By Imaan Moosa
Edited by Yumna Bodiat
We spoke to Bahiyya Khan about her journey to becoming an award-winning game designer and the challenges of studying and working with a mental health disorder.
Trigger Warning: Mental illness, sexual abuse and suicide
Bahiyya Khan foregrounded by the after HOURS video game. Photo: Bahiyya Khan
At the meeting point between art and technology, you will find a 25-year-old Lenasia-born game designer.
Game design is a field that unites computer science, programming, creative writing and graphic design to create video games. A career in game design offers both love of science and mathematics with creativity and art.
For Bahiyya Khan, game design is about “how I want [the game] to look and feel. The look and feel start off as a visual in my mind but can only be realised because of the technology available”.
Khan created the game after HOURS along with her team Tim Flusk, Abi and Claire Meekel. After HOURS is a full-motion video game that uses animation and film footage to tell the story of Lilith Grey, a young woman, with borderline personality disorder who suffered sexual abuse as a child.
After HOURS won the Best Student Game Award at the Independent Games Festival (IGF) in San Francisco in 2019, winning $3 000 and honoured with the Excellence in Narrative Award.
When I started conceptualising after HOURS, I knew that the entire game had to be filmed. Thinking about what I wanted the interactions to look like was also determined by which game engine I would be using since each of them come with their own constraints. Access to technologies and resources serve as a big barrier for many people, especially developers (devs) from third-world countries.
Games are made using the game engine and coding programs which help bring the game to life. Drawing tools such as tablets and animation software are used to visualise the designer’s ideas.
Khan’s favourite step in the game development process is the beginning. Scrolling through Tumblr, listening to her favourite musicians and watching Skins is when inspiration hits.
I like it because those things make me feel a lot and give me ideas on how to communicate emotions. Communicating emotions is my favourite part about making games.
A snippet from the video game after HOURS in which Bahiyya Khan acts as the character Lilith Grey. Photo: Provided
Her chosen career path has been central to the development of Khan’s personhood and identity; having to traverse a male-dominated industry.
She told To EmpowHER that although she is not ‘in’ the industry because she is self-employed and has not experienced as many challenges as women and women of colour who work in studious, she is victim to sexual harassment via unsolicited interaction with men at gaming conferences or on social media.
Her biggest challenges, however, were battled at university.
When she was 18-years-old she was still undecided about what she wanted to do. She says her emotional state was: “[I] didn’t know what the hell was up, an emotion I would find, is eternal”.
She also says she did not want to go to university at the time because the presence of so many people was overwhelming. Then, she wanted to write and be in a band. It was only after insistence from her mother that she go to a university that Bahiyya chose a degree in game design.
[My mum] was forced to drop out of high school and wanted a different life for her kids. I found out about game design at the University of the Witwatersrand Career Open Day and thought, ‘Okay cool’ and never thought about it again.
When Khan was introduced to game design, she thought it was a career inaccessible to her because in her mind it was a career for white people.
“I immediately associated it with white people, specifically white men, because they were the only people I saw at the booth. But when I saw someone who I went to school with, a black person from Soweto, game design took on a different shape for me.
“It just kept re-appearing in my life and it felt like a sign. I never grew up playing video games (not that you have to in order to design games), but being a game designer seemed to combine my interests of art and science and it also meant my mum would be happy that I went to university.”
Stills from the trailer of after Hours with Lilith Grey, the protagonist who has borderline personality disorder. Photos: Provided
Applying for a degree Bahiyya had long searched for did not mean all her problems were over.
“I was the only Coloured-Indian girl in my class and wished so much that there was another girl like me so we had each other in a sea of white people. I was severely depressed and unhappy because the people in my class used to make me feel stupid and like I was less than them.
“Some of them were racist and used to make fun of my accent and the ways that I used to string sentences together. A lecturer did the same thing to me and not one person called him out on it, despite everyone knowing ‘cos it happened in our class WhatsApp group. Some guys in my degree would pay attention to me if they had a crush on me, not because they cared to listen to my ideas.
“I wanted to switch degrees in my first year but felt awful if it meant my mum had to pay for an extra year. I came from a school where we paid R2000 fees for a year and suddenly we had to fork out around R60 000 for varsity fees. All of this scarred me so much. Anyway, where the fuck are those white boys now? Balding,” says Khan.
Reflecting on her experience, she notes that since her introduction into game design there have been more people of colour entering the degree. She hopes they do not have to experience similar mistreatment from her white, male counterparts.
Continuous mistreatment by others affected Khan’s self-confidence. She says she felt insecure in her abilities because of the kind of people she was surrounded by.
That did not stop her though. “The world is not your classmates and lecturers, although of course, it feels that way during your undergrad,” she told To EmpowHER.
“When I showcased one of my games at Amaze Fest and received positive reactions from other game devs and non-devs alike, I thought, 'Well, maybe I’m not terrible at it' and got way more confident in myself. I’m still figuring it out though. Also if someone doesn’t wish to see me the progress I’m probably gonna be unaware of it, so like, they can stay bitter and age horribly because of it."
Khan is currently brainstorming ideas for games while she completes a master's in film. Her project speaks to the hardness women of colour inherit from their mothers and their mother’s mothers – an inheritance Bahiyya says is symptomatic of apartheid.
I feel like apartheid made many people mentally ill, so I suppose that element is present in my work even if I’m not explicitly like, ‘HERE’S THIS PERSON. THEY ARE MENTALLY ILL’. My work will probably always feature people who are mentally ill, not because we are some plot point but because there’s so many of us that I find it hard to imagine a story where even a single character isn’t depressed.
Music video of the song Nice2KnoU by All Time Low which inspired Bahiyya Khan to create after HOURS and is animated by Bahiyya. Photo: Provided
The conceptualisation and publication of after HOURS and the process of game development are borne out of mental health challenges, most notably because the designer has mental health illnesses herself.
There was this time in January where I felt like I was in a much better position mentally and was trying to make a plan to release [after HOURS], when suddenly a friend of mine tried to commit suicide. I was the one that was with him while I waited for my mum to arrive to take him to the hospital and it was one of the worst things I’ve ever been through. It was extremely triggering for me, especially because I have seen people very close to me die before. The whole ordeal messed me up extremely badly and I am still struggling with it.
The experience left her in a period of psychological distress that affected her ability to perform. She says, “Sometimes I get in a really bad state and it’s super scary. I think I can’t fucking live like this. That fear motivates me to sleep at a reasonable time and talk to my best friend instead of shutting myself away. Then slowly I get into a better routine where work doesn’t seem impossible.”
Performing daily tasks with a mental illness can feel impossible, as Khan says, and finding ways to manage the emotions rioting inside can prove difficult and comes with practice. She is still unsure how to overcome her mental health challenges, but she says therapy is very beneficial for her.
When asked what advice she has for young girls and women like her, Khan says:
Therapy isn’t a resource everyone has access to.
"I would say to try and surround yourself with people who love you and put in the effort to understand you and make you a better human being. I didn’t have these people for a long time in my life. The other day I came across this sentence that said, ‘You haven’t met everyone who will love you’ and I wish I read that when I was a young girl because in my case, that has been so true."
I think if your creative work is making you depressed or messing with your mental health, you need to either park it away for later or stop working on it entirely, depending. Nothing is worth harming yourself over.
"I learned that while working on after HOURS. It’s also important to have interests outside of your work or creative projects because it makes for a more balanced life.”
More on Bahiyya:
What did you want to become growing up? If you could speak to yourself 10 years ago, what would current Bahiyya say to you then? I wanted to be in a band and write. I write and I am in a fake band, so I guess I’m living the dream. Ten years ago I was in grade 9 and behaving poorly; I wonder if I would listen to me at all. I guess I would say to myself not to talk to that 18-year-old-boy because he is gross for liking me at that age and being emo is always going to benefit me and that I should stock up on Twilight merch in a bigger size for future me. I would tell her to ignore all her teachers who keep pressuring her to go into journalism and give her a hug and say that there are names for the things that she is feeling and people who will put in the effort to understand that.
What advice do you have for young girls and women who wish to pursue a career in game design? Have fun with it. It’s okay to change your mind about which area of game development you want to be in. YouTube tutorials are helpful. Use your universities’ WiFi to download The Black Parade album. Look after yourself, check your posture, drink lots of water, rest your eyes, hang out with your friends and don’t make video games your entire life. Also, to girls of colour, I believe in you a lot and I’m rooting for you. Sometimes your parents might not understand what you do but that doesn’t make it wrong.
What are your interests outside of game design? I love going to gigs by myself and jumping around with other people I don’t know. I also keep watching the same tv shows from when I was 15. I read books. Shit, are those everything that I do? I guess just being stupid with my friends and acting like a worm.
Comments