As stated by John Sharp in his “Works of Game”, games have the possibility of producing meaning and experience. In the class Games and Play, we used this idea and the theme of “disruption” to create a game for our final project. As a group, we started brainstorming on different ideas that could asses meaning through a digital or analog disruptive game. While trying to choose an idea, we thought about the concept of choice and how sometimes the choices that make rational sense do not produce ethical outcomes. As such, we decided we wanted to work with the story of the Homestead Act to create our game.

Brenda Brathwaite describes de design process of her game “The Passage” on her TED Talk “Games for a Change” and how games can save the world. Inspired by her words as well as by Brenda Romero’s “Train”, we intended to create a digital decision-making game with the Homestead Act in the center of the plot. Therefore, The Choice is a game where the player makes different decisions that seem rational and personally beneficial but when reaching the end, the player realizes that he/she was part of a devastating event in human history. I believe the game is disruptive because of the following reasons. By offering the player the opportunity to both witness and perform narrative events, we provide a framework to think about what could have happened in history if the decisions were taken in a different way. Although we give certain hints during the game, the player needs to reach the end to know the final outcome of its decisions. As such, we could ask if their actions would be different if they knew their effects from the beginning and if they would have intended to disrupt history with their decisions. In addition, the decision-making game is disrupted by the end, which provides an unexpected turn by revealing the final result of the decisions.

For us, choices are a way to disrupt the course of history. For that reason, we tried to convey the player with a story based on a decision-making historical game told in the third person by using simple 2D design in Adobe Animate and Adobe Illustrator. Our main challenge was to create a story that could convey our initial intentions. The story has a main character, John, who lives a difficult life yet has many dreams for the future. We wanted the player to empathize with John by giving details about his personal and love life. From the beginning, the player has to make decisions that would affect the life of the character as for instance the kind of job that he should have. That is how he meets another character, Sophia, who also struggles -specifically with the relationship with her father. The story tells that there are opportunities in the West and asks how should they both travel, what should they plant, how should they interact with the individuals they meet, etc. Therefore, the game doesn’t give the player the option to stay in the East or not, but rather focuses on the details of the characters’ trip to the West. We decided to do this because we wanted the story to end in one particular way, as in the game “Train”, in this case with the displacement of the Native Americans. Similarly, although there are various questions in the game that lead to decisions, most of these decisions do not make significant changes to the course of the story. We decided to do so for the same reason. However, we designed the game with very few hints of what was happening so that the player did not notice this aspect of our design process. The few hints that we included, as the appearance of “Dakota”, intended to conduce to an “aha moment” at the end of the game. We also decided to use different slides with a mixture of old pictures and graphs that provided an ambiguous yet pleasant aesthetic for the game. We included a soundtrack that was intended to transport the player to the epoch, and we chose to not include a melancholic song but rather one that keeps the player active and wanting to know what would happen next. We believed this decision would contribute to the game’s ambiguity. We thought that if we were to put another type of audio, we would give clear hints on our last message -especially to the ones already familiarized with the Homestead Act.

Throughout the process of building the final working version of the digital game “The Choice”, we faced several limitations. For instance, our initial idea was to tell the story in third person but with the name of the player. We wanted to ask the player at the beginning of the game for his/her name and with the code tailor the story and its character to have the name of the player. We thought that this would make the game feel more personal and connected to the character. However, we were not able to implement this idea because the slides were created with Illustrator rather than with code as Adobe Animate does not provide an option for aesthetic design of backgrounds. During the playtest, we were given the same idea that the one we initially thought of, yet also told that one of the strengths of our game was the graphic design. Thus we decided to keep the game in that way. One suggestion was to change the type of questions asked in the slides, by turning them from third to first person. Unfortunately, we were not able to produce this change due to time constraints and the fact that the illustrations made were personalized for each slide, however, we value the feedback and consider it for a future version of the game.

A player who familiarized with the Act mentioned not feeling guilty for what happened at the end. Perhaps the factor of familiarity conducted to this type of perception, but I am still satisfied with her comment. The initial intended meaning of our game was to make players understand that although daily life decisions seem perfectly rational and beneficial for ourselves, they could be affecting others and a larger group of people without us noticing it. We see these effects when the events already happen and the decisions have been made, but we are always able to learn from mistakes and try to be more conscious of our actions’ effects the next time. This is the meaning that we tried to convey. As such, it is noteworthy that although we had an intention regarding the meaning of the game, we did not want to control or determine what it means for each player. For some, it can be educational or a “review” of a history class. For others, it can be a path to discover one important event in history, a new way to reflect on the effects of daily life’s decisions, or an aesthetically pleasant escape from the decisions of “real life” by choosing things that are not normally available or socially accepted -such as taking a gun with you, traveling with a horse, or even killing an animal.

As stated by Sharp, “ideas” are an important component of games with meaning. Our main idea was to convey the message that it is in our hands to disrupt the course of history with our decisions and that we don’t have to wait until it is too late.