us & them

Do you trust your neighbour? We challenge you to survive the night, as you help the main character complete his house chores and fulfill his human needs.  

Description: 

This game was created as part of the ‘Game Jam for culture’ held by EPIC-WE. The main theme for the Game jam was “That’s not fair!”. Further we were asked to find inspiration in the cultural heritage exhibited at AROS and one of EU’s official values.

We wanted to challenge our tendency to distrust strangers who we don’t immediately relate to or understand. Distance is created between us and the other person. As we let this distrust grow, it is almost like we come to villainize the other person. We forget an important human quality -  the capacity for empathy and understanding. In relation to this, we wanted to explore how the human dignity of the other person is affected by the warped perception we put on them? What are the repercussions? 

Our game draws inspiration from the installation piece “Dawn Hours in the Neighbour’s house” by Pipilotti Rist from 2005, displayed at AROS in Aarhus. It’s an immersive piece, inviting us to situate ourselves inside the world of the neighbour. The installation piece plays on our different senses to allude to this, but particularly sounds. The room is situated within its own time loop. A day lasts 8 minutes in the space of the artwork. 

Like the installation, our game is centered around the neighbor and our relation to them. However we’ve taken the oddity of the installation and transformed it into an eerie and creepy atmosphere in the game. The player gets through the night by fulfilling all tasks and needs of the main character while keeping him sane by spying on his neighbor. As the perceived threat meter goes up, the imagination and thoughts of the main character escalates into a distorted reality. Through the horror genre, we wanted to make the act of villainizing or ‘othering’ the neighbour character, feel uncomfortable and creepy.