Josey Meyer is a senior undergraduate student at Texas A&M University, studying at Danube University Krems (Austria) this fall. She is working with four other Aggies in their educational game design program for study abroad. Previously, Josey worked at the TAMU Learning Interactive Virtual Environments (LIVE) Lab with two of her current teammates, developing art history educational games for classrooms such as ARTé: Lumiere and the upcoming ARTé: Reverie. In summer 2020, Josey interned at Blizzard Entertainment as a dungeon designer on Diablo IV and will return as an employee working on that same project upon graduation.
Reamifton North – a game about the United States Postal Service
FROG 2020 – Short Talk
Co-Authors:
Michael Black
Jared Derry
Kathryn Friesen
Montserrat Patino
(Texas A&M University)
Over the course of a semester, our team of five undergraduate Visualization students from Texas A&M University set out to create a game that explores the current political climate of the United States through the lens of the postal service. We ended up creating a prototype of Reamifton North, a resource management simulation game. You play as Cas, the new hire at the post office, and it is your job to keep the place up and running by organizing and delivering packages. In the face of a global pandemic and the 2020 U.S. presidential election, the national government took deliberate steps to sabotage the United States Postal Service (USPS). Our game is a critical response to this, which also addresses a variety of social injustices, including economic inequality, racial inequality, inadequate pandemic response, and voter suppression. Although it is currently only in the prototype stage, the full plans for the game include a story with multiple narrative paths and endings. The player would face critical decisions throughout the game that reflect events based on real-life United States politics. Gameplay becomes progressively harder as the story goes on and the post office the player works at is slowly stripped of necessary equipment as the government withdraws support. The increasingly difficult gameplay and narrative developments would aim to capture the frustration and despair felt by many people during the real-life events happening during the development of this game. Our goal was to create a game that would be representative of what is currently happening with the USPS, and the overall political climate of the United States, and to encourage the player to empathize with those most affected by these events.
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