Selected Press

It felt good to litter those pages and pages and pages with color and life and pain... Playing the game was emotionally draining, but also left me refreshed and filled with hope.

The Heartache Of A Video Game That Makes You Shred Real Books
Aiden Strawhun - Kotaku - 15 April 2019

The Book Ritual is one hell of an emotional rollercoaster, but the grief I carry around with me everyday gets smaller because the game helped me confront it.

This game destroys real books to help players cope with grief
Joanna Nelius - PC Gamer, 6 May 2019

What is the Book Ritual?

An interactive art-piece played using a real-world book of your choice.

Write in your book to tell it about yourself. Deface its pages in creativity exercises, so that your book can understand you. Tear out pages to keep the conversation going, as it reveals to you how it came to be and why it wants to know you.

The Book Ritual is about dealing with loss and accepting grief. The process of tearing up a book allows players to live out the experience of loss and examine the emotions that arise.

How to play

The game can be downloaded at home for free, and played using a standard office shredder.

At exhibitions, a specially modified shredder is provided. Inside is a sensor that detects when paper is being shredded.

The exhibition experience

Over the course of an exhibition the books will become filled with different players' messages, and other secret messages become anonymous shreds on the floor.

The pile of shreds that grows during an exhibition is a reflection of the emotional journey taken by previous participants. It mirrors the footprints left behind by those no longer with us.

Download from itch.io

Tech Stack

Unity C#

The game is developed in Unity and programmed using C#.

Arduino C Beam sensors

The shredder contains two beam sensors, one at the entrance and another at the exit of the shredding mechanism. When each beam is cut, a signal is sent as a simulated keyboard input to the computer. When both signals are received at the same time, the game knows that a page is being shredded.

Shader Model 2

For the background effects I wrote shaders that allowed me to make colour patterns out of book scans and ripped up paper shreds.

Emotional Design

In order to create a space where the player felt comfortable writing about their grief experiences, I had to take into account their emotional needs and concerns. The writing and sequence of paper tasks are designed based around how shallow or deep a relationship with the game they can be expected to have at that moment in time. The process took inspiration from Holly Stoppit's methods of teaching theraputic clown.

Creative Writing

The game plays out mostly in conversation with two lead characters: the book, and the shredder. I put a lot of focus into writing engaging voices for them. The book is youthful, exuding confidence but hiding vulnerability. The shredder acts as its opposite: mature, grounded and resigned. The goal was to create characters that the player would want to imagine as real, so that they would feel welcome sharing their secrets with them.