple. Nour has decided to leave and seek asylum in Europe. Her partner, Majd, stays behind to care for family. The entirety of the game's story is told through the most ubiquitous and familiar communication technology we have today: a texting app on a cell phone.
The story is heavily based on real people. The game's creator, formerly a journalist, read this story in 2015 and was eventually able to work with the subject of this story to make this game. The article is in French. Scroll through it anyways.
The game’s mechanics are simple. The only interaction between the characters is done via the game’s cell phone inspired interface. Nour sends messages and updates about her journey while the player, taking the role of Majd, has a handful of responses to choose from. These responses often represent binary choices that will have an effect on Nour’s fate. Some of the choices are seemingly minor—should Nour find food first or find a hotel first? Other choices have much greater immediacy and far higher stakes, such as which smuggler Nour should contact in order to make it to Europe. The game’s simple interface grounds the narrative in a time and place by using a bit of technology that is familiar to the audience.
Bury Me, My Love is an emotional roller-coaster. Over the course of an hour, I felt happiness, tension, relief, anger, fear, hopelessness, and hope—and I felt all of these more than once. One of the most affecting techniques the game uses is a fade-to-black screen and a clock after certain decisions are made. This is used to show the passage of time, but some of the best uses of this storytelling device are used to show only minutes have passed, but these are minutes which feel like an eternity waiting for a response. It is a simple yet effective means of increasing tension in a text-based game. We all know the tension of sending an important text and awaiting a response, how minutes can feel like an eternity. The game uses this to ratchet up the tension in a way that is immediately familiar to most people.
Bury Me, My Love is a useful tool for teaching the player about the hardships that a refugee trying to get to Europe might experience. Financial hardships, finding a place to stay, unscrupulous smugglers, hunger, exhaustion, and boredom are all things that a refugee might experience, and this game expresses that throughout its narrative and mechanics.
In “Exploring the Complexities of Migration in Bury Me, my Love with The Pixel Hunt,” game designer Florent Maurin says that if the game can help develop anything in the player, it's empathy. He says, “Without me realizing it, I had been influenced by the general media coverage of the situation into believing that migrants were different from me.” This game shows the error of thinking that people are all that different. When we hear about people fleeing from the world’s violent conflicts, it is easy to shake our heads and call it all a tragedy. Bury Me, My Love humanizes the victims by showing them dealing with intense circumstances in very human ways. Nour and Majd exchange selfies, tease each other with emojis, and talk about trying new foods. The player won’t walk away from this game knowing the background of the war, but they may walk away from this game having some sense of how that war has affected millions of people. History without people is just a textbook.Bury Me, My Love is about people, affected by an event in history, and how those people are more similar to us than we may realize.
Sources
A note about sources: this course is largely curated. In other words, the source readings are provided by the professor. However, all of the writing here is my own original work and interpretation of the source material, with quotations noted where used.
1. Nobis, Sarah and Florent Maurin. "Exploring the complexities of migration in Bury me, my Love with The Pixel Hunt." Games 4 Sustainability, March 7, 2019. https://games4sustainability.org/2019/03/07/migration-bury-me-my-love/.
2. Soullier, Lucie. "The Journey of a Syrian Migrant as Told by Her WhatsApp Conversations." Le Monde. December 18, 2015. https://www.lemonde.fr/international/visuel/2015/12/18/dans-le-telephone-d-une-migrante-syrienne_4834834_3210.html#/.
Thank you for reading.
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