Dear Esther/About
von erinnye
“Dear Esther is a ghost story, told using first-person gaming technologies. Rather than traditional game-play the focus here is on exploration, uncovering the mystery of the island, of who you are and why you are here. Fragments of story are randomly uncovered when exploring the various locations of the island, making every each journey a unique experience. Dear Esther features a stunning, specially commissioned soundtrack from Jessica Curry [...]
Forget the normal rules of play; if nothing seems real here, it’s because it may just be all a delusion. What is the significance of the aerial – What happened on the motorway – is the island real or imagined – who is Esther and why has she chosen to summon you here? The answers are out there, on the lost beach and the tunnels under the island. Or then again, they may just not be, after all.” 1
“I’ve played through a good chunk of the second take on Dear Esther, and it’s shaping up to be even more fascinating than the original. But almost as interesting as Esther’s story is the story of the game itself. [...]
The Dear Esther concept began in 2007, emerging from a research question proposed by Dr Dan Pinchbeck of Portsmouth University. Pinchbeck wanted to see what would happen were a game to focus purely on storytelling, to the exclusion of more traditional interactive elements. He also wanted to see how people would react if a closed reading of that story were near enough impossible to reach. [...]
“Esther is basically about ambiguity,” he explains. “It came from this idea that you could do more with storytelling in games if you stopped worrying about everything making sense and adding up, and that when you read a book or watch a film, you are filling in a lot of those details yourself. Games are like films in that regard: you have these cardboard cutout sets and no one worries about that – we focus on the front, not the back. So we can apply a similar thing to story, and stop giving as much away. [...]
“Grief, loss, guilt, faith, illness,” says Pinchbeck, when I ask about his interpretation of the Dear Esther story. “Cheerful stuff. But it’s also – and this is really important to me – about love and hope and redemption, and how people cling to each other in the face of a brutal, uncaring world. [..]
But right at the centre of Esther’s story is the idea that there’s no absolute interpretation of the themes at play. Pinchbeck expected that this may turn players off, leaving people bored and unfulfilled. He was spectacularly wrong”2
“Dear Esther was created by Dan Pinchbeck, a researcher based at the University of Portsmouth (UK) in 2007, as part of a project funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council to explore experimental game play and storytelling.
More information about thechineseroom can be found at the website: www.thechineseroom.co.uk“1
1 Denby, Lewis: The Story of Dear Esther, 3-7-2011, pcgamer.com
