The Making Of...
How “a game for nobody” became the most important visual novel in years
How Zachtronics’ Eliza went from “a game for nobody” to the most important visual novel in years
Throughout his five-year journey to make Eliza, Matthew Seiji Burns was plagued by a nagging doubt. “I was worried I was making a game for nobody,” he admits. A story about a virtual counselling app, the people responsible for it and those who would use it, here was a visual novel unlike any other, lacking many of the features you’d normally associate with the genre. It didn’t have anime-style visuals, for starters, but more significantly it had been deliberately designed to limit player choice. Burns knew his game was effectively a niche within a niche. Had he created too many hurdles for his intended audience? “Eliza sits in this weird space… I felt like I really had to explain it so people could get on board with it.”
The concern about potential failure is just one of the anxieties reflected in a game that approaches the intersection of mental health and the tech industry with great nuance and intelligence. It’s a story that had occupied its creator’s mind for half a decade: the idea for Eliza first came to Burns six years ago, during his day job as a producer at the University Of Washington’s Center For Game Science, essentially a research lab into videogames. Part of this job entailed attending a range of academic conferences dedicated to game-centric and other related technologies, and in 2014 he was present for a demonstration of a virtual-therapist application, specifically aimed at US military vets suffering from PTSD. “It was really startling,” he recalls. “Even though I knew things like that were happening, seeing it in front of your face was very different to just reading about it in an article. And so I started working on ideas and stories related to that.”
At first, this meant experimenting in Twine, the open-source tool used to create interactive fiction. At that stage, Eliza was a very different kind of game, with a more overtly dystopian outlook, and a “cyberpunk-slash-horror” feel. And yet even then the main thread of the story was broadly the same: “I was playing around with different ways to express the idea of feeling distressed as a human being, and coming up against this computer algorithm and response,” Burns says. His next attempt saw him adapt the story’s structure to something akin to the finished game. “You can see in that early version that you’d perform a therapy session, come out into the lobby of the counselling office, go back in and do another therapy session, and then come out and check your phone and your messages and things like that.”
Burns spent the next few years “writing and writing and writing”, conceiving and fleshing out a cast of characters based on his own experiences and those of his friends in the tech and game industries in Seattle. Those needing Eliza’s help range from a befuddled old woman to a cynical artist to an angry father-to-be, while on the other side, you have men and women representing idealism and opportunism within this burgeoning subsector of the industry. Burns was also keen to explore the problem of burnout, with which he’d become uncomfortably familiar during his years working as a producer on blockbuster games at the likes of Treyarch, Bungie and 343 Industries. Hence his accepting a position away from the frontline of videogame development.
By his own admission, there’s plenty of Burns in protagonist Evelyn. Throughout the story, she feels unmoored and unsure of her future, a feeling to which most of us have been able to relate at some stage, and which hit particularly close to home for her creator. Beyond the Seattle setting, the specifics may be different – Evelyn works in tech rather than games – but their emotional backgrounds were very similar. “It’s unavoidable in some ways,” he says. “The longer you write, the more things come back to you, even though you think you’re differentiating yourself. For the whole of my 20s I just tried to charge ahead and then I got to my 30s and thought, ‘What was the point of doing that?’ I didn’t know why. And that’s definitely reflected in Evelyn’s character.”
For all that, Burns also found himself returning to the industry that had left him drained, perhaps motivated by a similar sense of unfinished business. He moved on from his research job to join Zachtronics in 2016, where he worked on games such as Shenzhen IO and Opus Magnum, contributing art design to the former, and writing and music to both. In late 2017, he casually approached founder Zach Barth to discuss this visual-novel idea he’d been working on – it wasn’t exactly a formal pitch, he says, but equally he was hoping for a positive response. This was a departure for a studio known for its thoughtful puzzle games about engineering and programming, but Barth was receptive to the idea – in part because it was so different. “Zach said, ‘Yeah, let’s do it. I want to try making a game like this. Why not?’”
Thus a spare-time passion project became Burns’ day job. Now he could use Zachtronics’ resources to bring his world to life, through Kyle Steed and Jonathan Stroh’s evocative art and design and a strong voice cast, assembled by veteran casting director Khris Brown, perhaps best known for her work at Double Fine. Despite a limited budget, Burns found some well-known performers were happy to accept the standard union rates for a project that gave them a little more to do than usual; indeed, several of them actively told him so during the recording sessions. “If you’re a voice actor who works in games, more often than not, you’re doing things like, ‘Grenade! Grenade out!’ – not to be mean about it, but that is a lot of what they will do from day to day. And when they saw this sample dialogue that allowed them to explore territory that they don’t always get to… that’s how we got some of the heavy-hitters like Yuri Lowenthal, who was just excited to be a part of it. That was really cool.”
The cast helped bring out the dark humour in the piece, notably Cissy Jones as Maya, an unhappy but wryly self-aware artist wrestling with the lack of attention her work is receiving, and wondering whether she should give up the career she otherwise loves. “Humour is so important to me, I couldn’t do something without it,” Burns says. “I was talking with a friend about the film Parasite – you have this incredibly tense thriller where all kinds of horrible things are happening, but there are some really funny moments in it
“I WAS PLAYING AROUND WITH DIFFERENT WAYS TO EXPRESS THE IDEA OF FEELING DISTRESSED AS A HUMAN BEING”
too. The character of Maya could have gone very badly – if she just shows up and whines that she doesn’t have enough likes on her work, then people are gonna hate her. So we tried to make her really relatable, and it’s really to Cissy Jones’ credit that she was able to play both sides of that. It’s fun to be with her while she’s complaining!”
It’s a reflection of a game that approaches its subject matter with a rare degree of subtlety and balance. Even as it is critical of the way its technology is used, while addressing the hypocrisy of those operating within the systems they’re hoping to subvert, Burns’ script refuses to adopt the hectoring approach of the weakest Black Mirror episodes. It’s an approach that came as a surprise to some, he says. “I sometimes get the sense that players were hoping it would come out stronger against the tech, that it would be more didactic and more like Black Mirror and say, ‘This is bad and wrong, and you’re terrible for participating in this’,” he laughs. “But it was very important to me to just set it there, in all of its complications and contradictions. It’s very easy to just say that technology in itself is bad, but I don’t believe that. I believe that technology is a tool and we absolutely need to think carefully about how we use these tools.”
All the same, it hardly shies away from the downsides. As the game took shape, Burns became aware that Eliza had become alarmingly relevant – he was no longer examining what might come to pass in the near future, but dealing with the here and now. His careful research had begun to complicate the story still further. “Since I first got that demonstration in 2014, the deployment of these types of apps and the money that’s going into it is huge and very rapid,” he says. “I had no idea about this [when I started writing], but if you’re a college undergraduate now, they’ll give you an app on your phone where you’re supposed to record your mood, because there’s a demand for mental-health services on campuses that can’t be met by the people that they have. They’re throwing technology at the problem in a desire to help, but what are the consequences of that?”
We’re used to considering the ramifications of our actions in visual novels, but though Burns had considered a branching narrative in his early Twine experiments, he’d long since decided to restrict player choice. As Evelyn becomes a human proxy for Eliza’s advice, we’re unable to diverge from the software’s algorithmically generated script – even as she’s clearly keen to do so. We’re privy to Evelyn’s thoughts about Eliza’s limitations while being unable to act upon them for the vast majority
of the game – it’s frustrating, but that, Burns says, is crucial to the game’s message. “It’s easy to imagine designing a therapy game where you choose what to say, and then it either makes the person feel better or not, and anyone’s first instinct in designing a game around this would be to do that,” he explains. “Say, this person has characteristics A, B and C. And they have problems X and Y, and you need to say this or prescribe them that to make them feel 32 per cent better. You could approach this subject matter in a very simulation-like way.” Burns quickly rejected that idea, believing it was wrong to pretend that it’s possible to make people with anxiety, depression or trauma better so straightforwardly. “A lot of this kind of stuff happens in the serious-games sector – as long as you do whatever the game wants you to do, then it says, ‘Congratulations, you’ve solved world hunger’ or whatever,” he says. “But that’s not necessarily applicable to the real world. I wanted to make a game where people aren’t reducible to a set of systems, where the only way you get to interact with them is through the dialogue. And for better or worse, you can’t just solve their problem.”
Towards the end of the story, Evelyn decides to rebel against the system, though that’s nothing compared to the daunting decision you face about where she ends up next. She can go back into the tech industry, pursue a new creative outlet (and possible relationship), or opt to leave it all behind. After spending so long being unable to choose, it feels overwhelming, the kind of seismic life-changing decision we sometimes face that’s informed by all that’s gone before. “That was definitely something I wanted,” Burns says. “Just to build and build and have very few choices and then suddenly it’s, ‘All right, what are you going do about this?’ It was important to me to present it that way, too, because I think it’s more true to life than the consequences of your actions being the sum of a lot of small choices over time. I just feel it’s more honest to players, instead of making them wonder, ‘Should I have offered tea to that character in chapter four and then they would like me?’ I didn’t want to waste people’s time with stuff like that.”
Burns anticipated some of the negative feedback he’s received since Eliza launched – that’s always likely when a game defies player expectations – but the general response has supported his assertion that ‘no choices’ was the right choice. And while he says it hasn’t reached a huge number of people (“It’s not as if I made a big triple-A game, or even the goose game,” he laughs) he certainly hasn’t made a game for nobody. Eliza has resonated strongly with its players, from those who identified with Evelyn’s emotional journey to those who experienced the catharsis of having their thoughts articulated within the game. “That’s absolutely the most gratifying thing,” he says. “Getting an email from someone who says, ‘This really spoke to me.’ I’ve had a bunch of emails that are like, ‘I work at a tech company and this is exactly the kind of stuff I think about’. Feeling like I’ve connected with somebody because of Eliza... that’s really the greatest thing.”