Introducing Vya

At least twice a day, I spend time in an elevator, traveling the distance between my home and the world outside. Descent, which takes me away from my comfort zone, always requires a different kind of resolve. The poet in me can’t help but draw analogies to katabasis, Greek for “going down,” the name given to underworld narratives, like Persephone’s abduction into Hades, Dante’s Inferno, Alice Notley’s The Descent of Alette, or Neil Marshall’s The Descent. In these works, the underworld is a formidable place where the protagonist encounters the garrulous dead, their own fears, an obstacle course, a confrontation with the most hidden parts of themselves. Inspired by these descents, especially Dante’s Inferno, my video game Vya is a downward journey into the under layers of the middle-aged self. Along the way, the eponymous protagonist will encounter shades from her past, personal demons, figures of repression. Her experiences there will be claustrophobic and inescapable, raw and uncomfortable, precisely the kind of experiences she endeavored to avoid by escaping to life in the woods. Vya is a single-player narrative adventure game which I am building in Unity, using Yarn Spinner for the bulk of its branching dialogues.

When the game opens, we find Vya in her forest home, reflecting obliquely on the motivations for her retreat from the outside world. Her narration begins with the lines “Midway upon the journey of my life/ I found myself within a forest dark.” Dante uses “midway” (nel mezzo del cammin), a spatial measure, to represent mid-life (for him, the age of thirty-five) and the “forest dark” (una selva oscura) as a figure of doubt and uncertainty. “Forest dark” is Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s translation (in fact the first few lines of the introduction borrow directly from it), and it has inspired the introduction’s level design. For the opening, I wanted to capture a feeling of comforting and claustrophobic containment. The forest is Vya’s comfort zone but also a place of risks and dangers that she evades by not straying from a linear path. Rendering it as a two-dimensional level, where players can move only from left to right, serves as a convenient shorthand for the linearity and predictability of Vya’s life. Parallax scrolling imparts a feeling of depth, gesturing to the wider world while inhibiting the player’s ability to explore it. From the player’s perspective, Vya should appear to be enclosed, maybe even trapped, in this forest, implying that the straight path is the problem.

A few years ago, when I started telling close friends that I wanted to study game design, a few suggested that I was having a midlife crisis. The phrase carries such negative connotations, the weight of a warning, but instead the word “crisis” would bring me other meanings, like “turning point” and “change.” In Hebrew, the word for crisis—mashber—is related to fragmentation and shattering. The word for rift—shever—is a relative.  In English, as in Hebrew, a rift designates the breaking apart of landmasses. Geological rifts feature varied landscapes and habitats, creating conditions for biodiversity. A midlife crisis is a rift. It can be isolating and violent, but also creative and transformative. That is what Vya is about.