Send E-Mail - Twine

The purpose of my Twine project was to experiment with how simplicity can still tell a meaningful narrative. I was heavily inspired by the Sisyphus story and corresponding Twine game, in which the player would continue to push the boulder up the hill in hopes of reaching the top, but inevitably falling back down the hill every time. My concept is similar in this respect, but I chose the narrative focus to make the player a generic office worker whose only job is to “send emails”. This game is meant to be a metaphor for the monotony of a regular office job and how it can quickly become overwhelming, and the fear of being fired at any moment looms over you. The player is driven by competition, to last the longest and get the highest score, which is representative of an employee’s motivation to continuously be more productive than the last day. However, this is impossible, and such is the moral of the game.

                In order to create a sense of urgency for the player I used a timer which was representative of the “work day”. The timer would tick down, and if it reached 0 before the player is able to send enough emails, they would be fired. The player might not know right away that they would need to mash the “Send Email” button into the survive a long time, but they would soon find out what failing to reach the email meant for them. I debated about also displaying the “Email goal” each day, and, ultimately, I decided to keep it in for the sake of the rough draft, but I think it might instill a bit more stress and frustration for a player if they didn’t know what the goal was each day. Then, in order to demonstrate that job hunting is as exhausting as the job itself, I made the game loop back to the start after each failure. My hope is that this further establishes the metaphor of monotony, and frustration, and an endlessly impossible cycle one cannot break free from.