The most important thing to us was to use the mechanics to allow the player to compare and contrast each character’s public vs. private self. The voyeurism of the AR scenes allows us to observe how the characters act when speaking to each other in a group, versus when speaking to each other in isolation, or how they behave when entirely on their own.
I think video games like pieces of art can find the Waldos that society sometimes cannot, and also, I think maybe the developers want us to think about why they do certain things in video games. I think a way to dismantle these kinds of racial stigmas in games would just be, for starters, to have a main character that is a person of color.
I think Roberta Williams and her team probably did a great job at the time of including so many different representations of women. It just gets back to that issue of representation vs. agency, like in some of the conversations about what’s coming out of Hollywood.
Maybe the common denominator of my work is the question of making livable, meaningful lives for ourselves. We tend to think that’s the goal, but just how possible or achievable is it? Is it better to travel and enjoy oneself, or to devote oneself to a worthy vocation?
I think about certain things differently because I played so many video games. The Harvest Moon games influenced how I conceptualize life in general and especially making and spending money, a topic I’m still obsessed with today. Every time I do anything even remotely adventurous, I pretend I’m Lara Croft from Tomb Raider.
We think video games are literature, and so why shouldn't there be literature about video games? That's the question we're hoping to answer here. Read more.
