Somewhere brings together gaming, literary fiction, post-Colonial stories, and a little magical realism. Instead of directly following a set objective with lists of rules, this game allows you to explore its world through stories.
“We have been working on Somewhere for over the past three years, looking at diverse stories. We believe that video games are deeply suited to the telling of post-Colonial stories because of the inherent fragmentation of narrative and the multiplicity of authorship that they offer,” says Dhruv Jani, the game’s creator who was in Bengaluru for a presentation on the game in an event organized by the India Foundation for the Arts (IFA). Dhruv is an IFA grantee and co-founder of Studio Oleomingus, an independent game studio.
“Players get a certain amount of authority to choose the narrative inside a video game. If you have several narratives embedded inside a game to begin with, players will start to tailor a story as it suits them or their understanding of the narrative. When they share their experiences and find them to be different from the experiences that other people are having, you start to see the nuances of construction inside the stories, which is what post-Colonial narratives try to elicit.”
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Dhruv also observes that colonial history is deeply contested, in that despite several writers talking and writing about it over the past 50 years, there is no single authoritative historical document that could explain the events that transpired.
“This is the kind of multi-faceted narrative that we are trying to subsume inside the game and have them added simultaneously, so players can start looking at the distinctions between each.”
Somwhere is a rule-driven game to a certain extent, except that the rules are hidden behind an exploration system. And the objective of the game is only to follow on till the end of the story.
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“The stories don’t technically end because they keep looping. You are then simply wandering around and that notion of aimless wandering has already been well-captured in some video games that are otherwise extremely rule-driven. There are games such as Skyrim, which simulate an enormous world with Nordic mythological overtones that players can traverse through. It takes hours to cross the entire world on foot and it has a sense of aimlessness where players can hunt and gather, roam around, talk or read books. Or they can explore and do what the game is supposed to do.”
What this means, he points out, is that gaming technology has already created the gaming theme that Somewhere is based on.
“We are simply mounting a series of strange narratives into that structure,” says Dhruv, a graduate from the National Institute of Design who has written the stories.
Set in Kayamgadh, a fictional place in the 1860s they are influenced by the works of authors such as Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Lewis Carroll, Sukumar Ray, EM Forster, Rudyard Kipling, RK Narayan, JG Farell, Saadat Hasan Manto, and Paul Scott.
“I studied exhibition design at NID. Loosely defined, it is a form of architecture for temporary structures and is instrumental in how we organize both storytelling and physical structures. A game can be seen from a larger architectural understanding of how data is organized or how space or movement works,” says Dhruv, who has earlier worked as a researcher for the Tajgunj Project at NID and a participant of the ‘Of Games: Theatre in Code’ residency at Khoj International Artists Association, Delhi.
“In my previous projects, I gravitated towards programming spaces and procedural form. But they lacked a narrative layer that would help relate to what was happening, which is something we could bring into games like Somewhere. I wanted to do storytelling but inside that computation space.”
He has already released three stories in the game, which is available in game distribution sites and is compatible with major operating systems. “The game’s rather difficult to describe. It is easier to understand if you play it.”