Interview: Causa Creations teams up with Elaine Agnew for new social impact game Songs Of Travel

A mosaic of hopes, dreams and identities, Causa Creations’ latest interactive graphic novel, Songs Of Travel, shines a light on the weighty themes of immigration and prejudice, with teen audiences in mind. Now, however, the project has been brought to a different level, with plans to showcase it at four partner festivals across Europe this year – including Cellissimo 2024, which takes place in Galway from 18 to 26 May.

For the uninitiated, Cellissimo has been described as a festival on the western edge of Europe, which aims to celebrate the power and the beauty of the cello. As part of its wide-ranging programme, the festival will feature six separate presentations centred on Songs of Travel. It should, as the saying goes, be one hell of a journey...

The new social impact game details the real, lived experiences of five migrants who sought new beginnings across Europe – and who co-operated in the making of this enormously ambitious work.

“There's so much bad-mouthing about immigration and immigrants, but it's such a vital aspect of our history in Europe,” explains the organisation’s co-founder, Ben Wahl.

And increasingly so in Ireland too. Clearly, this is a cultural phenomenon that deserves our attention.

So who are the people behind this fascinating project? Formed back in 2014, Causa Creations is a boutique game development company based in Vienna, Austria, that specialises in educational media and immersive experiences.

“We are trying to focus on making games – for schools, for museums and for individuals – that have educational content,” Ben Wahl explains. “Content that is not solely entertaining, but also brings something else with it.

“Coming from the arts, it's always a very culturally colourful environment that you're in. But it's also about being aware of your privileges and trying to use them in the right way. So, we are trying to do stuff that helps others, rather than taking advantage for ourselves. We try to make what we call social impact games with Causa Creations. So it's important to us that everything we do brings something to the people – that it gives something back.”

Credit: Causa Creations

Having established themselves as a leading force in visionary game design, Causa Creations teamed up with Irish composer Elaine Agnew, and four European festival organisations – Music for Galway’s aforementioned Cellissimo (Ireland), Fairplay Chamber Music (Sweden), Valdres Sommersymfoni (Norway) and Piano Biennale (Netherlands) – to design Songs of Travel, which will be showcased at each partnering festival during the year.

“I have never worked in this world of music before,” Agnew, a composer and music facilitator based in Belfast, says of the games scene. “I'm a very acoustic person, anything with a plug or an electrical current slightly terrifies me. I knew that this would be a completely new way of working. I've never played a video game. I've never composed music for TV or film, or anything at all like that.”

A quick learner and highly-skilled musician, Agnew worked alongside Wahl and the Causa design team to bring the powerful stories of Light, Vân, Michele, Hasan and Olya to life. Tied together by the experiences of Syrian artist Jack Guttman, who helped develop Causa’s 2017 award-winning game Path Out, Songs Of Travel highlights topics of migration, identity, poverty and fresh starts, as it guides players through five immersive narratives.

Credit: Causa Creations

“They were creating the game as I was creating the music,” Agnew explains. “Then we were putting it together week by week as opposed to them making the game, then sending it to me. Ben was very keen that the music would influence the game, and, likewise, the visuals would very much influence the music.”

An incredible array of colour and sound, Agnew’s compositions feature a quintet of musicians on B-flat and bass clarinet, violin, cello, piano and a range of percussion instruments, both tuned and untuned. Each musical track in the game is assigned to a graphic, which allows the player to flip through the segments at their own pace, while remaining in time with the music.

“It took me quite a while to get my head around the idea that a particular music track might not end depending on how fast the player is playing,” Agnew says, noting the inherent learning curve that she had to follow. “If someone is playing quickly, they wouldn't necessarily get to the end of the music track before the next one would play. So I just had to think of it – the beginnings and the endings of each track – differently than if I were just writing pure concert music.”

Drawing inspiration from the mannerisms, personalities and vocal patterns of their five interview subjects, Agnew crafted a series of intricate soundtracks for each narrative. “I was more influenced by that – by their voices – as opposed to, say, looking into the country that they came from and then taking some of that traditional music or folk music. For me, the music comes from the soul and the heart of those five people.

“Hassan, [for example], was born in Turkey and then at the age of one, his family moved to Austria,” she added. “But what was really interesting about him to me was that he had the most beautiful quality of a speaking voice. He’s speaking in German. So I decided that, within this game, his voice would very much be represented by bass clarinet, which is a very beautiful, hot chocolate, loving, big, warm hug, kind of a sound.”

Credit: Causa Creations

The music is paired with colourful, youth-targeted artwork from Guttman and Brian Main, who found inspiration in the works of illustrators Scott McCloud and Richard Stark, as well as similar narrative games like Phallaina from Small Bag and Florence from Annapurna Interactive.

"It was a short but very distinct style-exploration that we did,” Wahl explains. “ So we nailed the look pretty soon and went with this spot-coloured approach where every person has their own colour.”

Each of the five chapters is narrated by Guttman, shown in all yellow, who continuously breaks the fourth wall. Throughout the eight to ten-minute segments, are live interview clips from the subjects as they speak about their experiences first-hand.

“It was important to us to keep Songs of Travel as the stories of the people we're talking about, rather than making it our own,” says Wahl. “So it was a challenge to keep it as real as possible while navigating all the restrictions that you have with the artwork. It was very important to us to gather feedback from the interviewees and from our partners to make sure that they were okay with what we did and that we didn't re-tell anything incorrectly…

"A lot of effort went into keeping it as close as possible to the story that our partners lived.”

A 50-minute adaptation of the game will be featured at Music for Galway’s Cellissimo on May 19, an international cello festival that spans a period of nine days and highlights world-class cellists, classical musicians, composer and speakers, including Eimear Noone, Alban Gerhardt, Camille Thomas and many more. A forum for the exploration of the power of music, Cellissimo is a driving force for social change across Europe, with thousands of international visitors attending the festival each year.

The Songs of Travel Cellissimo debut will include a real-time projection of the game alongside live musical accompaniment. The presentation will also feature a short, standalone composition from Agnew entitled ‘Waiting' and centred around the themes of patience and anticipation found throughout the game.

Pic: Marc O'Sullivan

“It's quite incredible that the audience that will have access to this,” Agnew says, referring to the game’s four festival appearances and free public access. “These five individuals – their stories, are harrowing, they're bleak, their experiences are quite unbelievable. If Songs Of Travel brings more awareness and more empathy towards people – their flight and their experiences – then I think that's a really great accomplishment.”

• Music for Galway's Cellissimo Festival takes place in various venues around Galway from 18 to 26 May, 2024.