There are quite a few experiences that haven’t been presented in video game format, and a lot of them are because they’re somewhat specific experiences that can’t well be translated into more genres or mechanics. However, a lot of these more interesting and specific experiences I see from games like Gone Home or That Dragon, Cancer, come from a personal place in the developer’s lives. So, following in that suit, I decided that my personal experience with moving countries and the adjustment involved with that would be an interesting perspective to communicate to players who might nor(or may never) have to make a cultural adjustment of that magnitude.
I think the best way to communicate this sort of difference of cultures is through a some sort of immediate immersion into a game’s mechanics, without explaining them with an in-depth tutorial of sorts. The issue there is perhaps is finding a genre or more specific set of game mechanics that are easy and intuitive enough to learn without a tutorial, but complicated enough where they’re not something that just comes naturally to the player. Much like I had to learn a new language, I want to make the players feel odd and out of place at first, unsure if they’re using the mechanics correctly, but also become able to learn them very easily as they gain more experience and are immersed in an environment where they can observe that mechanic being used ‘correctly’.
A possible way to do this is to add a new, creative mechanic to a 2D-platformer sort of game. This game would be likely taking after a game we’ve seen presented in our previous show-and-tells, In the Company of Myself, a game that I thought was an incredibly well done example of a meaningful narrative that expresses a personal feeling or event that players can personally attach to. This would likely not be a very long game, but just long enough to allow for players of any origin to be able to relate to the cultural barriers of moving from country to country.