Balloon Diaspora - Cardboard Computer

Last fall, I saw a talk by the artist Erik Peterson. Erik is developing a video
game called "Qeej Hero," which is sort of a "Guitar Hero" clone that
replaces the guitar with the qeej, a reed instrument played by the Hmong
people.
Erik's description of his research and development process, meeting young
and old Hmong and Hmong-American people and learning about their
culture & how their community lives in diaspora left me with a lot to think
about.
I thought & read a lot about diaspora as a social/cultural/economic
phenomenon. I also came across an article about family therapy that
recognized the kind of diasporic structure of many modern families
(particularly American families). This has been my experience growing up in
America as well -- moving away from home (and often even to a new city)
seems like an almost inevitable coming of age ritual here, and our
understanding of "family" has come to reflect that.
But I was also very struck by Erik's description of his experience engaging
the Hmong-American community & culture -- a culture in many ways foreign
to him but living in his home state, with a fascinating but painful history in
which the USA is particularly implicated. He seemed to approach this
community with a mix of respectful caution, curiosity and empathy; a frame
of mind that I knew I wanted to explore in a video game.
So I started making this game about diaspora as a social/cultural
phenomenon and also about engaging a foreign culture, feeling alienated
at times but making connections through curiosity and empathy
The first version of the game I made was built in Flash. It was a 2D game
with one-button input. The player piloted a hot air balloon & could turn on
its furnace to ascend, trying to catch air currents and thereby navigate to
the different settlements of the Balloon People.
In this version, the player would first encounter the remnants of the Balloon
People's original homeland. One of the remaining inhabitants would try to
enlist the player's help in convincing the inhabitants of the other settlements
to return home. Of course, there would be conflicts; some of the other
settlements had been founded because of political unrest at home, or
would for other reasons be suspicious of the player's request.
I had in mind that the game would have seven different endings, so that
the player could experiment with different resolutions to the situation and
none of them would necessarily be "correct." I haven't yet tried this
technique with multiple endings, but it's been put to great effect by other
game designers like Gregory Weir in his "I Fell In Love With the Majesty of
Colors."
But ultimately I didn't want to put the player in a position of power over the
Balloon People, deciding their fate, so I rewrote the game's story to focus
more on meeting people and learning about their culture, rather than
effecting large-stroke changes on it.
I also decided to remake the game in 3D and from a first-person
perspective, again to shift the player away from a position of power. The
third-person viewpoint is more "strategic" -- the player can see and relate
to the game world all-at-once, while first-person view is more about
exploration and discovery from within the world, at the same level as the
rest of its inhabitants.
In order to create a sense of alienation, I made all the characters the
player meets from the same 3D model (with distinguishing bits of brightlycolored cloth attached in different ways), and gave (most of) them singleletter names that can be difficult to keep track of.
The character Silas is named after a character in Robert Frost's poem/story
"Death of the Hired Man." In this poem, Frost says (through one of his
characters):
"Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in."
"I should have called it
Something you somehow haven't to deserve."
It's a gloomy but touching poem, and I was drawn to the ambivalent
relationship to "home," which seemed from my research to resonate with a
lot of the experiences of people living in diaspora.
The children in the Oak Settlement insist on referring to the player as
"Mary Ann." This is a reference to the white rabbit's housekeeper in "Alice
in Wonderland." The white rabbit mistakes Alice for Mary Ann, and she
doesn't immediately correct him. "How surprised he'll be when he finds out
who I am! But I'd better take him his fans and gloves." Like Alice, the
player's character is also being constructed by other people's assumptions,
and vice versa.
In addition to these literary points of reference, I looked closely at a few
video games from the 1990s. One was "Myst". I imagined Balloon
Diaspora playing a bit like Myst, but with conversations instead of puzzles
-- which is pretty much how it came out.
I also re-played Cryo Interactive's "Dune", from 1992. This is one of my
favorite games because of its strange, slow atmosphere and the incredible
score by Stéphane Picq. It's also a story about exploring a foreign culture,
the Fremen of Arrakis, learning more about them and building rapport.
One of my favorite parts of Dune is flying from sietch to sietch in the
ornithopter; even though it's only occasionally interactive, it creates a real
feeling of moving through a larger world. I tried to recreate this experience
pretty closely with the misty trips between settlements in Silas' balloon.