This is a guest post from Johnnemann Nordhagen, one of our panellists for the forthcoming Alternatives theme panel. You will be able to watch the panel event as a live stream from the TIPC3 conference. The entire conference is being streamed here, but if you are just tuning in for the HGN Panel. This will take place on Friday 26 May 2023, at 13:30 CET time (11:30 UTC).
In 2018 Dim Bulb Games released Where the Water Tastes Like Wine. WTWTLW is a game about traveling America during the Great Depression, collecting stories, and spreading them. The player takes on the role of an anonymous wanderer who loses a rigged poker game to a wolf-headed man (played by the musician Sting), dooming themselves to take on the task of collecting stories.
The wanderer has small adventures, which become tales they can tell around the fire to sixteen different characters. The player’s goal is to collect the characters’ own true stories of their lives and times. As the wanderer tells the stories of their adventures, the tales spread and grow more fantastic, ‘leveling up’ into folklore and becoming more potent to tell around the fire.
Being set in the Great Depression, WTWTLW is a historical game. However, I’ve always been very upfront about the fact that it is not intended to be a historically accurate game; or, at least, that it picks and chooses its moments of historical accuracy for maximum impact. The setting of the game is nominally the Depression-era United States, but as the player wanders the land, there are several things that undermine the exact historical setting. The first is the folkloric nature of the world – since WTWTLW is a game concerned with stories and folk culture, the world reflects that and the player can run into people like Paul Bunyan or John Henry and creatures like La Llorona or the Headless Horseman, in addition to stories that are to various degrees fantastical.
Contrasted with these fantastical stories, however, are the stories of the characters the player meets – this is where real historical research comes into the game. During their wanderings the player talks with a child sent away from home during the Depression, a striking coal miner, and a displaced Okie fleeing the Dustbowl, for instance. Each of these characters might comfortably exist within the game’s fictional Depression era. But the player also has occasion to meet an ex-cowboy, a Beat poet, and a hippie. These characters are brought into the narrative because they each have something interesting to say about the game’s main theme – the misplaced promise of the American dream and the essential falseness of the myth of America. As Sting, voicing the Wolf character, tells us during the game’s intro, “You see, this land is built on stories. It’s one big story, this country, woven of many small ones. Few of the small ones are strictly true, and the big story is mostly a lie.”
These characters don’t belong in the historical period, but they certainly belong to the story the game is trying to tell. And it’s an interesting mix, I think, to have a hippie whose experience is drawn from interviews and historical records but displace her to a fantastical place and a time she was never a part of.
There are other characters, too, like Althea, the blues singer. She’s sort of a cross between Memphis Minnie and Robert Johnson – like Memphis Minnie, she’s a hard-drinking, hard-living, incredibly talented blues musician. Like Robert Johnson, she sells her soul to the Devil at the crossroads. At least, that’s the myth of Robert Johnson. In the world of Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, that fits right in. And so the Devil is literal and real, and Althea really does sell her soul to him. She’s obviously from a historical background, but it would be stretching things to claim the Devil on the side of rigorous historical research. Luckily, I gave the character of Althea to Gita Jackson, an amazing writer, who turned the Devil into a metaphor while keeping him literal. Yes, Althea sells her soul, but she does it because a black woman in the south at this time has limited options. Every deal she could make, with record companies, with society, with anyone white – they were all Devil’s bargains. So she may as well take the literal bargain, and tell us how the Devil is just as dishonest as any white man she’s ever known. This magical, folkloric intrusion into the historical story helps us underline the point of what it might truly have been like to be Memphis Minnie, powerless and taken advantage of on all sides by beings who care nothing for her and have limitless power.
And so there’s another side to the “alternate history” of WTWTLW, and that’s presenting an alternate history to the one that’s more commonly known among Americans, or taught in our schools. The history of our country that includes oppression of Black women, suppression of workers’ rights, the massacre of indigenous people, massive environmental damage caused by capitalism, lost and harmed children, and abused queer people.
This is how the player’s quest in WTWTLW, to find these stories and add them to the tapestry, mirrors the game’s own goal: to bring to light a history that’s less often told and show the ways the country’s mythmaking leaves the darkest parts unexamined. The Wolf, again: “The more true stories you can find and tell, the more you can weave that truth into the big story. Tarnish it a bit, perhaps, but isn’t a dingy and battered truth better than a shining lie?”
Johnnemann Nordhagen is a 20-year veteran of the game industry. He has worked as a QA tester, in Sony’s Research and Development department, on the Bioshock series at 2K Marin, and was co-founder of The Fullbright Company and the sole programmer on Gone Home. He founded Dim Bulb Games and headed development of Where the Water Tastes Like Wine (2018) and Museum of Mechanics: Lockpicking (2022). He currently works as an Expert Technical Narrative Designer at Ubisoft Stockholm.