Words by David C. Obenour
It was never something you really thought about. Even after all of the shock and disbelief of the world ending calcified into some form of acceptance. Thousands died. Thousands more turned into something… else. You and your brother both understood all of this. It’s not even that you believed the change couldn’t happen to one of you. But that isn’t the same thing as coming to grips, hour by passing hour, with the reality of it finally happening. In Elliot Davis’ The Time We Have, two players work through a deck of prompts and complicated emotions as they sit on opposite sides of a closed door at the very end of it all.
Off Shelf: You’ve talked about a love for sad story telling, what appeals to you about that? How do you think these narratives connect with us differently than those driven by other emotions?
Elliot Davis: I think sadness is one of the greatest teachers about ourselves. It’s a very personal emotion. What makes you sad says a lot about you. Sharing your sadness brings you closer to others. When I experience a sad narrative alone, I feel changed by it. When I experience one with someone else, I feel like a new facet of our relationship forms. It’s uncomfortable, right? But if you can’t safely explore that kind of negative emotion, it will kick your ass when it hits you in real life. Being sad is a part of life and I think sad stories help us to better experience the full depth of life without adding more risk or danger than we already must face in life.
OS: You’ve also mentioned how this game was born amidst your self-described pessimistic outlook for the current state. How do you think that perspective shaped this game?
ED: I deal with a constant fight against pessimism at the current state of the world. It’s gotten better. There are people in my life who make me believe in a better future. But when I was writing this game I was feeling particularly bad. I feared the capital-A Apocalypse that might be on the horizon in my lifetime. And while it is unlikely to be zombies, they’re a useful framing for how I felt about the end of the world. I thought a lot about the people who matter most to me, how we would manage to survive together, how me might fail to do so. I thought about what I would say to them should the worst happen. There is a lot of my perspective in both sides of this game’s conversation. I think there would be a lot of grief in the apocalypse, a lot of love with those we survive with, and frankly, a lot of humor at the fucked up state of things.
OS: If someone were to say that they didn’t think a sad story RPG felt “fun” or worth doing – given the current state of things – how would you respond to that?
ED: “Fair!” [laughs] I hear that a lot to be honest with you. People hear the pitch at conventions and immediately say, “Oh, I couldn’t play that.” And like, on the one hand, I am never going to push on that if it feels like it’s coming from a real place of hurt—you never know what someone has dealt with. But what I tend to ask people is, “Do you ever listen to sad music? Do you know that cathartic feeling it gives you when you really feel like shit? This is like that!” I know recreational sadness might seem like a fool’s errand but – especially when the world feels bleak – it can be healing to play in that space. To cry and rage at the things you are afraid of from the comfortable position of fiction.
OS: When I ran into you at Origins you mentioned that this game was very specifically designed for two brothers and their relationship. How do you think that relationship is unique from a spouse or friends or a parent?
ED: Yeah, it is really specifically meant to be played as two brothers. Every question was written with that relationship in mind and I think something is lost in changing that relationship. At the core of this game are my feelings about masculinity. Brothers are a unique relationship in how it teaches you lessons around masculinity and forces you to confront its challenges and limitations. Me and my brothers have very distinct versions of masculinity. My own is very informed by my queerness and a desire to balance softness and strength in how I express my gender. A brother is someone you will go through some of the worst moments of your life with and have the hardest time talking to about it. You laugh through shared pain and trauma from your family but simply saying, “I love you” can be a challenge. It might take years to access a vulnerability you find easily in other relationships. Or you might never find it.
OS: Family can be a hard thing for many of us to navigate. Was that something you considered when creating the prompts for this final conversation between two brothers?
ED: Oh, absolutely. Family sucks! It is this incredibly intense web of relationships that you have no say in. There are prompts in this game that come from my own experiences with my family and prompts that feel true of all families. One of my favorite prompts in the games is, “Which family member are we a little glad we don’t have to see again?” Everybody has one of those, and if you’re like me and my brothers, you leave every family function thinking, “Fuck that guy.” This goes along with the reasoning behind this relationship being two brothers. Sometimes that is the only person who can complain and laugh with you with the full context for that particular family member you hate.
OS: You dedicated this game to your brothers, how have they responded to it? Have you played it with any of them? Did any of how they responded surprise you?
ED: In the spirit of the game, we haven’t had any big conversations about the contents of the game. They each own a copy and they were very touched when they heard the concept. We haven’t ever dove into how much my relationships with each of them inspired the game, how there are moments within these cards that are defining of those relationships, how my fear of losing them is core to the game. We certainly haven’t played the game and I’m not sure we ever will. In many ways, you could say I haven’t taken the lessons of my own game.
OS: Can you talk about your collaboration with Ripley Ash? What were you looking for as a visual companion to this game?
ED: Ripley is one of the most talented people I’ve ever had the joy of working with. The visual identity of the game truly wouldn’t be what it is without them. I met them when the game was still an early idea. As soon as I saw their work, I told them “I will want to work with you on something, I’m just not sure what yet.” Then I saw an image on their instagram of an arm with flowers growing out of it. That not only cemented my wanting to work with them but it was the final piece of the puzzle for what the aesthetic of this game would be. It was the perfect balance of beauty and body horror that I was looking for.
OS: What guidance did you give them? Are there illustrations that particularly resonate with you and why?
ED: I was attached to the aesthetic of the cordaceps virus in The Last of Us but I wanted something softer, something beautiful. The floral nature of the virus is part and parcel with the game’s themes of vulnerability and masculinity. The pain of vulnerability is beautiful and as the virus takes away the infected brother, he becomes something beautiful.
With this point of reference, I talked a lot with Ripley about the flowers, the way the virus manifested. Lilacs were an early point of reference for both color and shape language, with Ripley ultimately developing a more original flower shape that could contain the eye on the cover, which is one of my favorite details.
The cover illustration was the first one Ripley made and is the perfect encapsulation of the game. One thing that was really important was for the brothers on this cover to feel imprintable for prospective players, not too specific in how they are depicted. I think that Ripley nailed this balance with the more line-art forward approach and the lack of facial details. There is also so much in the posing of these characters that speaks to what it feels like to play each side of the game.
OS: For the written prompts on the cards, how did you develop these? What makes for evocative questions and did you learn anything about asking questions from having made this game?
ED: I love prompt-based game design. One of my first games, Project ECCO, is a solo journaling game and I’ve done a lot of work in that space. I feel like I continue to change and grow in what I think is a “good” prompt but I’ll try to wrap my thoughts around it. The initial vibe of these prompts came from my love of For The Queen by Alex Roberts, for which this game owes a lot of its core DNA. The prompts in that game often follow a structure of Statement-Question that I use a fair bit in The Time We Have, ie. “There is an inside joke we have about the infected. Is it still funny?” This structure does two things at once, it makes something true that you can flesh out in conversation and then asks you to make a choice about that truth. From my work in solo design, I always wanted a prompt to contain more than it appeared at first reading. I want to inspire entire scenes you might never “directly” see. I want you to be able to approach the question in different unexpected ways. Then, of course, there is the inspiration from my actual brothers. My relationship with each of them is in these prompts, I have either had the conversation implied by the prompt or imagined that exact conversation with an exact brother in the apocalypse.
OS: You also had a number of guest illustrators and writers. Can you talk about how they got involved and how you decided to open up the call for submissions wider?
ED: This is another area where I have to give flowers to For the Queen. In that game, there are several “Queen Cards” which have art pieces of various queens across a huge variety of visual styles and implied genres. When playing that game, I was struck by how much the choice of queen influenced the particular playthrough and story we created. It is brilliant design. I knew that was something I wanted to replicate in this game. But I realized that a door alone might not give full inspiration the way a character like the Queen does.
So I decided to do a bit of a call and response with some of my favorite game designers and illustrators. The designers were asked to write a short piece of fiction that implied two things: a setting and a specific twist on a “zombie” infection. The style directive was “found environmental storytelling in exploration videogames”. Then that writing was passed to an illustrator with the sole directive that the focal point of the art had to be a closed door. It became one of my favorite aspects of the game. It adds a replayability that I worried in early days was not possible for this game. It also forced me to really restrain the main game to the emotional core of this relationship because it now needed to resonate across a multiverse of different zombie apocalypses.