my baby needs blood

I’ve been to a lot of communications trainings over the years – I work in policy advocacy, so the topic of how to use words to persuade people is kind of important – and there’s one hangup that pretty much always throws somebody in the group. See, comms professionals will often distinguish the message – what you are trying to get across – from the story – what you actually say. But for some people, there’s a disconnect because they don’t get why you wouldn’t just say the thing that you’re trying to get across? Like, if the message on health care reform is that if we rein in insurance company greed sick people won’t go bankrupt, isn’t that what we should trumpet from the rooftops? But of course that’s not how human beings work. Sure, some people will nod along, but those are mostly the folks already on your side. Tell a story about a specific, actually-existing sick person who actually experienced these things, talk about how it felt, what exactly they did, drawing out the message like the moral from a fable – that’s what will actually move people.

my baby needs blood has an interesting message, but I wish its author had sat through one of those trainings and made it more of a story. The setup here is definitely novel; the protagonist is an Ainu (I think, from googling some of the proper nouns) woman living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Her partner is deeply unwell, and depends on her to bring him food, and especially the wineskins full of blood that he’s sure will bring him back to health. At the same time, he doesn’t understand why she doesn’t want a family the way he does; if nothing else, surely extra hands will help lighten her burden, once the children are grown? As she goes back into the woods and reflects, she encounters, or thinks she encounters, a creature that maybe be the goddess of hunting and motherhood – or may be her demonic doppelganger, who impersonates the goddess, pretending even to have a child, only to lure hunters to her and drink their blood.

The dramatic questions are clear, and have an appealing mythic resonance: the woman is sure she doesn’t want to be a mother, so while her partner sees her as the fecund, all-providing goddess, she’s worried she’s actually the demon. Meanwhile, he also says he needs blood, but the game’s text emphasizes that he’s relying on tradition – and a specifically paternal tradition – rather than direct knowledge, so perhaps this violently-slaked thirst isn’t a real need, just something imposed by the patriarchy much as the expectation of childbearing is?

When I type it all out like that, it sounds pretty cool! But while the game doesn’t state matters quite so baldly, it doesn’t do much to dress these dilemmas up into a story, either. The plot doesn’t really progress, for one thing, ending well before any of these conflicts begin to resolve themselves, and there’s no interactivity to foster player engagement. For another, detail that would help make the characters feel more human remain frustratingly undeveloped, including the all-important question of why the narrator feels the way she does about having a child. The prose is also frequently a bit awkward and unconvincing. For example, there’s a reference to the protagonist’s mother having read her stories when she was a child, which seems implausible for a hunter-gatherer culture (a quick google indicates that the Ainu language doesn’t actually have a written form, just being transliterated into other scripts once other cultures came into contact with them). And this excerpt contains the nugget of a compelling idea, but conveys it awkwardly, at least to my ear:

"We can only adapt to [winter]; weapons serving for where we lack strength, wardrobe for where we lack fur. But no matter the arrowheads I carry or the layers I dress, I still feel these shivers."

The counterpoint to these complaints is that the story of my baby needs blood isn’t in the text – it’s in everything else. Because this is a multimedia production, with monochrome-blue, downsampled videos of a frosty landscape lending substantial ambience to proceedings, and character portraits in the same vein theoretically providing additional emotional heft to the dialogue. While I didn’t play the game with sound on, intermittent black screens that persisted for a few seconds made me think that there’s an audio layer too. It’s all admittedly very well done, but there’s also a price to be paid for all those bells and whistles, which is that there’s a delay on every word the game displays, which quickly began to feel excruciating.

For some players, of course, that will feel like a quite modest admission-cost given the cool vibes on display, finding the audio-visual tapestry provides a richly evocative context for the words. But I like text games because I like text; I want the theme to be dressed up in words, not pictures or sounds, no matter how artfully produced they are.