Stained Nights

Artist Statement

When it comes to obsessions (for which I am endowed plenty as an obsessive person), there is only really one obsession that really matters and it is the first—the night that my baby brother Caelan passed. My memory is hazy. In repeating it dozens and dozens of times over the years, I am sure that my recollection of the night has been tainted again and again, my surroundings and body metamorphosing as I age into new versions of self. But a few images of the night remain the same: I see the hallway strangely lit, I hear the soft sounds of my mother sobbing, I gaze upon the cold lifeless body of my brother on the kitchen table, and I’m taken away to be distracted by a firefighter, police officer, and an EMT. 

Stained Nights is a game about dreams, and the world of the imaginary. But in its core, it is a game about grief, about the various modes of dealing with loss, including its repudiation.

Grief is no linear process, it holds no aims. It can’t. It exists on the level of the imaginary because all interactions with the lost Other must begin there. So in imagining a past which cannot be changed, I do so in response to a future that is always changing, moving away and further to a world where he cannot (and therefore does not) exist. As Judith Butler aptly places it, to mourn is to “accept that by the loss one undergoes one will be changed, possibly for ever”. It is the struggle to make and live in a world after ‘you’, in which its very condition is the absence of that which was the world.  The story is cyclical, non-linear in nature, but also fluid in its causality. Linking these passages in a cyclical fashion forces the user to a reinterpretation of ‘fact’. This is the broader thematic statement of the piece—that to potentialize greater (or even the possibility of) futures necessitates an imagination of better pasts. It makes no claim on the validity of this argument. The three final endings of the game, which can only be achieved by ‘reimagining’ the past, make three separate arguments about whether or not the process of this reimagination holds any stake in the real world. In this way, Stained Nights functions as a game along the same lines as how Costikyan defines them, actively playing within and subverting that definition. Truly, Stained Nights is a game of endogenous meaning (its primary thematic argument questions whether or not representations can produce exogenous meaning). But at the same time, it questions whether or not a ‘struggle towards a goal’ can really function in the absence of exogenic meaning, or in pursuit of an endogenous meaning that can ever produce whole conclusions.

For this game, I adopted loosely what Nat Mesnard defines as a map structure. There are a few sandbox elements to the game, in which the player can choose to enter different rooms, and do certain actions according to what the space allows them to do. It also follows a lock-and-key mechanism, in which players can only reach the three endings by ‘imagining’ alternative (and often contradictory) pasts. 

I playtested this game with a few classmates and close friends. Following Mesnard’s advice, I first asked them to describe in general their feelings towards the game, without trying to hint them towards any answer. Then I asked them a series of questions about the game on the level of structure, meaning, and experience. As a whole, the response I got to the game was quite positive. Many of my playtesters related (or expressively wished not to relate) to the language and poetics of grief at play in the work. Similarly, many enjoyed the non-linear structure of the game as well as how it played to the broader question of the ‘struggle’ of grief. One playtester noted that it “reminded [her] about actually important people in [her] life.” There were a few major errors in some of the lock-and-key mechanisms in the game that led to some serious debugging. 

A final note about the work about the Christian imagery of the game. Since grief exists on the imaginary, for me, it is never separated from my Christian upbringing. On the very level of that failed project, for a majority of my life, I could not rationalize a notion of my dead brother without the saving imaginary of a future in which we could be reunited. In doing this project, I wanted to explore the very ways in which self-reflection is infused with those same images. I think this is most evident in the meaning gap between the titles of the endings (visible through the HTML titles of the ending passages, but self-evident in the story) and what they entail.