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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