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REVIEW: SORRY TO BOTHER YOU (Online)

16/1/2019

8 Comments

 
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Death is universal. There's no escaping it. It defines our lives, be it losing those we love, or those we admire. And, ultimately, we're all running the wrong way down an escalator, away from our own inevitable end. 

Despite the universality of death, grief can be a very unique and personal thing. If life can be viewed as a river, a loss of any magnitude will alter the course of the river's flow. It changes us, it changes our lives, and it comes to define us. There is no escaping grief. Even when we feel we've outrun it, it can catch us up when our guard is down, and remind us that it's just over our shoulder. It is insidious and cruel and indiscriminate, dripping its paralysing poison into our ears.

How we deal with that is down to the wiring of the individual. 

I saw the power of loss at too young an age. My family suffered a year where four close family members fell like dominoes.

While still grieving a cousin and an uncle, I remain haunted by the memory of hearing the phone ring, a week after the death of my nine month-old niece, and sitting on my mum's bed as she answered it. Numbed and battered, all she had to say before hanging up was a resigned, matter-of-fact, "Thank you for letting me know".

The call had been to tell her my beloved grandad, her father, had taken his own life by stopping the pills which had for years held back the massive heart attack which ultimately consumed him. She didn't have the strength to comfort even me, but by that stage it almost felt routine.
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POTENT ENOUGH TO SHOCK
Even now, 35 years later, the loss of my niece still shapes my family. It isn't something any of us ever really recovered from. The pain may be old and familiar, but it remains potent enough to shock, like a sudden plunge into an icy bath.

I wish more than anything that I could forget, but the weeks surrounding the death of my niece and grandad remain lucid and vivid.

I remember playing with my niece - she'd just started learning to stand up - the night before she died. I remember what I was watching on TV. I remember my mother receiving the call from my sister and screaming at me to wake up my dad. I remember visiting my niece in the chapel of rest. I remember how cold she felt as I kissed her goodbye for the final time. I remember the one and only time I've ever seen my father cry, and how he then pulled himself together for a couple of years until he could hold it back no longer. 

While the years either side of that time may be blurry and vague, the freezing eye of that storm is as fresh and high definition in my memory as yesterday. I wish it wasn't, but I suspect it always will be. 

There may be no escaping grief, but we all deal with it differently. The response from most of my family was to try and move on, push through the agony. Don't stop moving.

The following summer we visited my other sister, who was living in America, and it was the first time in months that the grief wasn't omnipresent. The vast, open, vistas of the Mojave Desert felt like the first rays of sunlight in months, and our trip to Disneyland was a 360-degree immersion in fantasy, a place where sadness wasn't allowed to take root.

We were given permission, just for a day, to forget. 

Even now, nothing takes me outside of life's problems like a trip to America, and in particular Disney theme parks. Thinking about it, my obsession with Disney is still me trying to escape. Video games. Star Wars. Digitiser. They're all my drugs. They're all, to one degree or another, coping mechanisms.

But at least it's not heroin.

CHANNELLING GRIEF
For Dan Hett, who lost his brother in 2017 Manchester terror attacks, he's channeled his grief into a series of online games. Sorry To Bother You is the latest. 

Dealing with the loss of a loved one is an impossible reality, but Dan Hett had to struggle through with his grief while being at the centre of a national news story. Sorry To Bother You simulates - for want of a better word - the barrage of messages he received in the wake of the Manchester Arena bombing.

Your task as "player" is to sift through these messages, and identify which are genuine messages of support, and which are messages from journalists or researchers, requesting an interview. The messages pop up on your phone, from various social media sources - and you have to click the heart, if you think they're sincere, or trash them if you suspect they're not. 

It sounds easy, but each of the messages are real. All were received by Dan in the days following the tragedy, and the disingenuous methods the journalists use to try to gain access to his grief aren't always obvious.

​Additionally, the speed at which the messages appear becomes increasingly overwhelming, and it's tempting to trash even the heartfelt ones, as they all come to feel like an intrusion at a time when - at least, this was my take - all that you want is to be left alone to grieve. 

​It's incredibly powerful.
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PROFOUND
What I found really profound about Sorry To Bother You wasn't so much its more obvious commentary on the maddening, predatory, nature of the media, but how invasive the more well-meaning messages felt.

We're hardwired to reach out when we see somebody in distress, but that rescuing instinct is more often than not a selfish act. We fool ourselves that we're being a "good person" by being kind, but words are rarely enough, and seldom given for the person on the receiving end. It's that old parable about giving a man a fish... if you teach people the tools to cope, if you take away their stabilisers, if you give them the space to grow, and grow strong, then isn't that far more selfless and kind?

Unfortunately, we live in a time when the absence of obvious kindness and overt displays of compassion are often seen as cruel. Too often we want to be viewed as the rescuer, the knight in shining armour. Or we bring our own stuff to somebody else's fight, instead of letting them defend themselves.

And too many of us are content to roll over and let those people fight the battle for us. The easiest path is often to try to palm your weight off onto another person, but that's just delaying the inevitable.

This was the big thing I took away from Sorry To Bother You - and like I said, grief is personal, so this may just be personal to me. Your reaction may differ. 

Sometimes, some of us just want to be given the space to cope.

You can find Sorry To Bother You here.
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8 Comments
Paul Morris
16/1/2019 10:09:40 am

A deeply moving read Mr B, death is a horrid fact of life and all that but to lose your niece at such a young age sounds horrific, I want to try the game but how do you think it would be for someone wrestling with depression as I am?

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Mr Biffo
16/1/2019 10:18:23 am

It's very, very simple, but your response to it is hard to predict. It resonated with me, but I guess everyone is going to have a different reaction to it.

At the very least, it'll give you some insight into what Dan had to cope with.

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Pete Davison link
16/1/2019 10:10:09 am

Beautifully written, Biffo, thanks for sharing.

This sounds like a really interesting way of coping with grief -- and raising awareness of the issues the author faced during an incredibly difficult time in his life.

I've found in the last couple of years a lot of these indie games that make use of "simulated text messages" and the like are overly predictable and lose a lot of their impact; the whole "you thought this was a horror game, but surprise! it's actually about being gay!" thing has been a little overdone by this point, for example.

But this... this sounds like it does a great job by keeping things simple and honest. It's not trying to pull the wool over the player's eyes or subvert their expectations; it's just trying to make a point and share the author's feelings. Art is so valuable for that; it is just one of many ways we can cope with difficult emotions. I'm glad Hett found an outlet, and I hope it helped him.

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RichardM
16/1/2019 10:24:45 am

Thanks for clueing me in to this: a very interesting game (which not give me motion sickness, like Jedi Knight 2 did last night while attempting to recapture my youth - I a getting old, especially in the inner ear).

Your point about well meaning attempts to sympathise becoming intrusive is very interesting. I struggled with that in my head - he wasn’t my brother, so what right did I have sort of thing. It was the first time I’d had to deal with a ‘sad’ death as well... A really complicated time. I do this stuff professionally too, but nothing prepares you for stuff like this in your own life.

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Treacle
16/1/2019 09:25:16 pm

Really good piece Mr B. Carrying unresolved grief is incredibly destructive, something I can testify to. No doubt there'll be people who don't feel comfortable with an article like this on Digi, but it's something we all have to confront at some time, and taking a wee mental step back to assess things can be hugely helpful.

And respect to you for sharing your own experiences, it's something a lot of people wouldn't have the confidence to do.

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Dr. Budd Buttocks, MD
16/1/2019 10:12:59 pm

I started writing a comment as I can very much relate to Biffo's experiences, but then I canned it as I thought, "who cares, this is not about me".

But then I realised something about how different grief is in the age of social media.

I had a horrible year in my teens, in fact a horrible couple of months. I lost two grandparents within a few weeks - one sudden and the other not entirely unexpected, but also a cousin took their own life on the same day as the second grandparent (in completely unrelated circumstances). This was difficult for the teenage me to process, who up until that point had had a life more or less free of grief. I bottled everything up for weeks and weeks, telling school friends that I didn't want to talk about it. The times before, in between and after are now a barely remembered numb haze, but I still vividly remember the sombre faces, sobbing phone calls, exactly where I was and what I was doing when I got the news. But there's simply no record of any of this, beyond a couple of brief emails that I still had in some old backup files.

It's a little sickening to imagine how all that would have played out if I had been on Facebook, and how it would have affected me personally. I had a young relative lose their mother a couple of years ago and there was a huge outpouring of love and support on social media, but this was also mixed with what I can only describe as "recreational grievers" whom they barely knew, messaging them out of the blue with "if you need anything you know where I am" type shit. I know they found it a bit upsetting and unhelpful. This is the bit where I make a world weary observation about how social media can bring us together but also blah blah blah, and to be honest I just need to go to bed now as I have a migraine but here you go anyway.

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Starbuck
18/1/2019 12:22:45 am

Firstly, thank you, to Biffo, Dan, and Commenters.

I just wanted to second Biffo's comments sboua the pain that even the most well-meaning of messages can bring. Be there for them by all means, ensure they know that that's the case, show humour if possible, but sometimes the best thing is to talk about something else, something daft, despite their grief.

(The Man's Daddy's jokes?)

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Adam Villarreal
19/1/2019 08:43:37 pm

Thanks for sharing that Mr. Biffo. I just played it and my head is swimming in thoughts right now.

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