Effective talk: How to implement culture and their stories into games
Year of Talk: 2024
Venba: Narrative cooking game of a family that moves to Canada from India and their cookbook gets damaged so they must recook all the dishes to have the correct recipes while exploring the family's story.
The problem:
Hard to show new cultures that aren't well known to a wider public.
Not only need to tell the story but also teach about the culture and what makes it unique. But can affect the storytelling if it's not done correctly.
The solution:
The game was able to leverage the culture as lore that the players can learn and allows the player to become interested in what is being shown and become willing to do more research on it.
Many games and stories will normally have the main story that the player can go through the story and will encounter small nuggets of lore and culture that seem commonplace in that world but not in what most people might be used to. So the people who enjoy exploring and learning about the world they are playing in will inadvertently start learning about a real worlds culture.
Treating the familiar as unfamiliar. In a game, if the designers and storytellers want to have the players feel like everything happening around them is normal and familiar then the game needs to act as if it's familiar to the rest of the characters and the world.
This leads to having characters that are experts while the players might not understand a lot of what is happening.
If you lean into the dissonance and have the characters act as if the things that happen are commonplace dont bother adding explanations from people who wouldn't normally be doing it in those contexts.
For example, during a cooking marathon, it was considered having names included to help people unfamiliar with the game to know what they are cooking. But this would make it seem like these plates aren't made regularly. Imagine how weird it would be if during a family dinner, they had a UI element appear saying “Pizza” next to a plate of pizza. That's something many cultures in the world already know so there isn't a reason to write them out.
Changes the color of UI text depending on which language was being spoken. White for Tammer and yellow for English.
Representation/Representative:
Responsible to properly show everything that is part of the culture. Showing one part might mean you might not be able to show another part. But trying to represent the entire culture might mean it is hard and a lot of effort is put to show off what feels like very little. Aim to show a representation, not the entire representation.
Imagine how Red Dead Redemption might feel if they tried to show off more city life in other parts of the country where it might have been more industrialized. You'd lose time representing those areas when it doesn't help and distracts from the main focus of the game and setting.
If you become a tour guide the game concentrates too much on becoming a representative of the culture. However, according to the presenter, it did become blurry at times as player expectations might be hoping for different things. And affect how the story is perceived. Subtle ways to teach about food and culture through mechanics
A subtle way was through the proverbs shown at the start of each day. They are called Venba (Same as the game) and many players became interested and started to do research on them and learn more about the proverbs and others like them.
If you can give just enough information and get them motivated to learn more about the culture and the different cultures. If you show passion for the culture people are more likely to feel passionate for it also.
Players are able to connect the dots on certain features even if they haven't experienced the same situations. An example given is photo sizes. Many photos from India dont have the same sizes for frames in the US and Canada so many Indians can connect but even other people can subconsciously understand that the photos from other countries might not come the same way as theirs so it forces them to adapt to fit in.
It can drastically change how someone writes dialogue when they already are used to the other language versus someone who might be learning about it for the first time. In the game, they were able to capture a more authentic immigrant feeling by first writing it in the original language and then translating it more literally/directly.
Giving lore to players it is important to keep it as fleshed out as possible even if some players might miss it the first time as they are still learning about the culture many of the people who have a deeper understanding of the culture and experience it more often will pick it up and feel a deeper connection to the source material as the reminisce of those memories.
A spoiler example in the game is when one of the characters dies there is a shot that is placed in a frame with a book and a set of glasses. It is commonplace for people in India to have an image if the person dies. This allowed people from that area to instantly recognize it while other players that might not know that initially can realize that later on in the game or not at all.
It also allows players to become more engaged in the game as they might not understand what happened with the character and this can lead them to stay engaged with the story so they can understand what is happening. Once they do it can allow them to retroactively understand that the photo that was shown is done when a family member dies.
Allowing for you to be self-indulgent in adding references to your culture then it allows there to be references and common practices that only people from your culture would understand and allows for a deeper connection.