Elevators

This is a Twine game I made for an interactive narrative class. The game is about navigating a bureaucratic hellscape in an elevator. This was made in a rush (mostly out of my own poor time planning), so it is unfinished and janky. The biggest thing that I should've done was make the actual elevator more of a hassle to use, but instead, I focused on adding actual content to the floors (and even then they are somewhat sparse). I still think the core idea is cool, and I will definitely reuse ideas from this in future projects.

My original design statement:

I really like elevators. To me, they’re this weird form of transportation that we use daily, but we don’t feel like we’re moving. As we ride an elevator, we logically know that we are travelling in a manner no different than a train or a car, but unlike a train or a car, with its windows and gentle reminders of friction, an elevator gives the sensation of simply being a room. Due to the lack of any stimuli during its smooth movement, using an elevator feels like being locked in a closet, sometimes with strangers, sometimes alone. It's the only form of transportation that has its own music genre. I love it. More media needs to have long, drawn out elevator scenes.

So now that I have decided that I want to make an interactive narrative, more specifically a game, that is centered around elevators. But I want there to be choices, because just sitting in an elevator for 30 minutes doesn’t sound fun (and would completely fly in the face of this class), so I need things to do. What situation would prompt someone to take an elevator 50 times in a row? Paying a utility bill. In person. In a terribly managed office building. So the play, who is our protagonist, needs to follow the whims of whichever crazed madman working in this office they choose. The game will be about taking an elevator up and down floors, fetching required documents and items for middlemen, while trying to decipher their incomprehensible instructions like a puzzle.

The world that this building is constructed in is an anarchist country on Mars. I’m using this idea of a society where people organize themselves freely without self serving power structures because it's new to me, and I’ve never seen any media that presented an anarchist culture until like 6 months ago (when I read Chomsky’s On Anarchism and Le Guin’s The Dispossessed). I also really like the idea that this country has gone through a million governments, and that the result of this is a complex web of bureaucracy that operates as its own living entity. None of these departments have greater systems that support them, instead people still staff them because of tradition and that they’re needed services. This leads to a kafkaesque world that pairs the mundane with the weird.