A Southern Apocalypse…For Real
The Southern US is kicked out of the Union by the Northern and Western states. Descending into hazardous wasteland, decay spreads through the South. In this Interactive Fiction game, you will play an astrophile Southern Unioner (Southerner) who is gifted a letter of admission to one of the most prestigious space academies in the Federal Republic (Northern and Western states). You’ll explore a bit about your hometown, click through various dystopian settings, spend a day in high school, and learn more about how this all came to pass. You’ll have to make tough decisions about leaving your hometown and adjusting to a new place. How will you choose to present yourself? Every step that brings you closer to your aspirations and dreams pulls you further away from the place you came… This game explores the politics of superiority and inferiority in the American South, the realities of internal migration, and gives you an opportunity to step into the shoes of some of your peers who may be experiencing these feelings.
Check it out here!
A bit of intuition about my initial thoughts…
Hi! My name is Genevieve Singer and I’m from Greensboro, North Carolina. Growing up in the American South was an exercise in resilience, with the ultimate hope that I would escape to the liberal holy-grail of California. When I got my letter of acceptance to Stanford University, it felt like a “get out of jail free” card. Finally, I could explore the full depth of my potential.
Coming here, however, forced me to change in ways I could’ve never anticipated. After teaching myself to speak in a geographically neutral accent, I learned how to play the game to avoid questions like “how often do you see Confederate flags?!” and “how racist are you, really??” While the fundamental questioning of the proto-typical Southern values from my peers resonated with me, I had spent my entire life rejecting the construct of the Southern Belle as she (clearly) did not work for me. To see myself immediately discarded as everything I critiqued in my hometown created a cognitive dissonance that has been difficult to overcome.
With my love of language and narrative, this assignment felt like the perfect opportunity to create an experience for others so they could understand how the process of internal migration necessarily forces a divide between home and community, love and loss. The division marks a severing from the communities that somehow did not satisfy the auto-exile’s needs, while fundamentally leaving them to scramble for structure in the new community. This is a small, imperfect slice of this experience. Please enjoy!
A bit of intuition about my process…
When my professor, Christina Woodke, asked for a playable prototype for last Tuesday, ya girl delivered. 30 hours of figuring out Twine, hashing a story, a few kind souls who tried out the initial versions, and I came to class ready to rumble with my initial neat little Twine beginning. I chose Twine because Inform7 is a beast and my experience with this project was much better spent honing narrative and choice than fighting a parser fiction tool. Also, I hate parser fiction.
Most inspired by the Art of Game Design- Story in the string of pearls model and the talk from 80 Days creator, I organized my game from the jump as a streamlined narrative where decisions did not necessarily impact what happened to you but impacted how you were taken through the challenges. The 80 Days creator led me to the idea of the inevitable end- regardless of how you interact with friends or with the teacher, your friends will come to your house and confront you. You cannot make the ‘correct’ choice, because there isn’t one. Instead, you will inevitably alienate your friends and community in one way or another simply by being offered a way out. Symbolically, this speaks immensely about the experience of living between and amongst two worlds like the American South and Stanford University. The great majority of my friends have never left the South.
A bit of intuition about play-testing and growth…
Y’all gotta let me have this one.
20–30 playtesters. Lots of feedback.
Initially, I structured my game like a novel in the beginning, and many playtesters felt like it didn’t incorporate game aspects. I totally restructured the game, forcing the player to explore the “Archives” in their high school to find out what the dystopia is. Another main source of confusion reflected the amount of knowledge that the player seemed to exhibit around their hometown. Addressing this feedback, I set the game in the last day of school, giving the character an impulse to ‘reminisce’ and introduced an NPC to emphasize the emotional impact of leaving your home behind. Another playtester noted that clicking through felt meaningless, the individual words clicked felt arbitrary to him. Thus, I went through and only used words as click-throughs when the words themselves were a location, an action, or a choice. While these changes may seem small, there are approximately twenty different smaller fixes that happened in the background (incentivizing going on side story by affecting choices, making the descriptions meaningful to the game, not feeling like there were enough choices, editing language, using smaller amounts of text, editing text styles to insinuate different voices) that led to approximately eight distinct iterations of the game.
Final thoughts…
I hope you enjoy the game! If you have any feedback, thoughts, concerns, please don’t hesitate to get in contact with me. Interactive fiction is a wonderful medium that combines two disparate but interlocked interests of mine: narrative-building and art (maybe some coding, but tbd). Thank you for taking the time to read this and check it out!