Submerged

Submerged is a game about rising sea levels and how we can foster a healthier relationship with the ocean. A quote that inspired the game was from the reading “All We Can Save”, which states, “The climate crisis is not gender neutral. Climate change is a powerful ‘threat multiplier,’ making existing vulnerabilities and injustices worse. Especially under conditions of poverty, women and girls face greater risk of displacement or death from extreme weather disasters…Tasks core to survival, such as collecting water and wood or growing food, fall on female shoulders in many cultures.” (Johnson and Wilkinson). Our game attempts to highlight this gendered divide and bring to prominence the disproportionate effect that climate change has over women and other marginalized groups. The game also responds to a quote from “The Extractive Zone'', which claims: “In reality, the problem is far more specific: colonial capitalism has been the main catastrophic event that has gobbled up the planet’s resources, discursively constructing racialized bodies within geographies of difference, systematically destroying through dispossession, enslavement, and then producing the planet as a corporate bio-territory” (Gomez-Barris). Finally, Submerged is influenced by various artworks that include Redshift and Portalmental by micha cárdenas and Olafur Eliasson’s performance art. 

Each member of the project had a different responsibility and was able to contribute their skills and viewpoints. To begin, Karoline worked on audio. She performed with her local ecology by playing flute and piano to her recording of crashing waves. Karoline also helped record and perform the wedding shots, revised the nodes, and took the videos of the waves crashing onto the camera. 

Victoria helped develop and expand the story by taking our basic plot skeleton and fleshing it out with descriptive writing and incorporating overarching ideas into our story. She also coded the visual aspect of the nodes by adding text animations, background images, different fonts and colors, and coding the sentences to appear in a timed order. Victoria also helped film the wedding scene and with overall twine editing. 

Marlene performed and recorded her own performances and helped expand the storyline about the player and their daughter, Luna. 

Marlene, Victoria, and Karoline worked on the storyline that branches from the “reconnect with nature” choice. 

Adam co-conceived the idea to a storyline based around a fight scene. The idea came from wanting to incorporate a fight and to have a smaller story branch off from another part of the story. He later went on to co-write the fight scene storyline with Max and have it fit in with the overall story. In addition, he also helped with the filming of the wedding shots, performed in the fight scene and decided what nodes to place some of the performance videos. 

Maximilian co-conceived the fight scene storyline. Originally it began with just observing two oversized branches laying on the beach and from it spawned the idea to make a scene using those two objects. One filming was completed, I collaborated with Adam in order to produce a branching narrative path for our story which involved a neighboring village who came into conflict with the village which acts as the starting point in our story. However, after meeting with our group, we decided to merge the branch into the main story. Max also helped with filming, performing, editing, idea generation, and project management.