‘Monster Garden’ Developer Talks About the Healing Power of Play - [INDIEGAMING]

Zack Wood, developer of Monster Garden, shared some of their design thoughts about their monster-befriending game, and how play and imagination can bring about personal healing and care.

What got you interested in exploring friendship with a game? 

Zack Wood, developer of Monster Garden: When I played RPGs growing up, I loved getting new characters and choosing which would be in the party for different missions. I wanted them to interact with each other and for the unique combination of characters in my party to affect major story events, but in most games it didn’t seem to matter much at all.

Harvest Moon 64 was the first game I played where befriending characters was a major part of the game, so I naturally loved it and other games in the series. But in the end, friendship is just a secondary element in Harvest Moon games, and you can pretty much ignore it if you want to.

So, for a long time I wanted to make a game where meeting and making friends with characters was really the core of the game.

Why do so using monsters? What was the importance of making friends with gaming’s most maligned group?

As an artist, monsters are a chance to get imaginative and have fun with character designs, so I always appreciate it when games create some nice monsters. But for me, having to fight them clashes with the sense of delight and wonder they inspire. I want to savor that feeling of encountering something mysterious, so I often wish fighting monsters to the death wasn’t the only way most games let you interact with them. I’d rather help them, get to know them, or just let them be.

A game like Pokemon might seem different since the monsters are allies instead of enemies, but trapping monsters in balls and only releasing them to do your bidding in battle isn’t actually very nice either, when you think about it.

And I don’t think it’s by chance that monsters tend to be either a threat that must be destroyed or cute creatures to capture. It’s because monsters represent the unknown. That’s why they’re so much fun to design, but also why they’re used as a generic stand-in for scary and bad things. Anyone who’s played enough RPGs has heard it before: “There have been more monsters in the forest lately. Something must be wrong…”

It makes sense as a convention since unknown things can be scary, but they can also be met with play, curiosity, or all kinds of other approaches, which I think opens up a lot of new area in game design.

In my game Monster Garden, I wanted to add a sense of mystery and surprise to dialogue by letting the player choose which of their monsters will talk without knowing exactly what they’ll say. I think this makes the monsters feel more autonomous and the dialogue feel more surprising than if the player just chose from a list of pre-written responses.

So, to answer your question, I wanted to show monsters some love and respect for a change, and also to savor the element of the unknown that makes monsters so much fun in the first place. If you’re interested, I wrote about why games need more “monster love” in this post on Gamasutra as well.

Of course there are also games like Undertale where players can choose between killing monsters or being pacifist, and I think that’s a positive change from many games. But in Monster Garden, I wanted to embrace monsters with a more thoroughly loving approach. Instead of just choosing whether or not to kill monsters, I wanted to let players choose different ways of peacefully interacting with them and getting to know them better.

You seem to have a great interest in ‘healing games.’ What would you define as a healing game, and can you tell us some examples you’ve found?

One way I think games can be healing is by inviting the player to explore, play, and experiment with its world without having to worry about being caught in a proving ground and punished. It’s hard to feel anything like healing when you’re busy just trying not to make a mistake and lose.

Kirby’s Epic Yarn comes to mind as a game that manages, despite being an action platformer, to be thoroughly forgiving and never really put you on the spot. I don’t know if I’d call it deeply healing, but it’s definitely going in that direction.

These days there are also lots of walking sims and similar games with no way to lose, and although I think that can definitely be relaxing, I also think that a special type of healing is possible when there are challenges in a game, but when you aren’t punished for approaching them in the wrong way. 

Of course, that’s next to impossible in large games with multiple overlapping systems where there’s no way to account for all the things that the player might do. So it helped that Monster Garden is only 30-45 minutes long and very simple. That enabled me to account for every way the player could possibly interact with the game’s three levels and to make something fun and different happen in each case (usually introducing a different monster).

Another way games can be healing is by explicitly focusing on personal healing experiences (which I think can be just as healing for the developer to create as for the player to play).

Two games come to mind as examples (although I haven’t played either one, unfortunately): Papo y Yo, a game about a boy dealing with an abusive alcoholic father based on creator Vander Caballero’s own experiences, and That Dragon, Cancer, a game about struggling with a child’s cancer diagnosis.

I’d personally love to see more games that combine playful, non-punishing gameplay with content that draws on personal healing experiences.

What unique power do you feel that games have to ‘heal’? How can games capture a kind of soothing interaction?

Once I asked for examples of “healing games” on Twitter, and people mentioned many games that I wasn’t expecting (Way more people responded than I expected, too, which reflects how much people appreciate the healing side of games).

Some of the games people mentioned involved winning and losing based on player skill like Celeste and many Legend of Zelda games, while others simply had a relaxing atmosphere like Viridi. Others were games people had played during a tough time in their lives that gave them a much needed break or connection with other players.

The variety of responses made me realize that all kinds of games can be healing, and that it naturally depends a lot on the individual player.

But in all cases, I think the key to games’ unique healing power is the that they let us play. When you’re at play, you feel more relaxed and open to change and seeing things in a new way. It might sound contradictory, but I think fun and play can be the key to serious healing.

What draws you to explore healing power in games with your own work?

I didn’t set out to make a “healing game” when I started working on Monster Garden. Initially, I just wanted to learn how to use RPG Maker and to design and animate a bunch of pixelated monsters. What I was consciously trying to do was make a more “playful” game in terms of being less punishing and more gentle, with a focus on characters and friendship.

Also, around the time I started working on Monster Garden, I had been learning a lot about play and playfulness at indie game events where physical games were presented alongside digital ones. I had been realizing that I just like playing around and having fun with people more so than competing and winning or any of the things normally considered core to games (like mechanics, narrative, etc.). 

I had also discovered the work of Bernie De Koven, a proponent of fun and play whose work in the 1970’s is one of the reasons Physical Education programs in schools in the US use more games and playful activities (Stuff like that big rainbow parachute thing that everyone wooshes up in the air and then runs and sits under. I remember that being so much fun in elementary school, but in retrospect it was so simple, not even a game at all…which I think was one of Bernie’s main points, actually).

He had a background in theater and worked to spread theater warm-up games, childrens’ games, and “folk games” throughout his life. I had also done some improv theater and loved the warm-up games more than actual “scenes” or acting, so I appreciated his approach and writing a lot. 

It turned out that he was a proponent not only of playing physical games with other people, but also of playing with yourself in your imagination. He wrote about exploring the “inner playground” of your imagination, and I love imagining things, so I was naturally intrigued. But it turns out getting in touch with your imagination and learning to let it guide you is actually kinda tough and takes a lot of practice. You have to learn how to trust yourself and get past obstacles you encounter along the way that stop you from letting yourself play – in other words, it can be a deeply healing experience.

Through that process I imagined a lot of fun, silly, and sometimes scary things. So, when it came time to work on Monster Garden and I needed content beyond the basic idea of a playful RPG about monsters, I used these experiences as the foundation for the game’s structure and story.

In a sense, you could say Monster Garden is about the healing process of learning to see scary, unknown things as fun friends instead of frightening foes.

Why do you feel it’s important to explore this sort of play and interaction in games? 

Lately I’ve been seeing myself as a “playful artist” more than a game designer because I realized I just want to make things that invite people to play, whether its through a game with other people or a silly moment they enjoy all by themselves.

For me, play, playfulness and the healing and fun that come with them are the real treasures that games have to offer. I wish we had more playful games, which I think would also mean more healing games. Games that are thoroughly warm and welcoming instead of cold and confrontational, where you don’t have to worry about the fun suddenly ending because you messed up.

I think this is still new territory in game design, but trends like “wholesome games” and “care wave” in indie games show that people want more of these types of experiences. It’s an exciting time to make and play games, and I’m personally looking forward to seeing what new ways people come up with to have deeply healing fun! 

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