Your Money Or Your Life (2020)
This is a short interactive narrative I made during the Covid shutdown to showcase the challenges of living with high risk family members while deciding to continue working as a store cashier.
My Role
I created this short narrative using Twine. I researched current events, laws and provisions passed in March and April of 2020 both local to the selected setting and nationally to develop a story showing the challenges and fundamental errors of not providing a way to either work safely when living with people who are at high risk of serious complications from the virus and being able to support your family.
Lessons Learned
The Power of Twine
Although it can seem basic, Twine is a great engine for branching narratives because it allows for the creating on variables and different states. In many other tools that I've used, some of the branching paths were unnecessarily complex because there was no way to implement basic variables.
Games that Promote Empathy
Even with just basic text, games can have the power to transport us to different lived experiences. This can help illuminate problems that exist in our society. I wanted to create this simple game to better understand the holes shown in our social safety net due to the coronavirus pandemic. A pandemic is a unique challenge for a society based on individual willpower. It makes us re-evaluate the need to keep each other safe, to stop the spread and to re-think what "go it alone" thinking can prevent us from understanding about gaps in economic and social systems.