Procrastinate and Scape is a digital game based on the theme of “scaping”. For me, “to scape” from something or someone necessarily involves anxiety, as well as certain movement from particular objects or subjects to “safe” or “desired” environments. Scaping means moving with the objective of reaching a space where those objects or subjects do not longer exist or bother you and where that initial anxiety is dissipated. Procrastinate and Scape tries to convey a situation in which the player can experience the feelings that “scaping” from something entails. The game posses a tone of irony, as the action of scaping is symbolized by a college student who “avoids” daily assignments -as well as the stress that comes with them- to reach the peaceful state brought by the weekend. In this way, the player is represented by a student who tries to avoid or escape from “assignments” throughout the period of one week with the objective of being able to make it to the weekend without being “hit” by assignments.

My initial intention was to create a game that simulated the overwhelming feeling that college assignments bring to students, as well as the constant desire of escaping from them and getting to the weekend. As I was unsure about my possibilities for game design, I thought about the specific features of my game as I discovered the things I was able to create with JavaScript. I decided to set the screen as the space of the game, the student as a purple square (to convey an NYUAD narrative), and the assignments as bigger, white squares. My original idea was to have an “all-nighter” as the final goal for the player because I thought the only way in which students could be saved from a day of procrastination was a hard night.

After receiving feedback for my proposal, I changed the time-frame of the game’s space from one day to a whole week. Therefore, I also changed the goal from an all-nighter to a weekend. This variation made a lot of sense to me because I realized the initial proposal was confusing. With the objective of reaching to the weekend, the feeling of the play would change from avoiding the fact of inevitably getting to a “greater evil” by avoiding minor ones, to really escaping from all responsibilities in order to truly reach a rewarding and peaceful state.

While changing the meaning of the game was simple, I faced some challenges when trying to transform my ideas into workable code. The major ones were related to how the assignments moved and how that movement affected the meaning of the game. I wanted the assignments to gradually and continually appear on the screen until the student reached the final objective. However, in my final version of the game, the player reached a point in which no more assignments needed to be avoided – some players noticed this problem during the playtest and waited until the assignments stopped appearing for crossing the whole “week” without any inconvenience. I also asked myself about the game’s feedback for the player when being hit by an assignment, and what would that even mean. I decided to make the student “disappear” when colliding with the assignments, yet not with the meaning of “death”. I tried to transmit the feeling of imposing a re-start of the game and thus the re-start of another week and a challenge of not receiving the stress of new assignments. While unrealistic, I thought it was fun to make it that way. Furthermore, it was a challenge to find the right “speeds” for the assignments, so that the game would be both enjoyable and neither too easy or difficult.

After testing the game in class, observing how others played my game, and receiving their comments, the following changes were added. First, I included color feedback for the player once the student reached the weekend, as the square changed from purple to red. The change of color tried to relate to the changes of mood a student face when getting into the weekend, and in the case of my game, getting into the weekend without having done any assignment during the week. Second, I included a new level with increased difficulty by increasing the speed at which the assignments move. Lastly, I restricted the backward movement for the player, as in real life student can’t go “back” in time. This change helped me imitate the movement of the player through the mechanics of my game. There were other suggestions I would have liked to include such as the addition of text, the creation of a button to restart the game without reloading the page, and the implementation of more levels. Nevertheless, time and knowledge on Java-Script prevented me from implementing these features.

Overall, the process of game design evolved from the idea of wanting to transmit the feelings of anxiety and relief related to “scape” to transmitting them through a video game with crazy assignments going all over the place. As discussed on the Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies, video games can be studied as material, software and cultural artifacts at the same time. For Olli Sotamaa, all video games need to be examined as material and software artifacts as they have historicity and develop rules with meaning through a digital interface. My game is an artifact as it can be played on a computer with a working screen and its mechanisms have been developed through JavaScript code. In addition, Procrastinate and Scape is a cultural artifact because it carries embedded ideas related to the life of college students. Its meaning is particularly related to the anxiety brought by often overwhelming amounts of assignments and responsibilities that need to be finished in a week, and the relief that comes with the weekend. Also, the game is a cultural artifact because it was socially shaped and produced with constant feedback and comments from the professor, friends, and classmates.

Code:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1NUnNEoScauWuik2MSHk6iJUERzJSsVUB