Author: Pratyush

Read my essay here.

I had no difficulty starting the essay the way it was structured. I actually thought that it was a better way to write essays, even if the pattern was not the same. I first thought about things that I wanted to speak about in my essay and then I tried to figure out how it had shaped the two games and their journey overcoming trauma. Instead of playing the entire game by myself, I played both games as much as I could before I got stuck at one point trying to overcome an obstacle for a long time. I decided that watching a walkthrough of both games on YouTube, where I could actually concentrate on the characters itself rather than figuring out what to do next and it would be more efficient as I could change the playback speed. The only shortcoming to this way was that I could not stop at one place, look around and just admire the beauty of both Gris and Firewatch, which were games with excellent visuals that even helped in some character development. 

Instead of writing about the things that we discussed I based my entire essay on how I thought this game and the story it was trying to tell us through the course of the game. In doing so I actually had some trouble organizing my ideas and tried to make it not repetitive, but after spending some time just jotting down ideas and then structuring it made me happy with my end result. 

In India, the majority of the population is under the poverty line, nevertheless those who weren’t, also suffered because of the pandemic and the fact that lockdown begun so early in India, that almost no one was able to work for five-six months. For very few it was blessing in disguise depending on the jobs they had they could work from home and spend more time with their family, however, for the daily wage earners and small-scale businesses it was nothing short of a curse. They couldn’t be bothered less about Covid-19, they were dying from hunger and the shortage of money. So, we concluded that the issues that people faced, to some extent, would be the issues people faced in other part of the counties as well, so we decided that we should make a twine game where there were three people from three different parts of the society (lower, middle, and upper class) just to provide what kind of problems they might have faced. Everyone had some kind of trouble no matter how big or small it might look to us. Another thing we tried to address was the fact that- “The problems that seem small to us might be someone’s biggest concern.” For example, Rebecca, our lower socioeconomic class character, always had a shortage of cash and had to literally move to an unsafe neighborhood just to save money on rent so she could survive through the pandemic, while Crest, our upper socioeconomic class character, had no shortage of money and his biggest concern was to either remain in his penthouse in NYC or move to his mansion in the Hamptons. We wanted to add more to the game like meters but since none of us on our team knew coding in JavaScript we just included it in our presentation that we would like to add meters like money, physical/Covid, and mental health meters that would also be able to display all states of mind and body and in general just talk more about the character’s state. 

Check out our game here.

In India, the majority of the population is under the poverty line, nevertheless those who weren’t, also suffered because of the pandemic and the fact that lockdown begun so early in India, that almost no one was able to work for five-six months. For very few it was blessing in disguise depending on the jobs they had they could work from home and spend more time with their family, however, for the daily wage earners and small-scale businesses it was nothing short of a curse. They couldn’t be bothered less about Covid-19, they were dying from hunger and the shortage of money. So, we concluded that the issues that people faced, to some extent, would be the issues people faced in other part of the counties as well, so we decided that we should make a twine game where there were three people from three different parts of the society (lower, middle, and upper class) just to provide what kind of problems they might have faced. Everyone had some kind of trouble no matter how big or small it might look to us. Another thing we tried to address was the fact that- “The problems that seem small to us might be someone’s biggest concern.” For example, Rebecca, our lower socioeconomic class character, always had a shortage of cash and had to literally move to an unsafe neighborhood just to save money on rent so she could survive through the pandemic, while Crest, our upper socioeconomic class character, had no shortage of money and his biggest concern was to either remain in his penthouse in NYC or move to his mansion in the Hamptons. We wanted to add more to the game like meters but since none of us on our team knew coding in JavaScript we just included it in our presentation that we would like to add meters like money, physical/Covid, and mental health meters that would also be able to display all states of mind and body and in general just talk more about the character’s state. 

Check out our game here.

In the last episode of our podcast we decided to go with Catan. We always wanted to do Catan but couldn’t in the last episode as we had some time constraints. We wanted to do a podcast on Catan because I think most people that play Catan love it from the first game, however, what many don’t realize is that the fact that the game has another side to it. This game involves a lot of brain work and strategizing about building settlements, which we thought was a really cool thing to tell people about as well as analyzing. I had never played Catan online, so it was quite a challenge as the game is much better when played in-person. We really had a tough time figuring out the emulator but after finally figuring out certain rules we played it. 

Strangely even though we thought that we had a lot of stuff to analyze, we couldn’t really figure out how to move forward with it as some of the ideas we had were essentially kind of repetitions. We played the game again and brainstormed with Professor, so after a few discussions we came up with ideas and talking points. We framed it in a proper way and came up with different things to talk about. Then, we finally prepared a script and recorded it to finish our podcast series. 

Listen to it here.