Video game Dot’s Home brings a story of housing injustice to life
Video game Dot’s Home brings a story of housing injustice to life
This is another installment of “Skin in the Game,” a special project of “Marketplace Morning Report” that looks at what video games — an industry bigger than movies and music combined globally — can tell us about economics, business, money, careers and equity.
This time: A video game where the only violence is in economics.
Dot, short for Dorothea, is a character in a two-dimensional, interactive video game out of Detroit called Dot’s Home. In the game, there’s a dreamlike sequence where Dot has found a portal back in time.
“She gets ahold of the magic key and travels through time to figure out that these choices that her family has made about their housing and opportunity. They are not easy,” said Christina Rosales, a community activist and co-creator of the game, which is free on Steam or mobile platforms.
“We wanted to tell a multigenerational story, because when you think about housing disadvantage, it is cumulative,” she said. “It has the ability to get worse and worse the worse your family is. And it has the opportunity to get exponentially better if you come from a place of privilege and wealth.”
Dot, and game players moving through the game with her, get to hear about her grandparents’ roots as sharecroppers in the South, who moved to Detroit for better lives working in car factories. In search of a place to live, they run into discrimination and predatory practices. These require tough choices. The game has dialog balloons, like a comic book.
You see Dot’s grandmother, back in the 1950s, saying, “We want the house, but that Murphy fellow is just making us choose between a contract for deed or renting the place.”
When banks refused to lend to Black people, real estate companies might draw up something called a contract for deed. It’s like rent-to-own. Under some circumstances, these can be dicey. A contract might say if your payment is late even once, you lose the equity you’ve built paying for the house and start all over.
Dot’s grandfather remarks, “Never mind the fact that it could take us between five and 50 years to pay the house off in the first place. I just wish we could get a loan.”
Dot’s parents come to their own crossroads in the early 1990s: whether to stay with bonds of community in the city or move out to “nicer” suburbs. Players have to pick among choices like “somewhere where you and your kids can grow without worry,” “a street where everyone knows your name” and “a neighborhood where you shop at the supermarket without being stared at.”
“When you think about video games, I think the predominant images in most people’s heads are like really violent first-person shooters, power fantasies,” said Evan Narcisse, part of the creative team on Dot’s Home. He was the lead writer and essentially the narrative designer. “But video games — like movies, like books, like music — are a storytelling medium, and you can tell lots of different kinds of stories within that medium.”
Among Narcisse’s many credits are three Spider-Man games.
“The idea of trying to talk about social issues and policy through video games fascinated me,” he said. “But then you get to, quite honestly, the Blackness of it all, you know. Like housing justice is something that impacts marginalized communities, Black folks in particular. I feel deeply connected to that.”
The game is a collaboration of multimedia storytellers and housing justice advocates called the Rise-Home Stories Project. Funding is from philanthropies like the Ford Foundation. Its nonprofit, social mission brings with it extra freedom.
“Most commercial and mainstream entertainments, including video games, they have to modulate how they present a worldview by virtue of needing to turn a profit, right?” Narcisse said. “We didn’t have to think about that.”
And this 2D game is being taken to a new 3D level. Anthony Baber is director of communications and culture at Detroit Action, an advocacy group. He is also part of the team that turned this video game into a full-fledged stage production, where that on-screen character Dot became live-action Dot.
“We had kids in the audience who were like, ‘This is one of the best things I’ve ever seen in my life,'” Baber said. “And I think there’s a level of importance when it comes to people of color being involved in the gaming industry or having a say in how we tell our stories.”
More on the stage production of Dot’s Home here.
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