COVID-19 — a deadly disease that has taken over the world and required everyone to stay within the safe confines of their homes. In response to this, researchers and students from the EPFL College of Humanities (CDH) and UNIL Gamelab collaborated with the Initiative for Media Innovation (IMI) and Le Temps to create an interactive game showing what the past few months have been like as we all isolated ourselves in our houses.
Countless questions and worries go through our head on a daily basis, such as “How do you stay entertained?” or “How can I stay focused as I work from home?” Most of us haven’t seen our friends in a while, nor have we had physical contact just to try and stay safe.
In order to explore and find the answers to our questions, researcher Yannick Rochat believed that a narrative game would be the perfect medium, showing the various ways different struggle and how they respond to it. Rochat states:
“Video games can convey information as well as emotions. The idea behind this game is to have a testimony to this period in history that has impacted us all. For a newspaper like Le Temps and for a researcher like myself, it is important to document and keep an account of these experiences.”
On August 20, 2020, Rochat and his team composing of graphic designers, programmers, and the like, released Quatre Apparts et un Confinement or Four Condos and a Containment. This is a series of choose-your-own-adventure stories that act out the lives of fictional neighbors as they live in solitude.
The game was developed around June and July 2020 with the cooperation of Andrew Dobis (EPFL student), Paul Ronga (Le Temps journalist), Saara Jones (UNIL student), Mathias Hängärtner (graphic designer), and Mounir Krichane (IMI Director).
The game is easy enough to understand, albeit it is in French. All you have to do is click through the different apartments and engage in the lives of each character. You will bear witness to their worries, their frustrations, and other emotional turmoil they may be experiencing during this difficult time. You might even be able to relate to some of the characters.
The game currently has an open-source code, so the creators are inviting others to publish the game into other languages as well, so that more people will be able to experience this one-of-a-kind game.
