Sorry To Bother You is a short videogame that details a real experience: specifically, the massive influx of thousands of messages following the unexpected death of my brother Martyn in the 2017 Manchester Arena terror attack.

The game tasks players with isolating the messages that are actually journalist requests (sometimes quite thinly-veiled ones). To do this, respond to each message by hitting the heart icon, or the trash can – ‘like’ the real messages, and trash the journalist ones. If too many stack up, or the player mistakes a journalist request for a real message of condolence, the game is over.

Identifying details have been removed, with the exception of my own name, and the names of the publications reaching out. Apart from that, and with some editing for brevity, every word in this game is real, and was taken from the messages I genuinely did receive. For the first few days following the attack my phone was almost unusable, and this game quickly ramps up in speed to reflect that. The messages within the game are a very small sample of the thousands of messages I received.

music/sfx: RUMA
Illustration: letsbrock!