2023

In Coffin Girl, the avatar is a Hispanic queer girl living in a small Louisiana town in the 1970s. She has three days to learn to defend herself from homophobic bullies and earn enough money to buy a bus ticket out of town before her mother sends her to conversion camp. Sam Kippur and Dana Benson designed the game for Rebekah Shultz Colby’s WRIT 1122 class, “The Rhetoric of Games.” They based the game on an editorial arguing that queer people need to take self-defense classes to protect themselves from hate crimes and another editorial arguing that there needs to be more diverse game development. [See the Coffin Girl walkthrough]

2021

In David Riche’s WRIT 1122 class, Ethan Baedke designed a narrative space exploration game about impossible choices. The game is designed around the trolley problem: every choice has ethical ramifications.

To play the game, you will be directed to a zip folder. Click on or run the file titled EnlighProject.exe.

2015

iMania

iMania is a clicker game designed by Jarod Takemoto, Bristi Basu, Ashton Winkelmann, and Zhaoyi Liu in Rebekah Shultz Colby’s FSEM class, fall 2015. iMania is a persuasive game designed to critique the global labor conditions for workers who create the materials needed for electronics.

ARTIST’S STATEMENT: In iMania, we tried to make a game that was cost effective but demonstrated the idea of using technology without realizing the human labor costs for its production. By creating a clicker game, we were able to present the concept through a fun and yet discreet manner. As players would play the game, they would slowly realize how their actions were affecting people. Players would realize how their actions, such as buying an iPhone, would affect the labor conditions of people around the world. [Play the game]