This project was created as a solo project for Stanford's CS 347G, Serious Game Design over a time period of 3 weeks. We were given the prompt to create a text-based interactive fiction about a problem we cared about with the goal of getting others to understand

In brainstorming the premise of my game, I was immediately drawn to the aesthetics of magical realism, especially by the short stories of Haruki Murakami and his story “Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey” in particular and decided to descend down a path of absurdity. In doing this, though, I set myself up for the difficult task of communicating something important through a surrealist storytelling technique, which I've never done before.

I decided next that I would focus my game on labels and identity politics.

In the midst of a job application cycle, I often feel reduced to a pile of words and labels, worried that I have to try to capture as much of myself as possible in a very limited space. The checkboxes and multiple choices can all feel so arbitrary.

As more identities become normalized, the lists and options get longer and longer, but in my opinion it doesn’t solve the fundamental problem of trying to categorize the incredible diversity of people into discrete buckets. In a more political sense, these categories can erase nuance and attempt to simplify complex narratives, and in an age of AI where data is gold it can be scary to think of people just as quantifiable and distinct instead of multifaceted.

‍However, I also recognize the value of labels to people in offering them control and solidity in their identity, so I wanted to make sure that my game also allowed players to hold on to what they felt was important to them.

Screenshots from low-fi Scratch prototype

Before moving the entire game onto a new platform, I decided to focus on refining the narrative and had a couple different options to pursue.

In the end I decided to flesh out an option : instead of having the player play as the bird, they would play as the person in the dream. Rather than stealing labels at random, the bird would present the player with one of their own labels, giving them the choice to either keep it or let the bird replace it with an absurd alternative. This core loop would continue until the player was happy with the “identity” that remained on screen.

My goal was for players to question the arbitrary labels that have been externally imposed upon them, so forcing them to engage in the choice over and over would both make my game longer and more impactive.

Since I still wasn’t sure that I’d be able to do my idea of images in Twine, my next playtests consisted of a combination of the Scratch narrative with a short Twine narrative that together illustrated the intended aesthetics and core loop. The goal of this prototype was thus to determine if my narrative was getting closer to capturing the message I wanted.

In choosing such a complicated and surreal idea, I inevitably made it more time-consuming since it was unable to be made in Twine. Between project checkpoints I decided to build my idea in React, and although it was time-consuming this flexibility allowed me to get as close as possible to my original vision.

To ensure that I held true to the constraints and intentions of text-based interactive storytelling on Twine, I modeled my React app using a set of messages with hard-coded links bringing players to different screens depending on their choices. To plan this out, I made a quick FigJam board to map out all the necessary screens and their key values.

The inline images allowed me to achieve the absurd/surreal effect that I was going for, with images bleeding out and around the text and quite literally breaking out of boundaries.

The second feature was an important narrative detail that ensured that players are focused on the idea of their personal identity at all times. I wanted to make sure that even as players make choices and new messages are displayed, their previous choices feel constant and that they’re able to see this progress and status at all times.

A screenshot near the beginning of the narrative, when the identity form first appears on the screen

While filling out the identity form, I also decided to force players to click through the cycling options a certain number of times before the message would give them an option to continue, with the goal of encouraging them to fill out the form with answers that reflected their real-world answers. To make sure that they kept filling it out even if the message appeared, I put the link text on the word “finish.” This made the choices later in the game even more meaningful as they were labels originally chosen by the player instead of pre-filled by me.

Further into the narrative, the player is being offered a decision about which gift to accept in return for their label.

In the middle of filling out the form, the player explicitly reads that the options feel limited.

I decided that no matter what, the first word that the bird picked would be the choice of introvert/extrovert.

The moment where the bird chooses the word and the player reflects on the arbitrary binary of the choice.

The player is offered a choice whether or not to keep the word.

After exchanging the word for one of the bird's gifts, the silliness of the binary is reinforced through another message.

After their first choice, the player repeats the loop on a shorter, single screen that reinforces the main question: is this label important?

Allowing players to "wake up" after a couple loops respects the fact that players might choose to keep the labels they feel especially connected to.

Once the player has completed multiple loops, perhaps keeping some labels and exchanging others, the following loops now offer them the choice to wake up.