Talking to my dad
The first of the two games that I played was “Talking to my dad”. In this game you are looking out the front windshield as you drive home from college next to your dad. The conversation is designed such that it includes many common tropes of conversations between young adults and their parents. It specifically touches on challenges around mental health including anxiety and depression and at least in my play through, sexual orientation. It was created by ‘hatimb00’ and published through itch.io as part of a zine that bundled the games of 10 developers called “Indiepocalypse”.
I played through the complete game once and, given the instructions that if you selected a (SHORT) game you must complete more than one game, did not choose to play again despite my curiosity to see the end outcome of different choices.
This game was a Visual Novel that consisted entirely of dialogue between your character and their dad. In some ways it is also a Choose Your Own Adventure as the choices you make in your dialogue can affect the outcomes of the dialogue. This allowed the game to stay on track toward a general end of the story while still allowing the user to participate. It was interesting to me that the game did not strictly respect the user’s choices. Instead of saying the dialogue selected, slight changes were often made to extend or shift the dialog. However, it also left times where I did not want to make either of the choices available, and chose to sit in silence instead of say something I did not want to like “I hate it here”.
The target audience seems to be the young adults who identify with the challenges experienced by the child in the car. Many of the comments online confirm that the experience mirrors these people’s personal experience. I think that the creator’s intention was to inspire empathy for young adults. I think that within this group, it successfully made people feel seen and not alone. However, my husband and I were discussing that the creator presented the parent in a reasonable and realistic way such that we believe that parents would reach a conclusion that the experience captured their experiences. As young parents, we felt sympathy for both groups. We believe that this could be a great tool for parents and children to be able to establish that their behavior is ‘normal’ but unproductive and work to be more mutually supportive, avoiding these antipatterns. For example, most parents want to speak to their children more, but this can feel emotionally sapping for many children.
Overall as the game progressed, I felt some impatience with the conversation pace and the general talking past each other. This is exaggerated by the design choice to have an almost static image through all of game play. The narrative includes evocative spaces as the simple design captures the feeling of riding in the car with our parents. I felt some positive nostalgia but I assume many young people remember and experience feelings of anxiety, judgement, and isolation. There were additional elements of enacted story as the player selects the next dialogue. In particular the ending I encountered selecting to reveal one’s sexuality versus not, is a significant and potentially symbolic choice.
This game is somewhat similar to my game but with some distinct changes. I like that the topic is everyday family dynamics. However, the center of this interaction is the grown child. In my case the center of the interaction will be the parents. This story also sets up an almost purely depressed tone. It is my hope to present challenges but mixed with high points and viewed in a light hearted way so that it is much more positive. In this case I will need to be more careful because the target audience is not someone who has already lived the experience but instead is someone who is new to the idea.
I Love You, Colonel Sanders: A Finger Lickin’ Good Dating Simulator
The second of the two games that I played was “I Love You, Colonel Sanders: A Finger Lickin’ Good Dating Simulator”. In this game you go to a three-day cooking school with peers that include your best friend, your archnemesis, and a young Colonel Sanders. It was developed by Psyop and published by KFC on Steam.
The subgenre of the game is a visual novel and more specifically a Dating Sim. Given the subgenre and the contextual information provided like “your modest student apartment” the target audience seems to be young adults. The player is not shown on screen so their gender is not established but the player’s character is interested in Colonel Sanders which suggests it is aimed at people interested in men. The inclusion of an unnecessary cute dog, also suggests an audience that is stereotypically female.
The dating sim set up the user to generally understand the ‘goal’ of dating before the game even started. It also was reinforced by the general design decisions of having pink backgrounds and hearts. It also used many of the more specific artistic choices from other dating sims that rely on manga styled character drawings. However, one potential difficulty introduced by this connection, is the expectations caused by other games in the genre. Before playing the game, I checked to ensure it was not pornographic.
More so than the previous game, the player is able to make more consequential decisions like who will be their cooking partner Miriam or Colonel. This decision clearly affects a players ability to collect the 11 secret ingredients and contributes to the enacted story. Additionally the game evoked very specific knowledge of the KFC franchise. The player is expected to “correctly” select common KFC dishes including fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and biscuits. The use of sporks is also featured in the game. If a player had never been to KFC these choices would seem arbitrary.
[Fun to see character shapes from 247G pop up]
This game is very different in target from mine but has 11 embedded choices that determine if you complete a game’s long quest. I intend to have 15 embedded consequential questions. The game uses one of the ideas I was thinking about. It has the player interact with several consequential choices before revealing a single reward, which gives them multiple chances to ensure they see the first reward but also time to make ‘incorrect’ choices before they are aware that there are consequential choices. This leads me to have more confidence in the reasonableness of my idea.
Honestly, I struggled to think of who this game draws empathy towards, and I am still not sure that empathy is the right word. This game creates a character that no player is truly going to relate to but provides humor around the general challenge of dating and navigating higher education. The real goal in my opinion of this game is to evoke positive feelings towards KFC and its food through positive presentations of KFC associated items. Like telling us the fried chicken is “warm and safe.
{AI Use to remove the visual artifact from my sketchnote/mindmap: “please remove the table from the background and make the page fill the whole image”}
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