My Sister's Cabin

Inspiration

Human trafficking is one of the fastest rising criminal activities both in the USA and internationally. As of 2016 it affected 40.3 million people worldwide, frequently exposing these poor individuals to horrible living conditions that the 2018 USA Department of State Trafficking in Persons Report states can result in physical and psychological trauma, disease, drug addiction, unwanted pregnancy, malnutrition, social ostracism, and death. We chose to focus on a more despicable element of this terrible epidemic, sex trafficking.

What it does

We designed this game to address 3 different challenges facing the anti-trafficking community today. Our game first and foremost seeks to raise awareness through immersive storytelling. It also seeks to evoke an emotional response to reaffirm notions players may already have and develop a culture of fierce opposition to sex trafficking. Finally, our program hopes to educate users on some of the less well-known aspects of human trafficking to assist bystanders in the identification of potential trafficking situations.

How I built it

We built our game in the Unity game engine, using the terrain-building library Gaia, as well as the 3-d modeling software Maya.

Challenges I ran into

We primarily were limited by the scope that we chose to pursue in ensuring a complete, detailed immersive experience that hopefully begins to attempt to address the everyday horrors victims of sex trafficking face. Some of the finer details we intended to use to create senses of suspense and shock were sadly not incorporated due to running out of time.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We are proud of the level of detail with which we designed the game and the creative approaches we took in implementing certain details. We are proud of finding ways to evoke an emotional response, normally a largely aesthetically driven goal, using a crafted environment and storytelling motifs on a limited time-frame.

What I learned

We learnt an immense amount of information about human trafficking both relevant to our own targeted scope as well as internationally. We learnt how multifaceted human trafficking is, and how challenging it is to even imagine the kinds of things these people must go through. We learnt the challenges of creating environmental storytelling games and of constructing defined narratives and chronologies. We also learnt just how easily things can go wrong when using Git with Unity. We learnt it is very draining to work on such a serious and disturbing topic.

What's next for My Sister's Cabin

We hope to fully polish our game to properly capture details and mechanics to allow a more complete experience, a longer story, and a better building-in of active decisions. We hope to expand upon the story and introduce more content for exploration. Given more resources we would also hope to improve the aesthetic of our game in the hope of evoking an even more powerful emotional response and more frighteningly capture the living conditions of victims of sex trafficking.