HE EAT HER – The Great Mother (Video Game)

The work is a video game made by Ting Deng and Lianyi Wang. It is our new artistic practice as an artwork, a game, and an exhibition. We hope you can accept this form to participate in your prize competition. And it takes time to play.

Game Trailer: https://vimeo.com/765637690

Link to play:https://rayhsux.github.io/thegreatmother_en/

 Game Introduction:

HE EAT HER – The Great Mother is a text-based adventure game. A traveler lost and reincarnated by chance in Mondo--an otherworld full of temptations, embarks on a legendary journey to find the Gate of the Great Mother. The mysterious relics of ancient grandeur, the prophetic words of the gods, and the dream within a dream ... And it is quietly revealed to the audience. Not in life and not in death, both in life and in death, the paths of life are intertwined, is it a dream or reality? What fate awaits you?

Concept: 

"The Great Mother " comes from Laozi's Tao Te Ching · Chapter 6, the original text is "The god of the void will never be exhausted, it is called the mysterious female. The gate of mysterious female is the root of heaven and earth." In the eyes of the ancients, hills are the Yang, on behalf of the male root, and the valleys are the Yin, representing the female root. What Laozi called the "Gate of the mysterious female" can be understood as the birthing gate of the “mother”, the root of heaven and earth, the immortal, the continuous and the inexhaustible.  It is a responses to the theme of Cecilia Alemany's "The Milk of Dreams”. Capturing the light of art from individual experience, but also from the ancient consciousness of the Chinese nation, including women, bodies, myths, imagination, ecology, earth, technology... We carefully try to reach out friendly branches from the far east to touch a de-anthropocentric future.

In ancient China, the earth, the moon, the streams and valleys were worshipped as female sex organs. "Maternal worship" exists in the collective subconscious of the Chinese people. As the carrier of primitive images, Chinese creation myths have a distinctive tendency of “Great Mother Goddess", such as Nu Wa, Xiwangmu, Mazu, Huaxu, Jiangyuan, Jiandi, shaman Shimu. Erlich Neumann sees the Great Mother Goddess as both creator and destroyer. In addition to the goddess of goodness, the "mother of terror", such as ghost and banshee, prevents humans from independent and mature, forcing her son retreat into the darkness of the unconsciousness. Here, “mother goddess" or "Yin" is synonymous with chaotic consciousness, and the male with superficial consciousness, The conflict between god and goddess, The Great Mother and The Son is the process by which human steps from the chaos to the enlightenment. When The Father of the Sun descends, mystery is gone.

However, the invention of the Hubble Telescope has reintroduced us to the universe, and the advent of modern warfare has awakened human who dreams to dominate the world by technology. H·P·Lovecraft, who created the Cthulhu Mythos, found that in the vast and infinite universe, the laws, interests, reasons and emotions that human had built up for their own amusement were meaningless, because humans are too negligible and insignificant for the whole universe. Thus, Lovecraft changed the image of omnipotent and autonomous god in the myth of the past peoples, his Azathoth, the master of all things, is the Blind Idiot God. The universe was formed in a dream when he fell asleep, and the it dissipated when he awoke. Yog-Sothoth, the “All-in-One and One-in-All”, exists as the incarnation of time in the cosmos,  Shub-Niggurath, the “All-Mother” who associates with fertility and life, and Nyarlathotep, the "Crawling Chaos" who has numerous incarnations that increases the entropy of the universe -- the Characteristics of these outer gods embody the mysterious universe and unknown things. Our new "myth"  begins to reclaim a reverence for the unknown, the universe and the nature..

In recent years, amid a wave of rethinking of the Anthropocene, Donna Haraway, the feminist historian who wrote the Cyborg Manifesto, introduced the concept of ‘Chthulucene’ in her 2016 book Staying with the Trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene, and Haraway apparently drew on Lovecraft, The capitalocene was replaced by Chthulucene, pulling political philosophy out of the “Anthropocene”, which is centred on ‘rational’ human beings. She argues that “biology, art, politics need each other… In a symbiotic system, they induce each other to create a more livable world which I call the Chthulucene." This is undoubtedly a provocation to the current capitalism ethics.

In these uncertain times, why do we still talk about motherhood, the body and mysticism? Perhaps the more chaotic the world is, the more we need to activate all our senses and try to connect to the magnetic field to communicate with the world, just like the communication between the fetus and its mother in the womb. There is no one but longs for mother's embrace, and we hear her call. The world today seems to be more fragmented. The gloom of the COVID-19 pandemic, the fear of technological invasion, the ecological degradation, the advent of natural and man-made disasters, force us to acknowledge the limitations of the flesh and the loneliness of mankind. The Great Mother gives birth to all and devours all, including us and more known and unknown life and consciousness. As Cecilia Alemani said, “as mortal bodies, we are neither invincible nor self-sufficient, but rather part of a symbiotic web of interdependencies that bind us to each other, to other species, and to the planet as a whole", a post-human future was revealed.

It is the instinct of human life that make us wander, and the enchanting, intact, deathly “Gate of the Great Mother" welcomes us back to her womb.  May our departed compatriots return to their mothers' arms, and we embark on the journey home.

During the game, you will have many options. The options can be a trap or a wise counsel. Whatever you choose, the "blessing" will always follow you. So please be careful. Hope you make a good choice.The game has seven regular endings and one hidden ending, which are related to the choices the player makes during the game. Can you find the Gate of the Great Mother? Will you be on an eternal drift in the misty river? In the ending, your gender, your partner, your fate, your encounter ... will all be different.

"Are you ready for adventure?" is not about opening a new chapter in the game, it's about "Are you ready to spend your life in real life?" Do you accept or fight against secular prejudices, stereotypes and social rules? Do you seek the wholeness of the family, the meaning of existence, or true freedom? The assumptions we make in the ending are miniatures of the fate of certain groups of people in our society. It is happening to you, to me, to everyone. 

The Development Team

Curators: Ting Deng, Lianyi Wang

Design: Ting Deng, Lianyi Wang, Rui Xu

Script: Ting Deng, Lianyi Wang, Rui Xu

Illustration & Art: Weiyang Jiang

Development: Rui Xu

Operations: Keyi Cao 

Voice Talent: Mo Lin, Xiaoxuan, Yunye

Music: Mo Lin

Playtester: J2 He

English Localization: Ting Deng, Lianyi Wang

Creative Curation: Buoyant Art, No Space

BGM：

Gu Rang Yuan Mu Series

Participating Artists: 

Weiyang Jiang, Yinglin Zhou, Jiangchuan An, Ning Tang, Jing Gu, Liuna Yin, Emily Cheng Qi Yao, Yunfeng Bai, Kun Xie, Ruofan Chen, Jing Lin, Suo Di, Haowen Zheng, Peirui Yang, Yexuan Qin, Zichen Wang, Shiqi Bai, Yujie Cao, Anran, Jinyuan Li, Mingyong Deng, Qiqi Wang

* In order of appearance in the game. The works are using as game cules.