Dad's Bitter Gourd

[CYCLE TWINE GAME]

Artist Statement

This game is based on the cycle “Dad’s Bitter Gourd” in which my dad plants the seeds of a bitter melon, waits for it to grow, harvests it, removes the seeds, cooks the fruit, then leaves the seeds out to dry until the next planting season. I approached the meaning gap by thinking of other things associated with a garden which brought me to the idea of a world in which people live underground, like vampires in coffins. However, I was still unsatisfied with that idea so I looked to my current obsessions for inspiration and found my dog, Zombie. That brought me to writing a story not about vampires, but about another kind of undead being: zombies. The fabulism in this story is that humans have zombies as pets. Naturally, I based the pet zombie in my story on my pet dog, Zombie. The thematic argument I’m trying to make with the structure of my cycle is how caring for a pet is similar to nurturing a garden. They’re both repetitive processes that involve lots of commitment as well as trial and error, but it’s all extremely rewarding in the long run. To emphasize this argument, I actually have the pet zombie learn to “potty” outside the house when the reader-player visits the second passage for the third time which simulates how training a dog a new trick takes a couple tries. 

The main feedback I got from my playtest was that it was too confusing who and what Georgia was: A dog? A human? I fixed this by changing the food options in the first passage because they were misleading. Instead of pop tarts (which is a very human food), I changed it to foods that make more sense for a dog/zombie to eat. I was also careful with how I used the word “undead” because it was being confused as an adjective when I was using it as a noun.