Week 1: Whose Story Is It?

This week, we kicked off Torn Apart by onboarding the full team and meeting with our advisors to align on our project vision. Since this project was pitched last semester, we were already familiar with our goal—to tell the story of a family being displaced by gentrification. We also began discussions on an important question: Whose story are we trying to tell?

Gentrification happens in various forms across the world, but the word carries its strongest context in the United States. It would feel appropriate to tell the story of a Black family or community being displaced. However, none of us on the team identify as Black, and this raises a critical challenge—how do we tell this story without misrepresentation?

Initially, we envisioned the game as a narrative experience, but after deeper research over the summer, we realized it needed to be more than that. Gentrification is an issue often confined to specific echo chambers, so we decided to shift our focus toward making this a transformational game—one that can raise awareness and foster empathy.

Challenges This Week:

• Organizing all the information and content that had already been worked on.
• Getting new artists up to speed with the rest of the team.
• Deciding how to frame our transformational framework and incorporate our research.
• Representing a race or ethnicity that no one on the team personally identifies with.
• Navigating how to tell the story of a Black family or community without misrepresentation.

Next Week’s Goals:

• Find a new subject matter expert on gentrification.
• Identify individuals to interview and conduct research to further define our transformational goals.
• Explore the types of interactions that could be included in a walking simulator to effectively serve the transformation we aim to achieve.