Meet Me In The Garden

What it is:

Meet Me in the Garden is a cooperative puzzle-based narrative-building game that encourages genuine connection between players. The game's elements extend beyond the screen--an important aspect of the experience is the usage of one monitor, and a physical barrier that splits the screen in the middle. 

The players, despite being in close physical proximity to one another, cannot see the other side of the screen, and the two of them must communicate verbally in order to solve puzzles together. In between puzzle gameplay segments, the players are asked to stop, look away from the screen, and draw out an aspect of their experience on post-its that they then share with each other.

This game requires the players to be open, vulnerable, and trusting of one another in order to progress--not as separate entities racing towards the goal, but as a single unit.

Why we made it:

Meet Me in the Garden began as a project for a class on designing games for speculative futures.  We were tasked with researching sociopolitical systems like homophobia, trans-phobia, classism, etc.  Then building upon that research, our team created a game that comes from a future where these problems have been abolished and transcended at all structural and cultural levels. 

With Meet Me in the Garden, we wanted to convey our team’s collective vision for a future where platonic intimacy and openness are encouraged and facilitated in day-to-day life.  And throughout our design process, we did our best to embody that vision. At every design step, we did our best to hear each other’s ideas and problems, to support each other on our bad days, and celebrate each other’s successes. We made sure we were all taking care of ourselves, and of each other, leading to a deep and lasting friendship.

This resulted in a project that was deeply personal for us, not only because of the game, but because of the culture we had built around it through our research, our care for each other, and of the future we challenged ourselves to make reality. And it is that queer, open, and caring future that we hope to create for our players: a future of collaborative creation, of communal as well as personal understanding, and of appreciating individual narratives instead of the glorification of a single master narrative.

Our goal:

If even a single person walks away from Meet Me in the Garden more appreciative of themselves and those around them, more aware of how deeply affective we can be on one another, or simply with a calm that they can bring into the rest of the exhibition floor, then we are one step closer to our goal, and to our future.