Values at Play & P2 Peer Grading

Tunnels

1. The value in this game was the choice between venturing into the unknown and learning more about the world or returning home to something that is familiar. The game designer conveyed this message by having it be the final choice in the story, which made this decision have a lot of gravitas.
2. I felt pretty invested in Carpon’s story, so I think the game got me to care a lot about his final decision. The game used the medium, Twine, pretty well. Some things in the game unique to Twine were the text sizes and the speed at which text appeared. Text sizes indicated the volume of noises and voices, while the text speed made things feel like they were happening in realtime. The final choice in the game was pretty consequential, and it was tough to decide between staying with Carpon’s new friend or his old friend. Both lives sounded enticing and were equally “good” endings.
3. I thought the narrative was great and the author has great story-writing skills! All the characters were likable, which made the final decision hard. I also appreciated the way the sentences appeared one at a time, so I was never faced with an overwhelming wall of text.
4. I think it would have been cool to have audio, especially for some of the sound effects that were written out.

The Company

1. The main message of this story is that we are all part of a larger system, but it is up to us how we want to navigate the system. We can expose the system’s corrupt parts while risking our own safety, or stay safe but be complicit in immoral deeds. The game designer embedded this message into the story with the final decision, which was whether to share my findings with my boss. If I shared my findings and tattled on my coworkers who were fighting for justice, the ending(s) were incredibly unsatisfactory. So I was compelled to not share my findings, which led to a more satisfying ending in which I joined the revolution against capitalism and corruption.
2. Trying to solve the puzzles in the game made me feel like I was doing something dangerous and risky, which elevated my experience of the game and made me feel immersed in the story. Because it took brainpower to get through the puzzles, I felt like I was working towards a huge revelation, which is that the Company that I work for is corrupt. At the end, I did not want to betray my coworkers, which I think is a good indication that the story made me care about its message. All of the choices in the game, other than the last one, are actually inconsequential, which was a little disappointing. But the last choice was actually hugely consequential, so I think the game had a decent amount of consequence.
3. I thought the writing was was extremely funny! I loved the names “Jeffery Bezos,” “Bezos Pesos,” “Steven Jobs,” etc. It cracked me up. I was also really impressed by the puzzles!
4. When I got the 3rd password wrong, I couldn’t go back to the previous page to reread the puzzle, so I was stuck on the “enter password” page until I guessed the number right. It would be nice to have the option to go back and reread the puzzle.

Where’s My Son?

1. The main value in this game is to make the player empathize with Alzheimer’s patients. The author puts this value into his game by not immediately revealing that the main character has Alzheimer’s, and instead slowly reveals this throughout the story by having other characters tell the main character things that the main character does not remember about their own life. The decision to reveal the story piece by piece makes the player as confused in the beginning as an Alzheimer’s patient would be.
2. I think the game did a good job of getting me to care about Alzheimer’s patients, since it made me gain empathy for them by putting me in their shoes. The ending was also very sad, and it made me extremely worried for the main character’s life. The author used Twine well, as the different choices that the player could make in Twine were what drove the story forward. The choices that were most interesting to me were the one where Colleen, the main character, has to decide whether her son is 8 or 34, and the one where she tries to remember whether it’s 9am or 1pm. It was as if Colleen could hazily recall things but couldn’t tell which one was the truth.
3. I thought it was great how, towards the end, there were fewer and fewer choices as Colleen became more and more frantic. The things to click on became single words embedded in lines rather than full lines.
4. I noticed some inconsistencies with the blue clickable text; most of them were Colleen’s actions/thoughts, but some were actions by other people, which confused me. It would be great if the clickable text were consistent in whose actions they are conveying.