Life on Hold: Game for Change

Game for Change

http://philome.la/zanderruiz/life-on-hold/play

Artist's Statement

In Julian Bleecker’s essay “Design Fiction,” he says, “a blurry boundary between fact and fiction can be creatively liberating, offering opportunities to explore ideas that may be thought about, but rarely explored.” When he said this, he might as well have been talking about this Game for Change assignment, because that’s exactly what this is. Exploring a story through a video game like this makes the experience so much more immersive — the player actively feels for the main character, making choices on their behalf and dealing with those consequences. So it makes sense that, for such a powerful medium, our stories must encourage the “right things” and must do so correctly, otherwise were feeding negative information into this feedback loop that Bleecker gets at where media shapes reality, reality shapes media, and the reality perceived in media further comes back to shape media.

I feel quite privileged to learn as much about homelessness in writing my game as I hope players learn in participating in the game. An article from Huff Post, “What Homelessness is Really Like,” helped me understand the difference between stereotypes about homelessness and the real-life facts of homelessness. While most people think that substance abuse and extreme mental instability are the leading causes of homelessness — that’s not true at all. I wanted to portray this negative stereotype through the main character’s interactions with others in the game in order to demonstrate how often it leads people to turn the homeless away, treat them poorly, and even dehumanize them. 

Home Aid America’s article “Top Causes of Homelessness in America” sums up those main reasons well, some of which include major traumatic events, mental disabilities, abuse in the home, a sudden shift in a family’s income, and natural disasters. I tried my best to accurately represent as many factors of homelessness as I could; after all, it’s never just one factor that leads to this unfortunate fate. I did fail to represent a few facts about homelessness that I thought were particularly important. One of the leading causes of homelessness is simply an inability to afford rent. I wanted to have a function in my game where the player could go job hunting — maybe one job might come to fruition, but it wouldn’t provide enough income alone to allow the player to rent an apartment. Most other jobs that the player tried to acquire would have been denied them due to employers’ bias against homeless people. I couldn’t implement this function, however, due to it’s substantial complexity to program anomy crunch for time on the project.

I really tried to echo personal experiences of homelessness, like those found in The Gaurdian’s “How I Became Homeless: Three People’s Stories.” I feel like I got close to their experiences, but I’ll never be able to hit that nail exactly on the head without that personal experience myself.

The inspiration for my game came largely from another text-based game for iOS and Android called A Dark Room. If this is a game you have never played before, I HIGHLY recommend doing so — I won’t spoil anything. But the game employs complex elements of an RPG and yet tells it’s story in such a simple way. I wanted todesigv my game similarly and have it get at it’s core message as effectively as A Dark Room did (again, I can’t spoil it, so I won’t explain any further how it does so).