For my thesis project at ITP, I built The Adventures of Teen Bloggers, a creative-nonfiction graphic adventure that lets you become a real teen blogger from the heyday of LiveJournal.
With the project, I want to highlight the tension between the value our online data has as historical documents and the embarrassment we feel about the things we shared in a prior phase of our lives.
Upon starting the game, players are asked to pick a LiveJournal account. Any extant LiveJournal is a playable character in the game, though I encourage players to play with their own account if they had one. Players are then placed in a high school hallway, where they must navigate the world only saying things that their selected LiveJournal user wrote on their blog.
The game is a work in progress as I continue to research online archiving. Specific next steps are outlined on Github; the source code for the project is there as well. You can play the game here.
Below is the presentation I gave on the project during ITP’s Thesis Week.