“We become what we behold” is a game made by Nicky Case that explores how media shapes what people think. It is open source and playable on itch.io. I played for about 15 minutes, first taking pictures of a man in a hat and starting a trend in hat wearing. I took photos of people who seemed happy and was granted the opportunity to photograph one cricket and then 3 crickets but these photos were inconsequential. One character starts to audibly yell at other players and if you capture a photo of it, characters will begin to fear each other. On my first play through I never got past a little fear. I honestly saw no need to photograph the same thing again.
I took a photo of two characters in love and was negatively surprised when it was reported negatively. Only playing the game a second time, in search of the content warning “mass murder” did I understand that there were two types of characters (squares and circles).
Only by repeatedly photographing the negative behaviors can you progress to the end of the game.
This activity in some ways has an action game vibe because of the character movement and weapons. However, game play is more of a journalism sim where the player selects stories and receives feedback on their ‘appeal’. This sets up the game’s message as the game argues that the current media incentives create polarization. There is a clear procedure where photographing strife moves game play forward. This contributes to the broader procedural rhetoric around the long term impact of this procedure. The player is put off balance as “disasters” are progress in the game instead of roadblocks.
The presentation of the eventual world created by the current system is an interesting way to help players reach independent conclusions about the flaws of the current system. I could see a game that creates the same empathy I am aiming for that eventually has the birth rate drop to 0 but I am invested in a cozy aesthetic so I will not implement that idea.
The two different play throughs I completed make clear some ludonarrative dissonance. In the first play through, this player was so bad at meeting the goals that most of the rhetorical outcome failed. However, the argument was still beginning to form, enough that I correctly hypothesized what was needed to complete the game and returned to play again. It is interesting that I was incentivized to play to the end for the sake of the assignment, when I definitely would have lost interest earlier. Having played to the end, I definitely felt uneasy about the impact of focusing on any interaction.
The second game that I played was “Spent”. It was developed by McKinney, a Durham, North Carolina-based advertising agency, and published by the Urban Ministries of Durham, a nonprofit organization providing food, shelter and a future. I played through the game making it to Day 30 of 31 in about 30 minutes. In the game you must weigh the pros and cons of financial decisions around work, housing, and parenting. It is a simulation of living for a month as a single parent with a child who recently lost their job.
Each decision you make has consequences, some obvious and others that are more surprising. For example, applying for a scholarship requires you to take time off work for an interview which costs money. The storytelling for me relied a lot on my prior experience navigating these questions, evoking the feelings of anxiety. However, I imagine that for someone who has not experienced these questions, it might create anxiety as they enact the story but with less knowledge over the consequences of their choices.
I wonder how much people who have limited experience budgeting and planning would benefit from the interaction. However, as a parent who makes decisions about how to use limited time and monetary resources for my family [Including missing a park playdate to write this assignment] the argument was clear.
I think this game faces a lot of the same challenges my game did. There are ‘correct’ and less desirable choices that impact outcome. I could picture someone making a similar critique to the ones my first playtester made about this feeling more like a quiz than a game. The biggest item that makes it feel more like a game is that you get immediate feedback on your bank balance. This aligns with the feedback from my playtest to make the actions have quick feedback.
Overall the game attempted to make the argument that anyone could require assistance if things went wrong even for a short time. The scenes function as a list of the challenges people face. This list should serve to create empathy for people who require assistance. Having made conservative but realistic choices, I almost survived the month, which could have been somewhat ludonarrative dissonant to the point of the game. However, in order to reach that point I had to sacrifice many things so there was still some learning in the process.
The final game that I played was “Adventures With Anxiety!” also by Nicky Case and also published on itch.io. It is a visual novel with significant dark comedy, where you simulate an external anthropomorphism of the character’s anxiety. In it your role is as the human’s anxiety and while it explicitly refers to you as protecting the human’s physical, social and moral needs, the game mechanics prompt you to cause the human to make decisions out of fear that they will be hurt, lonely, or become a bad person. Progress in the game is made as you deplete the human’s energy.
I “successfully” completed the game in approximately 20 minutes. The mechanics were simple, as they character completed activities, you selected which of 3 concerns to raise, that each reflected either physical, social, or moral anxiety. The choice for the mechanics to make this nonoptional, led to the nonoptional draining of the human’s energy which presented the impacts of anxiety as nonoptional and constant. For people who have not experienced the intrusive thoughts of anxiety, this does a great job of allowing them to better understand the challenge faced by those with anxiety. I believe this is a good way to create empathy for those struggling with anxiety.
While not particularly procedural, the rhetoric employed that presents the actions of anxiety as help, communicates a lot. While somewhat simplified this portrays the challenge of ignoring these thoughts and why some people may even question if it is useful to address their anxiety. I believe that the game successfully communicated the realities of living with anxiety. I did not find any way to avoid the impacts of anxiety besides to stop interacting and even then the pause screen reinforces the constancy of anxiety. As someone with experience with anxiety the game made me feel somewhat seen. I considered at least once sharing this game with someone to communicate something about myself.
This game makes use of a live stat update bar similar to Spent and I might include that but I also noticed the stats update screen at the end. This drove home the overall impact of the player’s actions so I would like to implement a similar screen in my game. I might do something this simple or I might experiment with listing the specific actions.
