A chat with the creator of Birth
Warning: This piece contains discussions of mortality.
To play the current build of Birth, I go to my desktop and click on a small icon showing a picture of a tooth. This is important: it’s a whole tooth, with the parts seen and the parts that, traditionally, go unseen, since they exist beyond everyday thoughts and below the gumline. “Below the gumline” might be a nice way of thinking about Birth itself, as it happens, a whole game that exists below the gumline. And that tooth? That tooth is perfect. This is not the cheery childhood mouthful of sparklers you draw with a few idle strokes of the pen. It’s the tooth extracted. The whole horrible truth of it. What could be more familiar? But with those roots, those prongs, what could be more inhuman, more uncanny?
BirthPublisher: Madison Karrh, WingsDeveloper: Madison KarrhPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out on PC 17th Feb
Birth is not a game about dentistry, although if you’re the kind of person who really wants to play a game about dentistry, you’re probably going to enjoy this game too. Birth’s creator, Madison Karrh, describes her game, with the concealed weariness, it can seem, of someone who’s spent the last few years trying to get an elk to fit on a Vespa, as a point-and-click game about living alone in a big city. To defeat your loneliness, you collect the bones and organs you find scattered around, and with those bones you slowly build a friend.
Where do you find the bones? You go to different buildings – shops and libraries and apartments – and meet the creatures who live there. You get to know the creatures by examining their things, their personal effects. You solve puzzles, too, ranging from physics challenges to more abstract stuff. How to get an eyeball out of a gumball machine? What do these fragments of pottery make when put back together?
Oh yes: and the game doesn’t explain itself. You poke at it, and all but hold it up to your ear for a brisk rattle. You give it all your senses. What’s inside? What does it want? There aren’t many games I can say this of, but I think I know what the world of Birth would smell like. It would smell like an old textbook from the 1950s, which had spent considerable time on the sunbleached shelves of a forgotten storage library.
