I like stories that show how bureaucracy works. My favorite thing about the show Andor was how it showed people complying with horror as regular people going to work, having lives and justifying their actions by believing they were doing the right thing.
Seeing the story in the Wall Street Journal’s account of Flávio Bolsonaro leaving Brazil was the journey south. this was illustrated for me. For a guy with infinite connectons, and buckets of money, the issue was navigating a tricky exit. The WSJ left out any sleight at hand at home that might have let him slip past anyone inside Brazil on his way out, but seeing the story laid out this way made me imagine what experience designers call a journey map or service blueprint.
The part that was so interesting to me from a designer perspective was how much coordination was necessary within a short window to make the escape possible. Again, for a guy with deep connections and a family with supporters throughout the country, this was probably a relatively easy thing to navigate at home. But it left my wondering, what if you could design this journey in a fictional way?
This coincided with a segment in my Interaction Design studio where we are working on a data viz sprint in the next week. We've spent a decent amount of time in HTML, and I started thinking that doing data viz using data journalism (think: pudding.cool) or even taking a step further and taking a mundane activity and turning it into a game of high stakes. (the indie classic game Papers, Please fits this description)
By the end of the night, I'd built a game using HTML, CSS and a fictional universe i started when I was a kid.
Coalition
In Coalition, you play an opposition figure trying to leave a fictional country after losing an election. You have substantial resources and people willing to help. You also have enemies, and your contacts’ influence has limits.
There is no money shortage to solve. You can afford to leave. The difficulty is finding people who can deliver what you need and keeping their arrangements working together.
Each level presents an immediate problem while allies continue working elsewhere. You might need to change vehicles while your sibling secures an aircraft. A contact across the border might promise reception before anyone has confirmed who will meet you.
Cards give you specific help. An introduction earned earlier could make a later encounter easier. Using a favor now might leave you with fewer options at the airfield. Dice introduce uncertainty, so you need alternatives when someone fails to deliver.
Balatro helped me think about building useful combinations across a run. I want the story to explain those combinations: who offered the help, what they expect and where they can act.
There is one border crossing near the end. Getting across still leaves the aircraft departure to complete. You win when the jet leaves the relevant airspace.
The fiction lets me invent the institutions and circumstances. The article does not explain every part of the departure or establish bribery. It supplied the situation that interested me: coordinating an escape through people whose authority and cooperation vary along the way.
Since I started writing this, we added a third character that lets you operate as one of the government officials trying to pursue the title character on their way out of the country before they're gone for good. That was a fun second way to expand the concept, prove it works, and iterate along the way.
Testing the idea
The first build reduced the journey to a puzzle in one rail town. I used my closedtab after-action report tool, to generate AARs which record how I make changes across agent development runs. The original spec version had six playable stages, with thin content so I could test the journey before expanding it.
After that worked, I set on the path of expanding the narrative, bolstering the design engine and adding more to the story. This idea came to me last night and i put it all together in less than a day. I'm sure there will be improvements in due time, but for now, I'm just happy that it's somewhat playable and that there is a logic to it all.
I have a separate post on my main blog where I talk about the AX content tool that I developed in the middle of making the text for this game,