Diversity is the reality in Deconstructeam’s Essays on Empathy
The creators behind popular Cyberpunk game, The Red Strings Club, and publisher Devolver Digital have announced Essays on Empathy – 10 unique games and experiences which focus heavily on narrative design and the characters within that narrative.
These 10 games are varied in the best of ways. In one game you may be an interviewer that has to talk to an old man who believes he can contact god through the radio, and then in the next you may be playing as a girl who kinda-sorted-weirdly-but-strangely-positively discovered that her skeleton isn’t actually hers! Strange how that keeps happening…
One game, named De Tres al Cuarto, is exclusive to the compilation. It has players following a couple of two-bit comedians trying to make it big.
Here are just some of the things that Essays on Empathy can offer you.
- Ten Short Games About Life: Step into the shoes of a richly imagined cast of characters over 5 hours of vivid and varied gameplay.
- Premium Collector’s Bonus Content: Soak up Deconstructeam’s acclaimed artistry through sketches, design insights and a new mini-documentary created especially for this collection.
- Sounds Of Sympathy: Features more than 2 hours of original music by Paula Ruiz, aka fingerspit – a queer artist, whose music you can listen to here.
In our talk with Deconstructeam, they stated the collection is titled Essays of Empathy because “you get to inhabit a broad spectrum of characters and contexts throughout the games included in this collection, from being a housewife in a toxic relationship to a gay hitman learning to make flower arrangements. Moreover, there’s about an hour of video documentary on the context in which the games were created, what we learned, our views on diversity, politics in games, creative philosophy, and more.”
The collection also has the team’s literal faces inside the project, with this inclusion the team wanted to reach to players out there and connect on a new level in an act of literal, “explicit communication.”
As for why the inclusion of queer characters, the answer from Deconstructeam was a simple one. “For us diversity is reality. We live in a world populated by a wide range of identities. It doesn’t make sense that the media keeps being monopolized by a single profile.” They continued. “Beyond that, we believe that diversity and inclusion can improve our medium and our own lives, from the people who make the games to the characters who get to star in any story: to increase the variety of creative input, the ways of experimenting and interacting with life… one can only benefit from expanding their world views. And stories will be more original! New flavours! We can only think of good repercussions when about diversity in any context.”
To find out more, head on over to essaysonempathy.com and follow the team over on Twitter.
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