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?
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.
Karrh, who I spoke to last year, over Zoom, from my living room to her Chicago kitchen, tells me that while she’s been making Birth, she’s been listening to Frankenstein on audiobook and also playing Shenmue for the first time, and delighting in the parts of the game where you open drawers and cupboards and root through people’s stuff. Birth makes a bit of sense in that light – and it also makes a bit of sense when she tells me how much she admires the Rusty Lake games. But I want to know: what about the extracted tooth? What about the dead leaves, fish skin, jar lids and handfuls of rattling pebbles? These are the things Birth and its puzzles are made of, and the things that have cropped up in Karrh’s previous games, such as Landlord of the Woods and Whimsy.
When I play Karrh’s games I feel an unusual need to really make sense of certain things. Mostly, I need to draw a line around the stuff she puts in her games. It all seems of a piece, but how can it be, when it’s also so diffuse? Bird’s feathers and bits of egg, tarnished coins, rubber bands and gravel. I wanted to ask Karrh, when we spoke, about how she chooses this stuff for her games. And then I remembered, actually as I was dialling in, a photography project I had seen several years ago and found obscurely moving. A mother had photographed everything she had found each day in her young child’s pockets. And guess what? Feathers, pebbles, plastic monsters, rubber bands. Dead leaves. No teeth, thankfully, but you get the point.
I run this past Karrh, because I am unbearable, and she nods, and tells me that, actually, she used to teach preschool. „I had a child for a bit at the preschool who would eat rocks,“ she tells me. „A child who was a big pebble eater.“
She drifts off for a millisecond, or seems to, perhaps conjuring the pebble eater from the past. „Yes, absolutely,“ she says. „And I think the point about children? Children find so much joy in the things that adults view as mundane. So, like, rocks are not interesting to most humans.
„But,“ she continues, „I hope to hold on to that joy. To engage with life for much longer. And I think being around children does that. Just working at the preschool, kids are very funny, and they just see things. Things are so new to them.“
The pebbles and feathers get at something deeper about Karrh’s games that I cannot put my finger on, and which I’m hoping she can help me with. It’s not just the strange coherency of the things these games contain, it’s the way that they make total sense – I always feel certain I’m feeling exactly what I’m meant to feel at every moment of them – and yet when I emerge, I’m wordless to describe what’s gone on, and I’m wordless when it comes to what I’ve learned, particularly since what I learn always feels valuable.
