Mother, Player

Mother, Player is an experimental narrative video game featuring pregnancy and early parenthood stories from artists during the global pandemic. A series of interactive vignettes written in dialogue with artist parents, the video game presents complex stories of maternity experiences during lockdown with a focus on the distinctive challenges and poignant moments that artist caregivers to young children have faced during this time. The game additionally addresses the lack of multi-dimensional pregnancy and early parenthood stories in video games—something that the artist herself became sensitive to and critical of after becoming pregnant, giving birth, and taking care of a newborn during this isolated and uncertain time. All of the interfaces, animations, fonts, buttons, dialogue boxes, and icons have been hand drawn and animated by the artist, as part of a commitment to building a poetic, soft, labor-intensive, and complex game-world reflective of the childcare experiences she and the other artist parents featured in the project have had during the pandemic.