Big heart in a virtual world

Kirsty Baird-the heart, mind and soul behind a video-game that puts players in the dirty shoes of a young, homeless girl-speaks about where her compassion comes from, and why she badly needs a holiday.

For 10 minutes beyond the appointed start time for our interview at Melbourne’s Fed Square, filmmaker-turned-game designer Kirsty Baird and I sit at a cafe and unknowingly wait for the other to arrive.
    She’s outside in the fresh air, while I’ve taken a seat inside the small, trendy space of the cafe. So when she does stick her head in the door and spot me, in her characteristically brazen manner, she calls to me across the heads of several other patrons.
    Moments later she’s relocated to the seat opposite me (soy smoothie in tow).
    Apologies out of the way, she confesses she would have been happy to continue sitting in the sun, watching the human and automotive traffic of the busy Flinders Street/Swanston Street intersection all day; a too-rare moment of peace in the midst of what have been a busy couple of years.
    ’I've got things I should do, but I don’t want to,’ she admits. ‘I just don’t feel like doing anything today.’
    Her admission reeks of weariness. And who could blame her? Kirsty’s is the hyperactive imagination behind Street Survivor, an RPG currently in development, which places the user squarely in the shoes of a homeless girl and pits them against all the obstacles a real-life street person would confront.
    Gritty and realistic, the complete game (as envisioned by Kirsty) will tackle issues of drug use, social alienation, police relations and even prostitution, exploring the part these issues play in the lives of those living on the streets.
A project of both compassion and innovation, it’s been a long hard road trying to get a demo off the ground. Marked interest in the concept initially led to funding from the City of Melbourne and, under the umbrella of broader community cultural development (CCD) project Knot At Home, the Australian Film Commission. However funding has since dried up, with a satisfactory demo as yet incomplete.
    ’It’s really frustrating,’ Kirsty laments, adding that she’s done several interviews alongside this one; ‘I feel like I’m talking about something that doesn’t exist’.
    Kirsty, primarily a filmmaker, has never worked in the games industry before.
    ’I've been earning my living doing low-budget, community-based film projects for about four years,’ she explains. ‘I’ve been freelancing. I’ve got a company now, which is trying to do music videos. And I’ve more or less taught myself how to make films through that work.’
    This interest led her to become involved in Knot At Home. The project, spearheaded by community-focused arts organisation Big hART which screened on SBS in April 2006 as an eight-part television series, combines talking-head interviews, short dramas, music videos and animations, all produced with contributions from real-life homeless people.
    As part of this work Kirsty worked on an animated short also called Street Survivor (eventually culled from the TV series), which told of a young homeless girl who was sucked, Tron-like, into a videogame and ‘played’.
    It wasn’t a huge mental leap from this animated short to actually making a videogame about homelessness.
    ’[The animated short] was inspired by the videogame parlours that are located around the corner of Russell Street and Bourke Street [in Melbourne]. That’s a real kind of site for homelessness, drug use and petty crime, but it’s also a site where people hang out because that’s what they do with their time.
    ’So we were in there and we were looking mainly at a 2-D arcade game called Street Fighter, and that’s what I was inspired by. So my original idea was to make a kind of installation that was like an arcade game and had 2-D layers running in different directions to each other, which is how we made the film.
    ’I imagined it being housed in an arcade, and people putting money into it, and playing it, and the money was like for charity or something.’
    The idea has since evolved greatly, with an experienced game animator coming on board and introducing Kirsty to the world of three-dimensional role-playing games.
    ’I got really obsessed with Max Payne, which is still probably my favourite, and I think that’s because of the visuals. I’m still really tied to that in terms of how I think you can make the idea work.’
    Kirsty has also been fortunate to receive some unofficial mentorship from other industry insiders.
    ’Last year we took this [rough] demo we had-which was just bug city-to Free Play 2004 [an indie games convention in Melbourne], and I was the object of a session where three game designers tore me apart.
‘Everyone else was going, “Oh my god, those men with their egos!” But I thought it was great! [I learned heaps. For example,] I didn’t realise you needed to have “null motivation” in a game. (Null motivation is what keeps the character moving through the world of the game-if there is no null motivation the player can just stand around and do nothing; boring.)
    ’I didn’t really have a design then, it was kind of just really schematic. But one of those guys was an academic at La Trobe, Richard Hall, and I went and worked with him, because he was into story modelling. And I worked with him for quite a few months, and that’s sort of what has made the design what it is now.’
    While the look of the game has evolved, the essence of the original premise remains. Street Survivor is not just about entertainment. The idea has always been to house real information for homeless or at-risk people within the game using pop-up screens that would appear at certain points and provide the user with genuine information that can help them in their own walk. For example, the demo level provides information on the location of food vans in Melbourne.

Ultimately the game will also feature elements based on actual sites in Melbourne: a church that leaves blankets out on its front steps at night for homeless people; and a water tap in an unofficial ‘no-go’ area for police that provides clean water to addicted heroin users. (Although discreet, these locations’ real-life counterparts are quite accessible, situated within short walking distance of the very cafe where Kirsty and I now sit, and are well-known among Melbourne’s more experienced homeless.)
    ’The original idea is about making a game where you’ve got all these pieces of information in the game play, that you could actually reprogram the game to suit any city in the world.
    ’It was targeting young people who are in front-line youth centres, and the idea was that these people are delivered information in a variety of ways-such as pamphlets or films or whatever-but this is a new way of delivering information that could engage them, because it’s entertaining.
    ’[By using a game we also overcome issues] about literacy-in fact, there’s so many reasons why a game is such an amazing platform to deliver information.
    ’Yet, at the same time, we don’t want this to be didactic; we don’t want this game to be something where, “This is going to teach you something”. This is a game.’
    Kirsty has an excitable personality. Her smoothie seems all but forgotten as she hits her stride, enthusing about her pet project via extended monologues that require little interjection from her interviewer. The story she describes to me that underlines the game is compelling and poignant.
    
‘There’s this girl and she has left home because of her violent stepfather. Her sister’s left before her, so the girl goes into the city to look for her sister.
    ’But as soon as she gets to the city [one that’s generic but features recognisable Melbourne “textures”] she starts to encounter all sorts of issues and difficulties that make it really hard for her to find her sister; [such as] drug use, the need for food and shelter, and, maybe, further into the game, the need for condoms, clean syringes, money, travel cards and legal advice.
    
‘She interacts with NPCs, and they’re really negative to her! They say things like “Get a job”, and that’s all about alienation and isolation, and that affects her health and esteem [points].’
    No doubt the game will be controversial. In particular, the game will acknowledge the ambivalent role drugs play in the lives of many homeless people. The game’s fictional drug, “Quick”, enables the central character to run fast in order to outrun her stepfather (an overt metaphor for “escapism”), who pursues her throughout the game (providing “null motivation”). Use of the drug will be vital in order to pass the early stages. But as the game progresses it will become the proverbial monkey on the girl’s back, affecting her “health points”, and she will need to shake that monkey before the game can be completed.
    ’At the end of the game you do detox, you get clean, but the drug is like, you can’t play the game without taking it, and it starts this kind of downward spiral; but ultimately you do get out of that, that’s how you win the game,’ Kirsty explains.
    ’I don’t think drug use is simply bad, so I don’t really want to express it in that way. And Quick is also a metaphor. It’s not just about heroin, it’s about cigarettes, alcohol, other types of dependencies, other habits that you develop. It’s that thing where until you turn around and face it it’s always just going to bite you.
    ’I wanted to do harm minimisation rather than zero tolerance,’ she adds. ‘So [the character] might access a foot patroller, who is someone who carries clean syringes around and gives them to others; or, if you use a syringe bin, you’ll gain health points. That’s all about harm minimisation and health issues, and trying to look after yourself and the community in the way that you behave.’
    Kirsty admits she’s yet to work out how she’s going to tackle the topic of prostitution, an issue that in reality a young homeless girl is likely to confront at some point.
    ’The censorship issue’s a big one, in terms of what the game would be rated,’ she explains. ‘I have always thought the game should be, in part, about educating other people about homelessness through schools-the whole Knot At Home project is being pitched to schools, to the educational market.
    ’So the censorship thing’s a real tension, because kids who are on the street can be really, really young and be experiencing all of these things-drug use, crime, prostitution. But I think you do need to deal with those things.’
    Street Survivor is clearly a labour of love for Kirsty. Her motivation for wanting to produce such a social justice-type game is one many of Australia’s “comfortably-well-off” can probably relate to.
    ’I think it’s because I’m so privileged,’ she says. ‘I think I’ve always had this real middle-class guilt chip on my shoulder! I think I’ve got a political thing, because I feel like the world is really unjust, and it really pisses me off. I think it is disgusting that in a country as wealthy as Australia, people are homeless. It seems so wrong.’
    Her passion also wells up from her involvement in various other CCDs. Although she says she hates the word, she believes those in ‘marginalised’ communities (such as the homeless or those in prison) often have the most interesting stories to tell. And not only are such projects about raising awareness about an issue, they also empower those who are allowed to communicate their story via an artistic medium.
    ’The thing that underpins the Knot At Home project is that it is about some kind of transformation. It’s about the idea that by telling your story or performing your story you control your story rather than it controlling you.’
    We’ve been talking for 45 minutes; smoothies and coffees are finished, and Kirsty seems spent. So we wrap up the interview, pay the bill and exchange parting words.
    Kirsty seems decidedly more relaxed than she did when we began. She likes talking about the game, she admits, as talking about it reminds her of the strength of the concept, and motivates her to keep the proverbial ball rolling. Weary she may be, but daunted she is not. And if determination is a precursor to success, then surely Street Survivor will be completed someday.

As of April 2006, in conjunction with Big hART, Kirsty is still working on Street Survivor, and the project is being directed to incorporate an international focus.

Words: Tim Kroenert