Intertwined: Intersectionality and Entertainment
It was perhaps one of the toughest, and most fulfilling project I had been on.Our client was Stephan Caspar, the director of Askwith Kenner Global Languages and Cultures Room, a room dedicated to games, education and art that deals with social issues and language learning, all the while embracing mult-culturalism as its core element. It’s a wonderful space, and the interactive games and documentaries go beyond a desktop, mouse and keyboard to the latest VR headsets, and even a CAVE(Cave Automatic Virtual Environment).
We were asked to create an experience that would live in that CAVE that deals with social identity and intersectionality.
Designing and making games is what we do. But to create a game that could be socially provocative, and have it installed for it to run for years to come? That was a new challenge.
Throughout the ideation process, we got down as a team and did several exercises to help us get a better understanding of our own social identitise. One that stood out to us was a card game, “Where Should We Begin” by Esther Perel, which contained questions, sometimes provocative, that would invite us to sharing perosnal stories; stories that are not polished and dramatized, but real and resonant.
It was at this point when I was reminded once again, that people like to talk about themselves.
There is joy, and even euphoric aspect to sharing one’s personal story. It puts you in a vulnerable place, and yet it is that vulnerability that brings you closer to the people around you. And during these exercises, I quickly learned that it is true of the reverse as well. Listening to stories invited me to embrace the speaker’s vulnerability, and for a moment, our project room became a sacred ground of trust.
Sense of trust goes both ways, and it is the foundational element in a lot of our personal social interactions. The real challenge of this project then, was to establish that sense of trust between the guest, and our experience.
It took playtest after playtest and iteration after iteration, coupled with deep sighs and slices of sweet cake that we delivered our complete experience, called Intertwined.
The idea was to use a vintage rotary-dial telephone, through which a pre-recorded voice would interact with the guests, asking deeply personal quesitons. With the guests’ consent, we would record their responses, store them in our database, which could be accessed by any of our guests at the end of the experience by dialing up a number that corresponded to a specific question. This action would pull up a random response to the question which the guests could listen to, and guests could spend as long or as short as they wished in the room.
The vintage telephone struck us as a natural choice for the input device. Its function is quite clear, and the physical behavior that it affords(the way people cup their hand around the microphone, the way people press their ear against the speaker) seemed like a perfect physical representation of the game we wished to create. A space where you could be vulnerable. A private channel with just you, and your listener.
Everything we made, including the visuals, the ambient sound, the dialogue and even the physical props, were designed to reinforce that sense of trust. That this was a space where vulnerability was welcomed.
The wonderful thing about the project was that we had designed it to grow over time. As it records more and more guests and more and more stories, it would become an archive of real stories, much like the virtual archive scenary we made for the experience.
There were those who spent most of their time talking about their family. That was great. There were those who just wanted to listen in. And that was okay too.
I left this project with a deeper appreciation for the kind of impact a digital interactive entertainment could have.