LEGITIMATE WRAITH
is a serious game satirizing recent political attacks on women's reproductive rights.
It was created as a rapid-response game experience that uses the medium of an old-school text adventure game to make its point about the absurd series of circumstances and provably false science being used by lawmakers to justify their positions and deployed within 5 days of Senator Todd Akin's remarks.
It is available for free and can be played from any browser window by following this link.
In the game, the player is trapped in a house that is being haunted by a wraith. The player must survive the night in the house to be allowed to keep his/her basic human rights. The wraith can attack at any time, but the house will defend the player if and only if the house considers the wraith attack legitimate.
Ways to make the wraith attack legitimate include destroying anything in the house that might have been sending the wraith "mixed signals" that might confuse it into thinking you welcomed the wraith, and finding and destroying all seven hidden pieces of scientific literature in the house, thus allowing you to deny science - having done this, the house will be able to "secrete a special secretion" and otherwise warp, contract, and "shut the whole thing down."
Ways to make the wraith attack legitimate include destroying anything in the house that might have been sending the wraith "mixed signals" that might confuse it into thinking you welcomed the wraith, and finding and destroying all seven hidden pieces of scientific literature in the house, thus allowing you to deny science - having done this, the house will be able to "secrete a special secretion" and otherwise warp, contract, and "shut the whole thing down."
The game also includes a lot of other hidden game analogues for current and ongoing political debate. Staying in the kitchen, is, in fact, a way to stay somewhat safe from wraiths. But not totally safe.
The wraith can also become "casual" and will eventually attack in a truly gruesome way unless very specific steps are taken.
Win or lose, the point of the game is to put reckless political rhetoric in some actual experiential perspective. Most players do not survive the night, and that's because the game, like the system it satirizes, is not fair.
At the end of every play experience is a call to action, giving players access to information they can use to make their voice heard if they've had a profound experience as the result of playing the game.
