who's up for some extremely bleak roleplay?
who's up for some extremely bleak roleplay?
So here’s a very provocative project you may have missed if you took a summer Friday ( officially or emotionally; both count) before the weekend, but Study Hall* published this choose-your-own-adventure simulation called Off the Record, written by Farah Mohammed and designed by Mary Truong.
Essentially, the project invites you to role-play as a journalist of color, and you’re given these everyday work situations that you have to navigate, and it soon becomes apparent just how many tiny, invisible-seeming calculations you have to make while dealing with even the most innocuous scenarios, like deciding whether to speak up at an ordinary pitch meeting or figuring out when to arrive for your flight to the conference. Spoiler alert, except not really: It gets bleak, fast.
At first blush, the concept can read as kind of cheesy or potentially ham-fisted (it’s being carefully billed as “an interactive narrative” and not a “game,” which I think is prudent; anyone who recognizes these hypothetical scenarios from their own experiences will be able to tell you this is not exactly fucking Yahtzee), but the execution is clever, thoughtful, and rather representative of the range of issues BIPOC media workers face — for example, as a woman of East Asian descent, I could assume I’d get through airport security quickly, but I definitely couldn’t assume I’d skate into a conference event without proper ID.
It’s the gradations of the mental gymnastics involved that make this so interesting, and feeling them pile up will leave you feeling exhausted and jaded at the end, especially if you go back and try to game out a “successful” path. It’s alllllmost too depressing to “play,” but I would personally absolutely put up some money to be able to watch some real world Rhyses and Schuylers try this out and be like ????????um wow why is this so hard????????
* Disclaimer, Deez Links partners with Study Hall to do the Media Classifieds, so safe to say that we’re like buddies?