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Tipping Point Tavern is a serious game that uses gameplay to educate how addiction can alter the brain.
Engine: Gamemaker 2
Roles: Lead Narrative/Game Designer, Lead Programmer
What was the Point?
The goal behind Tipping Point Tavern was to get people to realize that addiction wasn't just a simple case of will and determination, but that there was a biological science that creates a physical dependency on the addicting material. We wanted to make a game that tried to remove the stigma around people with addiction and show that like any kind of physical/mental pain, it too requires love, care and treatment.
A Developer Walkthrough of the Game!
Tipping Point Tavern uses easy, fun to play mini games to show the negative effects of alcoholism and why breaking out of the cycle of alcoholism isn't as easy as just dropping the bottle.
The video goes into detail about the entire game, why certain mini-games were chosen to represent certain emotional states and what the thought process was behind them when I set out to design and program them.
I'm a little biased, but it's a fun watch!
We first did a lot of research on what addiction is in the first place and how it influences the human body. We looked into a lot of resources that explained what happened to the body during a period of addiction and what creates that dependency on that substance.
We then did research on games that already existed about alcoholism or had alcoholism has a central theme. The problem with most of these games is how they exploit the person going through addiction in a way to drive sympathy or to push forward the narrative of the story.
This really helped us find our niche and we decided to focus on the more biological side of addiction and how it can harm someone. We wanted to create something that strayed away from this typical fearmongering way of delivering the message and instead offer a helping hand to those who need it.
When designing for the game, we wanted the game with all of its messages and need to educate to still feel like a game. I think it's very easy to come across as preachy or alienate your audience when creating a game like this. You can have massive paragraphs of text explaining something or have mechanics vague enough that most people don't pick up what is being trying to be communicated. What we tried to do to combat this is make the lessons we wanted the player to learn to be backed into gameplay.
For example, we used a scale mini game to showcase how dopamine production becomes dependent on alcohol and how a higher dosage is required for the brain to get the same amount of dopamine. By having players interact with alcohol and dopamine, it becomes more obvious how alcohol affects the brain and the production of dopamine. I highly recommend looking to the video posted above as I give a breakdown of nearly every mini game we have in the game.
We have an interesting cast of characters that make an appearance throughout the story. We used these characters as vehicles to show the player the dangers of addiction and how even seemingly normal people can suffer from addiction as well.
We used these characters to also reduce the stigma of talking about issues like this and make it feel more normalized as well, in an attempt to help people, speak up. By removing the stigma around talking about addiction, we think that more people would be more open to receiving and getting help as well.
Some of these characters talk about problems caused by their addiction, but by also highlighting their journey to recovery and how much better they are, we tried to paint a positive light for recovery.
It's easy to feed off misfortune and misery to scare people away from engaging in topics like these, but by doing so you remove such a unique opportunity to open up and speak about these issues and if we never talk about them how do we find solutions for these problems?
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