In an alternate universe, school children are taken on seafaring journeys, where they encounter adventures in the form of creatures exhumed from the recesses of their psyche. It's not so alternative when the client already wants to send them on seafaring journeys, so we took the alternate universe and made it their reality. Of course, the concept of The Game is the ultimate alternate universe, revealing to us that our own lives are, in fact, structured like a game. What better way to transcend the limited in-the-world-ness of our everyday experience than to codify the world into a card game?
We took a dive into our own childhoods, coming up with Sierra video games, Magic cards and other forms of colourful and quixotic 90s playthings which became visual and textual citations in our Gap Semester Portfolio. In one sweep, the three separate domains of School, Childhood and Working World turned into a series of games with their own internal rules and dynamics. We wanted to recreate that moment when you explore the storeroom, open a dusty old cabinet and discover Daddy's old scrapbook and love letters. Or Grandmother's old jewels. Or an old-school Nintendo game cartridge that you used to blow into. Those are the explorations we remember.
