Why Did a Think Tank Make a Text-Based Game?

There are “spoilers” below, so we recommend you play through the experience first.

At the Better Life Lab, we see immersive and interactive media as essential to our culture-change mission. Our interest in such projects is twofold. First, we want to reach audiences that may not engage with legacy media or scholarship but could be drawn in by a media experience. Second, we recognize that immersive and interactive media can uniquely shape our perspectives and attitudes. Investing time and resources into new media requires good judgment—it can be too easy to get caught up in shiny tech and short-lived trends otherwise. However, while reviewing our director Brigid Schulte’s notes from her interviews with Kiarica Schields, we recognized that an interactive project could emphasize parts of her story that a written case study could not.

something else came up is a choice-based interactive experience highlighting the denial of agency and how it traps people in poverty. While the choices appear abundant, your environment and material circumstances create seemingly infinite barriers. Navigating around these barriers is time-consuming and reduces access to opportunities to build a better life.

The barriers in this project were pulled directly from Kiarica Schields’ real life, and by including them, we hope to prompt a sense of “empathetic unsettlement.” We’re not trying to make you identify with Schields, walk a mile in her shoes, or experience the exact emotions that she did. It’s difficult to pull that off, and I’ve argued that it’s inherently dangerous and unproductive to do so—primarily in an internal-use-only debrief of Tribeca Film Festival’s immersive section in 2023. But the short version of my stance is: You never know who is coming in to engage with your experience, and what provokes strong emotions for one person could provoke severe emotional dysregulation in someone else.

As storytellers, we shouldn’t be hurting people in our audience just to make our point. Also, these triggering experiences don’t create long-term attitude change anyway. Strong and unpleasant emotions encourage people do one-off things right now, like donating money. You can’t shift someone’s perspective long-term if they’re too locked into fight-or-flight to access those big-picture thoughts.

Instead, we hope that you can experience related emotions in a safe and contained manner and, therefore, better understand the day-to-day reality for families like Schields’. Feeling discouraged as option after option disappears on the game’s main menu won’t make you understand Schields, but perhaps it can provide a little more insight into her experiences. This was our primary goal while we were designing something else came up. As scholar Bo Ruberg writes, “More valuable than a video game that allows players to [identify] with someone else is a game that requires players to respect the people with whom they cannot identify.”