Devlog 2: Pitching a Game

As I suspected, being able to translate my research topic into a game was a difficult task. This problem I faced was due to the nature of the topic itself: racial injustice in conjunction to the western film industry. While an important topic, when wanting to express it on a medium as a form of both education and entertainment, you have to have a high level of sensitivity and understanding of the issue. Pitching a game that borders the insensitivity many other games and media withhold would be counterintuitive to the solutions I’ve established after research.

In order to overcome this, I began doing research on other games that were able to address issues surrounding racial injustice or any issue for that matter, in order to gauge how they were able to successfully deliver their message in the form of a video game. I found that many games that were praised for their portrayal of certain issues often had an underlying narrative through the simulation of a certain job. For example, in the game Tales of a Mortician, while players were in the shoes of a mortician simulating activities such as embalmment, they would also be immersed into a narrative that can elicit certain feelings surrounding death. This extra step of research I did really helped to create potential mechanics for the game while also delivering that intended message. Creating the pitch itself became relatively straightforward after this and helped to create that overall vision that I struggled with establishing before.

Unfortunately, during the time of presentations, I was indisposed for a couple of weeks and was unable to deliver that pitch to the rest of the class. Nonetheless, I am glad to have gone through the process of creating a pitch for potential forms of documentation preceding this course and my group’s project.