Assignment 2 – Future Play – Part 1

A Closed World is a game that aims to help teens to come to terms with and deal with the confrontation you can face as a young LGBTIQA+ person. A Closed World’s prototype (which i played a bit of) was released in 2011 by the Singapore GAMBIT game lab. It a digital game where your characters curiosity grows  about the fog and the forest near where they live, as you traverse the landscape you encounter demons you must fend off. The demons are often symbolic of different types of relationships, hardships or conflict young queer people may face as they try to accept who they are. You fight the demons with three attacks, passion, logic and ethics, the attacks are debuted with similar ones. The game creates a place where you can either experience the kind of bigotry these young people are facing or help those who need it normalise that it is ok to be different from others, even if they are family. The game invites players to be immersed into uncomfortable situations without directly pointing out that they are uncomfortable int the first place. The opening dialogue of the game surrounds the question of whether you are male or female, saying that this question alone can define so much for anyone struggling with their identity. In video games in general, being anything other than a man can already be hard to overcome as games are often depicted as aimed at either girls or boys and not people. The environmental story telling from give the impression that although far from reality it melds with what we know and experience creating a more relatable game play. Perhaps i only find this flaw because as of late pronouns and gender identity are something that i have been thinking about, but maybe the starting question doesn’t need to be are you male or female. people can identify with both or neither gender and this can have a great impact into their sexual orientation. Perhaps also i didn’t play enough of the game, but is gender where to play a larger role in the game it would different. I thought that it was strange that the first part of the game was choosing a gender, it didn’t seem to effect the appearance of the character or the narrative. I think it is a wonderful game and i had never seen or heard of a game like it before. The research statement (on the Gambit website) ends by putting “The result is a game that asks us to carefully consider what we think of as “normal,” and what is needed to live in the world and be true to one’s self.” Which is perfect, it tells you all you need to know about the aim and development of the game. It would be a great tool to show young teens without out telling them it was based on the hardships of being queer.

Bioharmonious is a game where you must find the balance between two very different planets, manufactured and natural. You must move things from the natural planet and incorporate them into the manufactured one to save the planets core from dying. You are responsible for making it so that these two planets do not die, and you only have six minutes to do so. The objects become incorporated with buildings that harm the planet to better aid the longevity of the manufactured planet. It was developed for an exhibition for Art Works for Change. The game can be played by pretty much anyone, although I would wonder is children would not get bored as there is quite a lot of reading to be done as you play. The game being set on two fictional planets does not lose the concept that in our own world nature and manmade are constantly at war trying to survive on our one planet. That if we were to make a better effort of combining the two perhaps, we wouldn’t lose one or the other. A good way to expand the game would be to add a more diverse selection of tools and changes the plants can go through, adding different endings. Once the objective of the game is understood the game is easy and simple to win, it doesn’t take much effort or thinking to complete. For this reason, I think expanding the worlds to depend on each more evenly instead of just one planet needing resources from the other, you can’t change nature but you can help it to further evolve which would produce more opportunity’s to change the manufactured planet. I think in these problems lies the faults of the game; the message is quite clear, but It doesn’t give much to the play aspect of it. It’s a play once and never again type game, although beautiful and well crafted, it lacks innovation. Its narrative is strongly embedded in the game and thus restricts too much creativity even though the game is mostly about variables. There isn’t much learnt through the game, essentially it just gives the opinion that our world (the real one) will eventually run out of resources if we don’t do something about the climate. In the real world there are many of instances of technology and nature working together to become a more harmonious existence, but it does little to balance out the damage we do to our planet every day.