With Papo & Yo and Spirits of Spring, Montreal’s Minority Media is riding the wave of a new trend — producing video games that focus on empathy
The New York Times singled out an unlikely video game created by Montreal’s Minority Media a couple of years ago, calling their creation “remarkable” in its singularity. “Papo & Yo is a magical-realist fable about the relationship between its creative director and writer, Vander Caballero, and his alcoholic father,” the Times reported. “Its power is amplified by its relationship to actual events from its creator’s childhood — and by the player’s knowledge of that relationship.” The word “landmark” was used.
As the character Quico, players of Papo & Yo build their friendship with a creature called Monster (who has a dangerous addiction) by solving puzzles together and adventuring through a magical, surrealist world. Here’s the innovation — players will need to learn to use Monster’s emotions, both good and bad, to their advantage if they want to complete their search for a cure and save their pal.
Papo & Yo, and now Spirits of Spring, both created by Minority Media, are considered to be part of a growing trend in gaming — an emphasis on empathy and learning about the emotional needs of game characters. Spirits of Spring, for example, focuses on the complexities involved in bullying. Vander Caballero, Minority’s creative director, told the National Post, “We’re not psychologists. We’re artists. And it’s important that we keep what we’re doing in the realm of art.” But the group reports receiving powerful accounts of the positive effects their games have had in the lives of people playing them.
Ruben Ferrus, the creative director for Spirits of Spring, was bullied as a child. He told the National Post, “This project was like my therapy. For my whole life I had nightmares of being bullied. With my bullies coming and pushing me around, and not being able to fight back. That was my pain: even if I wanted to I couldn’t fight back…. By the time I finished this project, my nightmare had changed. I still have it, but now I react. I stop it.”
“Sometimes when people are in really difficult personal situations, the most important thing is: ‘What is the sense of all this suffering? Why am I going through all this pain? Does it have any sense? Or should I quit?’” — Vander Caballero in the National Post
We speak with Minority Media social media director Rommel Romero.
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tweets and links
audio: @rommel_romero on empathy in video games @we_are_minority http://t.co/AfpVBlTazq pic.twitter.com/WlCej7ErgR
— People First Radio (@peoplefirstrad) January 22, 2015
Cool to know our interview was the most listened to on @peoplefirstrad in January!
http://t.co/SOBd4ZKkVG #empathy #SpiritsOfSpring
— Minority Media Inc. (@we_are_minority) February 11, 2015
Really enjoying Papo & Yo so far. The stuff it's doing with player empathy through gameplay is something you don't see very often.
— Nate Kiernan (@MrNinjaSquirrel) February 12, 2015
