IRL: The Game by Julia Makivic and Chris Stedman

About

IRL: The Game is a collaboration between game designer Julia Makivic and author Chris Stedman. The game is inspired by Stedman's latest book IRL: Finding Realness, Meaning, and Belonging in Our Digital Lives and explores themes of what it means to be real online. Players click through posts in a surreal digital landscape and interact with a series of exciting internet personalities. In the process, players examine their own relationship the internet and how their digital life intersects with their physical life.

Genre: Visual Novel, Narrative Game, Interactive Fiction

The Team

Julia Makivic

Julia Makivic is a creative technologist who divides her time between London and Belgrade. She makes alternative controller video games using hardware and various sensors. She also makes story-focused video games and is interested in how interactivity and technology can be used to tell stories. Her work has been featured in various international indie games festivals including A MAZE in Berlin, Interactive Futures, The Leftfield Collection at EGX Rezzed and Game Happens. You can view her work on her website.

Chris Stedman

Chris Stedman is a Minneapolis-based writer, speaker, and community organizer. He is the author of IRL: Finding Realness, Meaning, and Belonging in Our Digital Lives (2020) and Faitheist (2012). Chris has appeared on CNN, MSNBC, and PBS, and has written for publications including The Guardian, The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, Pitchfork, VICE, USA Today, The Rumpus, Catapult, The LA Review of Books, and The Washington Post. Previously the founding director of the Yale Humanist Community and a fellow at Yale University, Chris also served as a humanist chaplain at Harvard University. He currently teaches in the Department of Religion and Philosophy at Augsburg University and serves as the Network of ELCA Colleges and Universities' 2020-21 visiting lecturer. To learn more, visit chrisstedmanwriter.com.

Summary

This is a brief summary of the game. WARNING: This section contains spoilers.

In IRL: The Game players click through posts in a surreal digital landscape. Each post has four emojis that the player can click to respond to each post. Although this is not revealed until the end, each of these emojis represents a particular emotion: realness, meaning, belonging and uncertainty. The manner in which the player chooses these emojis will affect a map of their journey through the game that they receive at the end. The player can replay the game and click on different emojis to reveal a different map.

Players will also encounter three main characters in this digital space. These characters include a drag queen trying to determine the direction of her next performance, a furry trying to plan a fur meet in a unique location and a modern day cartographer trying to preserve the character of her neighborhood before it is lost due to gentrification. These characters pose questions to the player that challenge the player's understanding of what it means to be real online. The players response to these questions determines the final path taken by each character. Each character has a total of two possible endings. Players can replay the game and answer each question differently to unlock all of the possible endings.