Panem Today, Panem Tomorrow, Panem Forever in Our World
Katniss raises her bow and lets loose an arrow, blowing a Capitol hovercraft out of the air. As it crashes into a second craft and they plummet to ground, the screen bursts into flames, and then: the Mockingjay logo over black. We watch this in the theater at the end of a trailer, Panem sees this at the end of a rebel propaganda short—a propo. The Hunger Games reflects a darker version of our own future, but our world reflects Panem right back.
Young Adult dystopian fiction is not a rare genre to find. Divergent, The Chemical Garden, Delirium, Uglies, Unwind, Chaos Walking, the list goes on. There are a vast array of reasons young adults connect with dystopian fiction. Give them a world they can see coming in their own future, a land destroyed by those before them, rules that tear away their agency, adults who would manipulate them, and yet give them the strength to grow, to change the narrative of their world for the better.
By wiping away the tedious normalcy of our lives now and exaggerating the things that already make life harder for everyone such as surveillance, media bias, body autonomy, and more, YA dystopian literature manages to not only distill issues in our present, but warn of future problems.
Mountain Sound | One
Mist wraps around the mountains like a thick cloak, stained grey-pink with early morning light. There’s an unnatural stillness in the air, the heavy silence that comes from the sudden absence of human life. In the distance is a massive downed ship, smouldering still in the distance; a dead, metal behemoth so like just another mountain on the horizon.
A bleat breaks through the silence, then another, and another still. Shadows move behind a curtain of fog, until the pale tendrils peel away from a grassy outcropping where the dark shapes manifest into a flock of sheep. In the midst is a faceless guardian, standing against the bitter breeze with a branch-turned-staff clasped in one cold hand while a velvet face, haloed with frosted breath, nuzzles the other.
Bloom; a Game About Surviving
When you have a chronic illness, it starts to become the core of your being. It becomes hard to not let your illness define you, to actually live a life. It also becomes hard to explain your experiences to your healthy friends and family and I’m somewhat glad that I have friends with similar experiences for support (though I am not thankful they also have to live with these struggles.)
I’m not sure when I first heard about the interactive narrative tool, Twine, but from the start I had a feeling that, as someone who wants to get into game narrative, it was the kind of thing I’d want to experiment with. My first idea was based around chronic illness, and trying to illustrate what life is when you have one.
And so, I created Bloom.
