The Longest Walk

Description

The Longest Walk is an award-winning deeply personal biographical walking simulator game about my father's experience of living with depression and suicidal thoughts. The game was created using audio recorded from a 54-minute-long interview that I conducted with my father, which was then edited into this approximately 9-and-a-half minute long playable experience.

The aim for this game is to help reduce feelings of isolation and encourage those who are struggling with depression or experiencing suicidal thoughts to reach out for help. Through my father's sharing of his personal experience in an open and frank manner, this documentary game aims to raise awareness of and provide an insight into what it is like living with depression in order to provoke discussion and help tackle the stigma about opening-up about mental health issues.

This project was driven by the following questions:

What methods can game designers adopt to authentically capture and represent the lived experience of others?
How can game designers process and refine this lived experience to communicate a wider message whilst remaining authentic to the experience of the individual?

The Longest Walk uses a verbatim approach to present my research findings through play, knowledge exchange, and public engagement events. In the game, the player navigates a series of 3D-scanned vignettes of real-world locations as my father recalls his lived experience of living with depression and suicidal ideation. In this context, he ascribes his memories to the digital representations of the physical landscape; from his first crisis moment, to understanding his symptoms and recognising them as depression, to suicidal ideation, to recovery and reflecting on the experience. This prototype served as the culmination of my research up to this point: integrating the aesthetic qualities and considerations for voice explored through earlier prototypes with newly identified processes and practices for the structured capturing, editing and presentation of lived experience. The work sought to combine my father’s and my own perspectives whilst situating his deeply personal narrative within a wider socio-historical context. As such, this can be considered as a work of auto/biography (biogrpahy obtained through interview, imbued with elements of the personal). This invites the player not only to engage with his story at face value but also to encourage them to interpret it through the lens of their own memories, experience and context to derive deeper personal meaning.

The PC game is published under the Abertay Game Lab practice-based research group and Somewhat Unsettling Ltd., whilst the VR game is published by Somewhat Unsettling Ltd.

The intentions for this project were to:

Learn the process of capturing original lived experience data from another person through interview.
Identify and harness a more rigorous process of editing and narrative structuring.
Make the work publicly available (Publishing, exhibition, etc.).

It is recommend that you read section 4.4 The Longest Walk of the thesis for further insight into the project.

The Longest Walk V2.0

Content Warning: This experience contains strong language and potentially triggering content on topics related to anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation.