Coming Out Simulator 2014

Coming Out Simulator 2014
Screenshot
Developer(s) Nicky Case
Platform(s) Web browsers
Release
  • WW: 1 July 2014 (2014-07-01)
Mode(s) Single-player

Coming Out Simulator 2014 is an interactive fiction video game made by Canadian developer Nicky Case. The semi-autobiographical game was released on 1 July 2014 as a submission for the Nar8 Game Jam.[1][2]

Inspired by real-life events, Coming Out Simulator 2014 is intended to help LGBT youth to understand their sexuality. The game teaches what happens in conversations about coming out. According to Case's writing in the game itself, there are "no right answers."[2]

Gameplay

Case talking to the player at the beginning of the game.

The player is initially introduced into the game by the creator himself, and is made aware that they will play the role of a younger Case and be faced with decisions and events that may or may not have happened in his own life. The player must choose a selection of responses to say in conversation with other characters, in a user interface deliberately stylized to look like a instant messaging application. The characters in Coming Out Simulator respond to the choices of the player.

Kotaku reported that Case presented the game as a crossover between The Walking Dead and text messaging, and Case himself concurs with this description.[3] The game takes fifteen to twenty minutes to complete.[3]

Plot

The player meets Nicky Case, the author of this game, in a Starbucks coding. Case introduces himself and explains that the game he is working on, while it is based on their life experiences, is "100% lies", and will be 100% even if the dialogue were 100% true. The game flashes back to a night during dinner in 2010. The player controls the dialogue, selecting from one of three options, knowing that every word they say will be remembered; they can either choose to aggressively pursue their coming out to homophobic parents, lie to keep their relationship secret, or "gradually hint at it" (i.e. Nicky's bisexuality). Depending on the player's choice of dialogue several alterations to the ending may occur: e.g. Nicky's mother forces him to change schools, his father grounds him for apparently trivial remarks, and/or Nicky gets punched in the face. In all versions, the player has no control over Nicky's fate as his mother finds out about his relationship with a boyfriend and sets up a female tutor for him, ostensibly to help Nicky study but more importantly in an attempt to change his sexuality; his relationship ends three day later. Back in the present, Nicky outlines three different possible aftermaths to the story: the lie, in which he runs away to the North Pole and finds acceptance among a new family of LGBT animals; the half-truth, in which Nicky finds that the tutor is also bisexual and befriends her, sharing their experiences as "bisexual sluts"; and the truth, which is that Case had moved to the more LGBT-friendly San Francisco Bay Area to pursue his game-developing career, distancing himself from his homophobic parents. Case remarks that in all three scenarios "It Gets Better™", and that in the end "he won." Nicky's new lover then arrives to pick him up and carry him off the scene as the game ends.

Development

Nicky Case cites Anna Anthropy's Dys4ia, a short Flash game about gender transition, as a source of inspiration for this game.[4] Coming Out Simulator was created in two weeks for the Nar8 Game Jam.[1][4]

Events in the game are inspired by the author's own experience of coming out four years before the game's release.[4] Case wanted to revisit this dark period of his life and tried to express a similar story with deep feelings in a video game.[3] The game is created to be played on web browsers, using JavaScript and CSS; graphics were prepared using Adobe Flash.[5]

The game and its source code have been made public domain software by its developer with the Unlicense.

Reception

Metro Weekly describes the game as "a thoughtful, sometimes funny, often heartfelt exploration of one man's own struggle to be himself" and praises its programming.[6]

In an interview by Complex magazine, Case indicated that he had received "a lot of really touching responses" not only from queer people but also from people living through other difficult familial situation.[4] Coming Out Simulator 2014 was nominated to the Independent Games Festival's 2015 edition in the "Excellence in Narrative" category.[Note 1][7]

Notes

  1. ↑ 80 Days was the festival winner in this category.

References

  1. 1 2 "Nar8 Jam - itch.io". itch.io. Retrieved 11 January 2015.
  2. 1 2 Takahashi, Dean (11 July 2014). "Games for LGBT audience are finally hitting the market". VentureBeat.
  3. 1 2 3 LeJacq, Yannick (14 July 2014). "A Video Game That Really Gets What It Means To Come Out". Kotaku.
  4. 1 2 3 4 Turner, Gus (22 July 2014). "Interview: Indie Game Developer Nicky Case Discusses "Coming Out Simulator" and the LGBTQ Community's Relationship With Gaming". Complex. Complex.
  5. ↑ Nutt, Christian (11 February 2015). "Road to the IGF: Coming Out Simulator 2014". Gamasutra. Retrieved 11 January 2017.
  6. ↑ Marr, Rhuaridh (11 July 2014). "You need to play "Coming Out Simulator 2014"". www.metroweekly.com. Metro Weekly. Retrieved 11 January 2017.
  7. ↑ "2015". IGF. Retrieved 11 January 2017.
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