False Vacuum’s Upcoming Linda and Joan is About Facing the Unbearable
The past three years of my life have been rife with medical issues. Not my own, but those of my aging parents and extended family. Mostly, I’ve been doing my best to put my head down and get through it, thinking about the reality of the situation as little as humanly possible. So when I realized what False Vacuum Games’ upcoming title, Linda and Joan, was about, my heart dropped.
Framed as being about “the worst year of your life”, Linda and Joan depicts a man named Russell dealing with the fallout of losing both his mother and grandmother to illness within a year. The game is more or less autobiographical, detailing how developer, Russell Quinn, coped with these life shattering events. “ I was the sole caregiver for my mother, and the only surviving close family member, so also had to do all the post-death tasks alone,” Quinn told me. “ I was experiencing a lot of PTSD-like symptoms, because of the big disconnect between what had happened over the last year and my regular life. The two worlds just didn’t intersect at all. Nobody here really knew what I had gone through and my last two family members had died, so I didn’t have anyone to share the grief with.”
This is a familiar feeling. While friends do know what’s been going on with me, there’s just not much to actually be done about it. How do you help beyond just trying your best to be supportive? What help do you ask for when everything is crashing down around you? There’s no good answer. And as a generally intensely private, deal-with-things-myself kind of person, I could never really imagine putting that trauma out for the world to see. But Quinn has felt differently.
“I started reading about how other people in creative fields dealt with trauma and, of course, many novelists, filmmakers, playwrights end up making work based on their experiences. There are so many types of media where depicting such events is common,” he said. “But, I’m not a novelist, filmmaker, or playwright. I’ve worked in interactive storytelling for the last ten years and so, that’s the medium that I’m choosing to tell my story in. I guess it just adds to the personal nature of the project, because it’s also the format that the creator knows how to make.”
Quinn’s experiences as a caregiver didn’t just impact the game’s story. Its gameplay loop and even overall genre were also influenced by this time in his life. As he settled into a routine of care, Quinn began to notice how repetitive certain parts of it could be. There were tasks and puzzles in real life that would eventually translate more easily into the point-and-click adventure game Linda and Joan would become.
“Of course, that time was also punctuated with disasters, meaningful interactions, and so much more, but while caregiving is challenging for everyone involved, there are also huge periods of repetition and boredom,” Quinn said of the experience. “It wasn’t until later — I wasn’t thinking about turning the experience into anything at the time! — that I remembered this and how there were so many puzzles to solve (something new always needed to be done, but how to do it?!) and the format started to gel with a point-and-click interface.”
The prologue is a bit different, more of a “walking sim” than a usual point-and-click, but that also lends itself to the themes Quinn was after. “You control both characters and if you balance their speeds so they walk within earshot, they’ll have a conversation.” This prologue has Russell’s mother visiting him in LA from England, and they’re hiking up the short trail to the observatory. Walking with Russell’s mother begins to reveal her health problems, and the more you stick within earshot, the more backstory you start to learn.
“I really wanted to play with the friction of difficult family conversations,” Quinn said. In real life, his mother did come visit him in LA four months before he had to return to England to care for her. The signs that something was awry were there as they made their trek while she was visiting. “The walk through Griffith Park to the Observatory was a good time for us to talk, but it’s hard — hard to change a mood on a nice summer’s day, hard to broach topics that might lead to conversations about things you’ve avoided for years.”
Quinn wanted to capture the discomfort these kinds of conversations can create, and left it up to the player to diffuse the tension. If you keep Russell and his mother within earshot, they’ll dive into more of what they’re thinking, but you still have to be willing to give the conversation a chance. There are different dialogue choices that allow you to either open up the conversation more, or shut it down. If you don’t want to deal with it, you can simply walk ahead, though your companion will call after you if you try to leave them behind. “What is more awkward, walking ahead of a family member, or having a tough conversation?! That’s up to the player.”
No matter how hard we try, at the end of the day, there really is no escaping these things.You can ignore them, you can walk away, but eventually we all have to deal with the pitfalls life throws our way. Games have been diving more and more into these kinds of topics, with titles like That Dragon, Cancer, making waves. Though it’s going to be hard and painful, I’m excited to see how Linda and Joan handles the experience of caring for those who spent their lives caring for you, and how to cope once they slip away for good.
Follow the game’s progress here.
