Play the game at the link below:
https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/824856526
- Maker: Courtney Rosenthal
- Genre: Manifesto
- Level: Graduate
- Program: Composition, Rhetoric, and Digital Media
- Course: WRIT 5340: Studies in Multimodality and Digital Media
- Instructor: Dr. Eric Mason
- Semester Created: Winter 2023
In designing my “choose your adventure” game, I based it around the main principles of absurdism. Absurdism is an existential philosophy that asserts that life is devoid of any meaning. Traditional absurdist narratives often serve to disorient the reader, infused with irregular situations that highlight the insignificance of our being. I took influence from these narratives, especially those found in the work of Albert Camus, and immersed players in an absurdist world. Player’s find themselves standing alone in a barren desert, forced to make choices as to navigate their way through this wasteland. They have the chance to encounter a talking snake, a group of babbling individuals wearing animal masks, or trudge their way through the desert alone. Each choice they make guides them down a different pathway, although, regardless of the path they take, they will have to face the resounding fact that “life is meaningless.” There are three possible endings, all equally absurd and none “better” than the other. As players advance through the game, they begin to encounter the same situation multiple times, trapped in a state of cyclicality – a homage to Sisyphus, one of the most popular absurdist figures.
Inspired by the TED talk we watched for class (linked below) that put forth the importance of coding and introduced the Scratch platform, I constructed this game on Scratch, not using any templates as to challenge myself to learn the intricacies of coding technologies. I followed some tutorials I found online as to learn the basic features of the platform and then used this knowledge to make the game. Each “sprite” had to be coded with a different pathway that would align with what button the player chose, and then I had to send out a “broadcast” that would make them disappear and reappear when needed. I was particularly proud that I was able to make the game buttons glow when the cursor hovered over them! I thought that a “gamified” manifesto would subvert the genre as a whole, given that it is typically a print-based and merely outlines the tenets the author wishes to put forth. My goal was that a “gamified” version of the manifesto would “stimulate some or all the human senses by engaging users in an environment that perceptually surrounds them” (Doumanis et al. 121) and thus immerse the player in an absurdist world that put forth the main tenets of its followers. Additionally, I pushed back against the “choose your adventure” genre in disregarding the players choices, making each ending equal and oftentimes making different buttons lead down the same path.
Works Cited
Doumanis, Ioannis, et al. “The Impact of Multimodal Collaborative Virtual Environments on Learning: A Gamified Online Debate.” Computers & Education, vol. 130, 2019, pp. 121–138., https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2018.09.017.
“Reading, Writing, and Programming: Mitch Resnick at Tedxbeaconstreet.” YouTube, YouTube, 17 Jan. 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42_30Rgf6F0.
