“The Game Is For Everyone,” Rainbow Billy Developers On Using Games To Elicit Empathy
Rainbow Billy: The Curse of the Leviathan’s art director Anthony Vaucheret is heavily influenced by his childhood. “This narration about the Leviathan being this patriarchal image and transforming images of what they don't know into scary stuff came from a personal story: when I was younger, my father came out as a homosexual.
“My mother was Latino, [a] very religious person. So, what she did in trying to protect us with her old way of thinking, she created an image of my father as a monster, [an image] I grew up with until I was 18 years old. I said, ‘This is enough, I need to meet him.’ So then I went, and I saw my father. And I was like, why all these years I had this different image? I love my father, we now hang out a lot and we're happy.”
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In the same vein, Rainbow Billy is a game about bringing the colour back to a black and white world through active listening and empathy, something the developers believe the real-world is sorely lacking in. In Rainbow Billy, you don’t fight in the traditional sense. Instead, Billy talks to their enemies and convinces them to join them on their quest through words, not violence.
“Diversity and inclusion are super important to our core values as a studio, and we wanted to showcase [that] in the game as well,” says Chris Chancey, CEO of developer ManaVoid Entertainment. “The communication and empathy aspect was a really interesting twist on the traditional RPG combat system. We thought that it'd be a cool tool to use to be able to create communication skills among certain people.”
Because nuance is often lost on the internet, with bad faith takes reigning supreme, it’s worth the effort trying to teach people how
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