How Games like Dordogne Use Mixed Media to Explore Family Dynamics in a Nuanced Way

A couple chapters into Dordogne, Un Je Ne Sais Quoi’s title known for its gorgeous watercolor-styled graphics, Mimi remembers when she first found and used her grandmother Nora’s scrapbook. Mimi’s bratty and restless 12-year old self (who you spend half of the game playing) did so while spending her summer vacation with Nora in 1980s rural France. She gets severely scolded (almost disproportionately so) for using it to sketch a picture of her estranged parents in pencil crayon on a page. But soon after Nora apologizes for the incident. She explains in a contrite manner to Mimi that she was possessive of the scrapbook because it was meant to capture memories of Nora’s late husband Édouard and her son Fabrice, Mimi’s controlling ex-military father, but that it never got used. Nora then allows the 12-year-old to keep the scrapbook and let it be her record of the memories she makes during this summer visit. It becomes their way to connect with and learn from each other’s different experiences.

But the scrapbook is more than just a narrative device. Other than a series of somewhat finicky point-and-click actions to perform, the player’s central mechanic for Dordogne is scrapbooking. You collect stickers for it by exploring environments, paste photos you’ve taken in it or even generate cringey poetry from one-word thoughts that occur to Mimi throughout the memories she’s making and reliving. This scrapbook/scavenger hunt mentality of preciousness and play is extended to the present, as a 32-year-old Mimi reconnects to her grandmother and regains her lost memories through discovering a playful set of posthumous notes Nora has left for her around her old property in Dordogne. You also make tape recordings of sounds you associate with specific memories, listen to tape recordings of your late grandfather and read old family letters. My favorite tape recording so far is that of Édouard capturing the sound of an old motor car as he predicts to an exasperated Nora that future generations won’t know what old cars sounded like because their cars will be silent.

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The sequence where you first encounter and start using Dordogne‘s scrapbook set some gears spinning in my head, especially with regards to intergenerational divides and how evolving technologies and nostalgia for analog modes of expression can signify these divides in games. This sequence also, in my opinion, points towards how the deconstruction of the traditional family structure is hotly debated. Often technology is blamed for the atomization of the nuclear family. After all, the more screens we have the less attention we pay to each other, right? But I think this is only half-true.

Technology can keep us estranged from one another at times but it also helps us stay connected more so than in the past, when there were less immediate means of communication across distances. And when it comes to videogames, which have powerful potential for expression, such technology also helps us portray family dynamics in a nuanced way. Dordogne is only one game that displays the medium’s ability to showcase how complex interconnections between different generations and their attendant forms of self-expression and art-making can be. Our media is intertwined with our nostalgia and often nostalgia points towards what different generations believe or hold dear.

We’re all quite aware at this point in game development history that games are media uniquely equipped to explore various systems of interaction. Games, as Game Developer blogger Arne Neumann notes, are an inherently mimetic medium that began by digitizing pre-existing “concepts and game formats” such as tennis or tabletop roleplaying games. As games became more like the ones we’re familiar with today, they also began to mimic other forms of art and storytelling, especially those that center audiovisual and performance design. With the above in mind, it’s easy to see how over the years games have gotten very good at telling stories about families and their individual histories and dynamics. I haven’t seen much discussion, however, of how games utilize mixed media to signify family dynamics across different generations.

I previously wrote that stories about found families and intimacy like The Last of Us are stronger than most because they model the intergenerational connections of Joel and Ellie not just via the overarching narrative, but by having the player collect multimedia like comics, letters and dictation recordings. This referencing of tactile media from previous generations is deliberate and threaded through to the sequel as well, where Joel (and by extension the player) plays guitar to express his love for his adopted daughter and we find Ellie chronicling her coming-of-age, grappling with grief and rationalizing her plans for revenge in a journal filled with her idiosyncratic writing and evocative drawings.

Comic from The Last of Us

There’s been a lot of scholarship attached to how The Last of Us’s collectibles are para-narratives that extend the main narrative of its post-apocalyptic world. In the case of this game series, popular multimedia is a signifier of a shared past between generations. Whether it’s about sharing memories and regrets about lost loved ones or bonding over music, superhero culture, or cheesy action movies, The Last of Us leans into how our media can often function as a time capsule and a facilitator for our relationships. Oxenfree accomplishes something similar, tying its time-looping to analog media like polaroid photos, portable radios and tape recordings to get at how familial grief and memory aren’t linear. (On that note, I’m excited to see what Oxenfree II: Lost Signals will do with its mixed media referencing.)

Some games use mixed media to emphasize the generational divide rather than the overlap, however. For instance, the acclaimed 2013 title, Gone Home, had the player character Katie primarily piecing together the story of why her family’s home has been deserted. The space of the home is treated essentially as an archive and one that reveals the individual stories of Katie’s family members via their personal belongings. The player interacts with the belongings of each of Katie’s family members and learns in particular of her sister Sam’s queer identity and how their parents were in denial over the fact. Part of how she discovers this fact is by interacting with a riot grrrl zine, which I feel is a very smart way of situating the game firmly in the ‘90s when the punk rock movement of riot grrrl was in full swing (something recent indie game CURSES does well too). The zine also points towards other aspects of Sam’s identity, like her political ideology, as well. Unlike The Last of Us, which depicts an alternate 2013 America ravaged by a fungal-zombie pandemic, Gone Home focuses on realism, though both games are authentic in their emotional profiles of family.

Zine from Gone Home

And it’s not just other, similar art forms that games reference to start a discussion about families and intergenerational relationships. Bound used ballet dancing to get at the literal dynamics of movement and space in families where the members are dealing with a period of estrangement from each other. The upcoming Venba shows how cooking traditional meals keeps an immigrant family together and connected to their culture in 1980s Canada. Works like these explore the rich diversity of expression possible through games, while aiming for a deeper understanding of what it means to be a family.

Dordogne was heavily inspired by director Cédric Babouche’s childhood, when he spent his first 15 summers with his great-grandmother at her house in Dordogne. He’s also been watercoloring since he was 14, close to young Mimi’s age. It’s deeply personal. Like Gone Home and other games I’ve mentioned, Babouche is continuing a tradition of using the interactivity of games and its interconnected history to other media to explore evolving family dynamics over time.

Phoenix Simms is an Atlantic Canadian writer and indie game narrative designer. You can find her work at Unwinnable, Videodame, Third Person, and her portfolio. Her stream-of-consciousness can be found at @phoenixsimms.