Walking the Face of my Dead Grandfather

Description

My grandfather died on the 22nd of April, 2007, when I was 15 years and 36 days old. Last year, on the 30th of May, 2023, it had been 15 years and 37 days since his death, and I had officially known him longer dead than alive. 

Since then, I have wondered how much of my memory of him is informed by direct, lived experience, and how much is an amalgamation of what I think I remember from my childhood, the (often embellished) stories that my relatives tell about him, and my imagination filling in the blanks. Memories are in a constant state of formation and re-formation: they shift each time we recall them. Details are changed, particular incidents are embellished, values are inserted. As time passes, the line between fact and fiction grows ever thinner.

In The Empty Brain, Robert Epstein deconstructs the prevailing notion that the mind operates like an information processor such as a computer: that memory is a set of unchanging data, stored in the brain and just waiting to be accessed at a moment's notice with perfect clarity. Instead, he argues that what we understand as memory is actually a response to external stimuli: a recognising of a place, object, person, etc. in the physical world that our minds respond to in particular ways. Memory, in other words, is unstable because it exists between the unique, constantly changing structure of our minds, and the unique, constantly changing places, people, objects, stories, and world that we recognise and respond to. "No two people will repeat a story they heard the same way," Epstein states, "and...over time, their recitations of the story will diverge more and more."

Walking the Face of my Dead Grandfather is a playable memoryscape: a virtual, explorable memorial to someone very important to me. But it is also an acknowledgement and a celebration of the instability of memory. In it, players explore an empty, abstract landscape that slowly fills with bushes, trees, fences, seashells, and other objects in tandem with their movement, just as my own memories come rushing back when I walk the suburbs, beaches, and parks near where my grandfather's house used to be. This landscape is dotted with interactive vignettes that allow the player to act out certain memories I have of and around my grandfather: some fact, some fiction, but all revealing some aspect of his character, personality, and life.

That memory is so unstable allows us to insulate ourselves and our histories. It allows us to tell ourselves that we were funnier than we actually were in that conversation last week, that our child's first word was "Dad" not "Mum", and that music, food, and ultimately the world was better when we were growing up. With so many conversations and events recorded and stored as cold, unchanging data by digital systems, we are robbed of this comfortable ambiguity. Every word of that conversation is viewable in Messenger or WhatsApp; the exact unfolding of our child's first word is captured in exact detail in the background of an incidental iPhone video. We can no longer convince ourselves that we were funnier, smarter, or kinder: the (digital) camera never lies.

Walking the Face of My Dead Grandfather is an attempt to re-introduce instability and ambiguity to digital memory. It is a space where the words, actions, and life of a person is not rendered in precise, unchanging, digital detail, but is pieced together between the snippets that I offer, the virtual landscape that I have sculpted, and the experiences and memories of each individual person who plays it. Like memory itself, the impression that you form of my grandfather is your own, and will perhaps prompt you to reflect on your own memories of those who have left us, and what they mean to you.

The game ends when you have visited every vignette, and walked through the final door.

Controls

Walk: WASD or Arrow Keys
Look: Mouse
Interact: Left-click
Pause: Escape