Tag Archives: Death Positive

Final Project: Psychopup: A Death Planning Game

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(Note: I’m hoping that the above links work for everyone – please leave a comment if they don’t! You’ll need to click until you see the Psychopup application item (the one with the pink-haired girl.) You may need to extract all files first, and then repeat the process.)
I’m excited to share my prototype of Psychopup: A Death Planning Game. I’ve built this game in Ren’Py, a Python framework typically used for visual novels. I chose this framework since it is light, easy to learn, and works well with choice-based games
I was inspired to build Psychopup from the McGonigal reading.I wanted to take a useful process in our lives that was hard to do or may not be common knowledge and make it more accessible through a game. Then I remembered that I had wanted to work on my own death plan, but always became too intimidated when trying to find the paperwork that I’d need. Death planning was just the process that I was looking for. It’s tedious, scary, and can be difficult to find all of the resources that you need if you don’t know where to look.
Death planning may seem like a strange concept for a game, but there does exist in each of us a curiosity toward the unknown. I was moved when reading Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle at our professor’s suggestion to find the story of a baby who would drop his toy and retrieving it in a way to mimic his mother’s departure and return each day. He comments that the child had clearly turned this upsetting experience into a game, though whether he did so to familiarize himself with the experience on his own terms or project his frustration at being left onto the toy, Freud was unsure. Yet, I think this experience speaks to human behavior in that we make games out of what frightens us, what is difficult for us. From Resident Evil to Bloody Marie to Ring Around the Rosie, we have this desire to explore beyond our comfort zone. And, since this game is already exploring enough outside of the player’s comfort zone, I made the main character a cute fluffy dog with the rough color palette of Terry Pratchett’s Death from Discworld (the best anthropomorphic representation of the subject).
The game opens by asking the player for their name, their state (currently only New York is available), and what they would like to name their “Psychopup” (play on “psychopomp”, or guide through the afterlife). Rather than guide the player through the afterlife, however, the pup needs to be trained how to guide others in regards to the player’s health care decisions and funerary arrangements at the end of / after their life. The player is then informed that in order for their new dog to be a true Psychopup, the player would need to teach them three basic skills:
  • fetch – allowing the dog to find where the player has put important belongings
  • guard – allowing the dog to protect the players’ death plan wishes. Each section has an impact on the Psychopup, providing them with an elemental power up, armor, extra lives, and additional strength.
  • speak – telling the dog who the player has chosen to take care of their health care decisions in the event that they cannot and to plan their funeral / body disposition. In Speak, the player is also given advice on how to ask their chosen people if they would accept this responsibility

Once the player has completed all three skills, they are able to mark their training as complete and download a text file with the choices that they have made. The file is loaded to the “resources” folder in the game files, where the player can also find the state of New York’s Where Are My Assets, Body Disposition, Living Will, and Health Care Proxy forms. They can use their choice text file to fill out the forms later, and, even if they don’t, at least the player took some time to think about what they would want for their end of life plan. Regardless, they come away from the experience with more than they started. They would have a magic circle in which they could engage with considering their end of life plan to their own comfort level. Unlike Huizinga’s view of play however, the player would carry the fruits of that experience with them when they leave the circle.

One may look at this description and wonder if I have provided the player with an actual game. There is neither any score, nor a true sense of “winning” or “losing”. Yet, the game still fills the four requirements McGonigal lists for a game: a goal, a set of rules, a feedback system, and voluntary participation. The player is given the goal at the start of the game – train your Psychopup. They are also provided with each of the three tricks at the start that they can tackle in any order. For rules, the player must answer the questions provided to them in each trick path. For a feedback system, a player is informed when a skill has been completed, and a path is grayed out when the player has already finished it, For Guard, a more nebulous skill, the player is prompted with a finish button after finishing one section, allowing them to choose when they are comfortable with ending the skill. Finally, for voluntary participation, it is the player’s own choice whether to download and play the game, and they can quit the program at any time. In the rather long Guard skill training, the player is given the option down each path to take a break and select another skill or return to the main menu. Ren’Py’s built in save feature also allows players to play at their own pace and leave at their own leisure.

For this version of the game, I focused on creating a Minimum Viable Product – could I guide a player through the information found in these four forms in an engaging and accessible way? I certainly have a list of what I would like to add to the game now that I have the basic game flow down, such as:

  • Updating the Psychopup avatar as the player completes different sections in the Guard skill
  • Readding the average funeral cost breakdown screen into the Guard skill (technical difficulties)
  • Allowing the player to add in assets in the Fetch minigame rather than working with (mostly) what was provided on the form
  • Allowing the player to disable aspects unrelated to them through a menu with items like “Hide items related to home ownership”, “hide items related to marriage”, etc.in the Fetch minigame
  • Adding in minigames in the Care section that are unlocked with each skill that the player completes
  • Adding in a more robust pet / brush the dog feature
  • Add in backgrounds, perhaps depicting different rooms in a home changing with the game progression
  • Add in options for more states
If you do decide to play the game, any and all feedback would be appreciated – I do plan on polishing this prototype up and proposing it for the CUNY Games Conference!
Works Consulted

Final Project Proposal: Death Planning and Your Own Personal Psychopomp Game

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As the saying goes, there are only two givens in this life: death and taxes. Yet, according to a 2017 study, only one in three people in the United States has an advanced directive – a document(s) including health care proxy form (deciding who will make end-of-life decisions for you), a living will (a document that states what sort of medical decisions you would like for end-of-life medical care), and DNR form (Do Not Resuscitate) – in place to prepare for it. In 2015, the Funeral and Memorial Information Council (FAMIC) found that though most Americans were interested in preplanning for a funeral, only 17% of adults had made the arrangements. This past year, after the unexpected death of my uncle, I witnessed the difficulty that avoiding these decisions can have. My mother, having volunteered to settle his affairs, had to figure out funeral arrangements, burial of his cremains, and the settlement of his estate before she could process what had happened.  

As a proud member of the Death Positive movement, I was inspired by Caitlin Doughty’s introduction of the process of end-of-life planning in her video “Protecting Trans Bodies in Death.”  The process appealed to me, but the idea of finding paperwork according to my state’s law and researching every detail was daunting. Seeing my mother’s experience with planning my uncle’s funeral, I wanted to create a resource to help streamline and destress starting the death planning process. What better way to encourage exploration, learning, and engagement than a game? Instead of sifting through paperwork and extensive Google searching, I figured that creating a dedicated game for the topic could help users begin to consider these questions and begin to make these decisions at their own pace. 

The premise of the game is that you are designing your own death aide – inspired by the idea of the psychopomp, the angel of death, and the character Death from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. The player guides the psychopomp through their training on how to best serve the player, learning various skills, attitudes, and customs as they continue their journey to becoming a full-fledged personal psychopomp.  

The game – likely to be developed in Ren’Py (a visual novel Python framework) or as a dedicated JavaScript site – is mostly text-based with an avatar of the aide on screen, evolving with the player’s choices. The player’s choices will affect the avatar’s appearance both directly and indirectly – for example, they could choose the avatar’s hairstyle, and choosing cremation for the treatment of their remains would provide the avatar with a fire elemental motif. The death planning questions are asked diagetically as the psychopomp undergoes their training, rather than presenting the player with an arduous questionnaire to fill out. Before answering these questions, the player is provided with context so that they can make informed decisions. For example, before answering whether they would like their next of kin to be their health proxy, the player would be led through how next of kin is defined and what sort of decisions they would be expected to make.  

The player can choose to explore options for funeral planning and answer questions for health care proxy forms, and living wills, though this minimum viable product will focus on these forms for the state of New York. These types of documents will be introduced to the player so they can make the conscious decision to begin exploring these topics. The point of the game is to educate and engage the player at their own pace and comfort.  

The game also allows the player to add wishes such as a funeral in accordance with a particular religion of their specification, refusal of embalming, what music they would like played at their funeral, etcetera. While some options will be explored through the game, more open questions (such as religious affiliation) will be asked in an open-ended manner, allowing the player to accurately represent who they are and what they want.  

When the player has finished taking their psychopomp on their creation journey, the game ends, and the player is presented with a document containing their choices for download, including how their choices correspond to options on advanced directive forms. The choices document is not designed to be legally binding but to give the player a concrete token of the learning and introspection they have undertaken over their playthrough.  

This game takes its cues from McGonagall’s theory of using game development to improve our everyday lives and Flanagan’s idea of activist games, designed to emphasize social issues (in this case right to representation in death), education, and intervention. Through engagement with the game, the player creates a document with their choices that they can then use to establish an advanced directive and make their wishes known to their loved ones and health proxy / death care representative, thus lessening the anxieties and burdens on themselves and their loved ones in the future. In so doing, they gain concrete benefits beyond the entertainment or experiential value of the game.