The graveyard (2008)
Auriea harvey and michaël samyn
![Picture](/uploads/4/5/4/2/4542606/525224604.jpg?284)
"It's more like an explorable painting than an actual game. An experiment with realtime poetry, with storytelling without words."
- Harvey and Samyn
“We often call our work ‘short games’ in analogy to short film, because short films have a tendency to be more experimental and artistic than long films.”
- Harvey and Samyn
- Harvey and Samyn
“We often call our work ‘short games’ in analogy to short film, because short films have a tendency to be more experimental and artistic than long films.”
- Harvey and Samyn
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The Graveyard is an art game by IGF-winning developer Tale of Tales (Harvey and Samyn) which places players in the role of an elderly woman visiting a cemetery. The player guides the woman through the graveyard to a bench where she sits and appears to reminisce about something from her past while listening to a piece of music in her mind.
The game is short and simple, but gorgeously rendered, and features a sombre, original song as an interlude to the "gameplay." The free version is only a trial but the only difference between that and the paid version is in the full game the old woman may die. When asked how death changed the player experience, Harvey and Samyn said “It’s the difference between life and death! … But to the computer, the only difference is a checkbox labeled ‘avatar can die.’ We think there is a lot of poetry in this.” “One of the questions that we wanted to ask was whether death is always so unwelcome. Perhaps the peace that death brings is good. Perhaps life just goes on without us, and perhaps our own death is only a small event among many,” Samyn and Harvey said. In traditional games, death means “game over.” In The Graveyard, death is the point. The realisation is how tweaking a small aspect of the game’s narrative changed the entire experience. |
Suggested Questions
- How does The Graveyard differ from real life?
- What are the implications for giving players a choice whether to play a game where there’s no chance at all for death as opposed to the chance of the lady dying in the paid version?
- Describe The Graveyard using formal analysis and identify the dominant art elements and principles.
- Think about what the game would have been like if the camera was in first-person perspective and how this would have changed the experience.
- Harvey and Samyn describe the game as ‘an explorable painting’. If it actually was a painting, as it looks right now, do you think it would have been as effective?
- If the experience of The Graveyard was instead an animated film do you think it would be as effective?
- Would you recommend this game to be played by anyone else? Why, why not?
- How does The Graveyard differ from real life?
- What are the implications for giving players a choice whether to play a game where there’s no chance at all for death as opposed to the chance of the lady dying in the paid version?
- Describe The Graveyard using formal analysis and identify the dominant art elements and principles.
- Think about what the game would have been like if the camera was in first-person perspective and how this would have changed the experience.
- Harvey and Samyn describe the game as ‘an explorable painting’. If it actually was a painting, as it looks right now, do you think it would have been as effective?
- If the experience of The Graveyard was instead an animated film do you think it would be as effective?
- Would you recommend this game to be played by anyone else? Why, why not?