HomelessGame
“Homeless Game” by 3CeraTops Studios is a speculative asymmetrical side-scrolling platformer game with elements of choice and consequence, set in a dynamic and evocative gameworld environment.
Homelessness is an increasingly viscerally visual issue, be it the people or the campaigns against or for said people, their place in our society of collective infrastructure, and how they live and impact this space. The visual nature makes it not only a hot-button issue that’s easy to identify as critical but also likely to present itself as a common sight in the lives of many, inevitably leading to the internalization of ideas and explanations, since this is the human way of making sense. (Iser on Honneth, 2019)
By compelling the player to analyze the cause and effect relationship between their actions in the first phase of the game, and how they impact the second stage specifically, our design will facilitate speculation upon the system and dynamics of the world at large, that our game attempts to mimic.
Phase 1 of our game mimics processes of power in a modern democratic society, exemplifying how your decisions aren’t “directly” considered by representatives in a pool of social discourse from different groupings, sharing views of political topics. However, essential in democracy is that every voice and vote still counts. Actual change can then only be exercised, should enough voices gather the strength to formulate a collective that becomes large enough, to the point where it cannot be ignored any longer. Our game will compel the individual to realize their own, however minuscule, role in this larger but very disconnected process.
Phase 2 is a follow-up, helping players connect their intentionality and decisions from the ivory tower to concrete structures of society and how decisions and their background, namely the understandings about the world and its people that precede them, can have very impact consequences as “lived” or played by the player, assuming the role of someones whose plight it is to survive in a setting wherein decisions around the liveableness of that setting, has been determined by larger political influences and forces.
Our goal is not to discourage the player from exercising their agency as a result of finding themselves incapable or inconsequential, but rather to empower them to realize that their voice is equally important, no matter if it's within a soundscape of many. Our game will accomplish this feat, by connecting the actions of the player to the (game)world at large, thereby illuminating the fact that they do possess the ability to exert impactful action, and more importantly, what could result if they don’t, and whether they would really like the society that follows.
