In 2018, What Remains of Edith Finch won the BAFTA for Best Game. Here’s my thoughts on how the creator of the game, my friend Ian Dallas, built such an awesome game. The game is now available on many platforms including iOS.
Screenshot from the game
Why are the best and brightest so boring these days? That’s the question that William Deresiewicz asks in his book Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite. He writes about the sad state of the Ivy League student, specifically at Yale, where he taught. He decries the students’ inability to take risks, instead putting all their attention into getting into climbing onto the corporate ladder of management consulting or investment banking.
While Deresiewicz’s critique may apply broadly—just look at where many of my classmates got their first jobs—it’s not true of everyone. My crew in specific, The Yale Record, was a different breed. We wrote and published the school’s humor magazine. We challenged the common thinking and strove to do something creative and amazing. When I was Publisher, Ian Dallas was Editor-in-Chief, and he took this mandate of creative innovation further than anyone.
Ian is a risk taker. It’s hard to understand what real risk taking is these days. In the business world, risk taking is fairly anodyne. You have an idea, and you spend some time trying to build it. If it’s wildly successful you become a billionaire. Don’t get me wrong, the sacrifice for this is intense. It’s mentally and financially straining. A founder’s health may fall apart due to all this strain. Dustin Moscovitz, a Facebook co-founder makes it sound horrible as he explains it to students. But at least the model is well defined. You build a start-up, and even if you fail, it’s an experience they can learn from and eventually succeed later on.
But Ian took a much greater risk. In a world where everyone in media is playing it safe and making sequels, Ian was making the anti-sequel. It’s a series of short stories based on a cursed family in Washington State. Each story is totally different and plays differently. The only constant is that each story ends with that family member’s death. Not a great pitch for a game.
It’s not even something that most people would consider a video game. “Most games that people play are about challenges,” he says, “They are given rules and given increasingly more difficult challenges over time. But not all of them. Having one word for ‘video game’ is like having one word for movies and TV and love of sports.”
It took him a decade to build something that no one had ever conceived of before. If he couldn’t make it work, he was facing a totally different kind of failure. No one would criticize him if he made the next Super Mario Bros. and it failed. But creating a series of short stories around a cursed house where everyone died. That had to work. Otherwise, it would be a career killing endeavor.
His goal is to create a feeling of the sublime. That’s the feeling of immersion and amazement we feel in the world. He wanted to recreate the feeling of learning to scuba dive. When Ian started scuba diving, he saw this world under the surface. There was this palpable feeling of unending depth. It was beautiful, scary, and fascinating all at the same time.
What does it feel like to take that kind of risk and be thrown into a world where you don’t know if the last decade of your life was a bust. I’m not sure, but the game What Remains of Edith Finch? may come close. Playing this game, I had this experience of exploration of discovery that’s really amazing. I wasn’t sure where I was or if I’d be able to make it through. While I needed to look for hints a couple of times, I succeeded. And I never play games. In the game, I experienced that all encompassing feeling of the sublime that Ian was going for. This was a transformational feeling that I’ve never experienced before on my phone. It’s kind of like Virtual Reality but with storytelling rather than technology.
So how did this risk turn out for Ian? Pretty well. The game is really good. He won the BAFTA for best game in 2018, beating out The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey. How’s that for an anti-sequel.
Here’s a bit from an interview I did with Ian a few years ago. Ian was the Editor-in-Chief of The Yale Record, my college humor magazine when I was there.
Rob: Can you explain the types of games you work on?
Ian: The games that I work on are intended to create surreal experiences that people have never had before. Most games that people play are about challenges. They are given rules and given increasingly more difficult challenges over time. My games are more about an experience. Like what it feels like to walk through a garden or what it feels like to read a collection of scary stories and try to extrapolate from that. It’s a process of translation, like making a song about fortune cookies. How do you distill down what it feels like to eat a fortune cookie? What are the salient pieces and make a totally different experience that reflects that. There’s the enjoyable aspect of making something really interesting to organize a bunch of people to make something really crazy and get people onboard — which is a lot like The Record.
I knew you as a writer. How did you get into creating video games?
I always expected that I would end up in video games because it was a medium that I really had a lot of affection for and intense experiences with growing up. It was also a medium that seemed to have generally fairly low quality and had a lot of room for improvement. I felt like I would work at the Onion, write for TV and then after that write for video games. But then I found out that people who write for video games aren’t really appreciated for the writing. They might be good writers in their own right, but the medium isn’t really about the writing. The unifying element is that comedy and the games I make are all about surprise. And creating experiences that people don’t expect. It’s taking a situation of what people expect and then twisting it around—which is what Monty Python is all about.
I want to give people something that takes their breath away. Video games are more about an experience and creating an atmosphere and tone. Video games are a great medium to have an experience of discovery and exploration which doesn’t really happen in movies. In the same way that music is a great medium for super intense emotions so there’s a lot of great songs about love but it’s not so great about conveying historical information. So there aren’t so many songs about the War of the Roses or whatever.
This post took forever to write. ChatGPT wasn’t particularly helpful, and I also enjoyed delving into the topic. Here’s my discussion with ChatGPT.
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