Expressing Emotions In Holding On With Hub Games
October 22, 2018 by ludicryan
After a quite emotional Let's Play of Holding On: The Troubled Life of Billy Kerr, Ryan and Cass sit down with Rory and Michael from Hub Games to talk about how they made something so important in board games.
Rory and Michael take us through how they started in board games then talked us through the creative process from ideas and prototypes to the finished product. Importantly for Cass and Ryan was the connection to home.
Northern Ireland looms large in the background of Holding On influencing events and the team discuss the emotional resonance of that design choice and what it means to them.
What stories, characters and locations would you like to see in Holding On?
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Först! Nice video for lunch break.
a great video guys.
Fascinating video about the development of Holding On – that the HUB team worked through almost 50 ideas and iterations, having moved away from the initial “dementia” starting concept.
Also very interesting to learn that the demo games experiences in the US, England and Northern Ireland often highlighted different approaches and priorities concerning healthcare, as well as cultural attitudes towards illness, death and bereavement.
I hope Rory and Michael give an update about how HOLDING ON demos at Essen Spiel this weekend. However, with Billy Kerr’s life being so influenced – so it would seem – specifically by The Troubles in Northern Ireland during the late 1960s to late 1990s, I wonder how a non-Irish, British or American board game audience would be able to easily understand the significance of the references to these historical events.
I am also curious to learn more of the future plans of HUB – about other HOLDING ON stories or other games with a strongly narrative concept. May I suggest Berlin as a possible location for a HOLDING ON story? This is certainly a city with a “troubled life” itself – one which has the full spectrum of light and dark… Another city, I guess, would be New York – difficult, certainly, but perhaps that would be the challenge for the design team – and later the players.
Perhaps with THIS WAR OF MINE by Awaken Realms and now HOLDING ON by HUB, we have the beginnings of new genre in board games: alongside “competitive”, “cooperative”, “semi-cooperative”, “legacy”… we now have “emotional” (borrowed from the title of this video article) or “empathic” games. These could be games which combine real-word narratives, empathic role-play and which help the players to articulate a spectrum of emotions, including regret, bereavement, sorrow.
And if just nine Rory’s Story Cubes can help people of all ages have fun with creative, spontaneous storytelling, then it should be possible that a board game could also provide people with a form of therapy, perhaps even improving mental health, by enabling people to finally talk about an unspoken elephant-in-the-room…