Riley: Week 13

blob:https://twinery.org/d4f5235e-3775-4da6-9d30-69f57f91bd8e

I had a LOT of fun making this (as y’all could probably tell)! It was such a fun challenge to figure out how to weave different choices together to reach the same ending, or loop back around to a good point to restart from, or how to end a thread in a satisfying way. There were multiple moments where I had managed to sort of “tangle” my story threads up and found myself having to think really hard about how to “untangle” them. Being able to go back and then play it for myself to test it was really cool and satisfying!

What made this project and the concept of “choose your own adventure” games particularly interesting to me in this class is the idea of perspective. As I said in class, I was really compelled by this point from our reading, “Can Video Games Be Humanities Scholarship?”, “Simulated subjectivity has often been used to give players powers and abilities beyond their daily lives, but these avatars could just as easily be tailored to show limitations. Such characters might be made to be aware of their race, class, rank, sexual orientation, or other personal or group identities, for example, and experience the consequences of those identities as they traverse the game.” I think this is a great idea, as to me it feels like an easily accessible way to expose people to viewpoints outside their own, or perhaps use historical thinking. One idea that comes to my mind is potentially using a “Choose Your Own Adventure” format to show how difficult it was to navigate legal systems in the past, such as women before they could do things like own credit cards/open bank accounts or POC during Jim Crow. Of course, this would need to be done with an INCREDIBLE amount of sensitivity and knowledge.

I don’t feel confident or comfortable enough yet in my knowledge or experience to have attempted to create a Twine that depicted a social situation with limitations; any of the ideas felt too serious/dark to do as a Twine story. However, I think a good example of what a marginalized perspective in video games looks like is the game When Rivers Were Trails. The perspective of Indigenous Americans is one that has been systemically repressed, especially their perspective during the period of “westward expansion”, and I think it’s incredibly cool to see Indigenous groups and allies shedding light on it by adjusting focus in “familiar” stories such as The Oregon Trail to create When Rivers were Trails.

Though I didn’t adopt the perspective of a person with a different positionality than mine, adopting the perspective of an animal for this game was a fun mental exercise. I had to think about how a coyote, as opposed to a human, moves through a neighborhood or city, or what kinds of things in those settings would pose a threat. Using verbs like “stalking” and “trotting” to describe movement and trying to find images through the “viewpoint” of a coyote was a really fun exercise in thinking about space, which is another area in which video games can give one a new perspective. I also really enjoyed choosing where to add educational information to the game! I was picturing it as I made it as a cute little game that could also teach the player a few fun facts about coyotes. I knew some of the facts I wanted to add beforehand, such as the fact about badgers, and figuring out when and where to introduce those facts was really fun.

In conclusion, “perspective” wasn’t something I had thought too deeply about before with video games, especially in a humanities sense, but I don’t think I’ll be able to un-see it now!