This is a slightly modified version of my supplemental college essay for the University of Southern California’s Interactive Media program. The prompt was to talk about an interactive experience that inspired you. This post is to test out my new blog section for my website, and hopefully I will be able to start adding recent and original content for it soon. Thanks for reading!
If you have a second, I want to tell you about a videogame that changed my life. It is called “Chasing Diego,” and you have never heard of it.
The reason you have never heard of “Chasing Diego” is because it was made by my father. He made it for me, and I don’t believe he ever released it publicly. The premise is short and simple, you play as a very young boy running around a house trying to catch his little brother, who is crawling all over the place. But that young boy is me, and that little brother is my brother, Diego. The house we run around in is a simple recreation of the old house we used to live in at the time. I didn’t think much of the game when he first made it, I was too young to understand how cool it was. But now when I think back on it, it moves me. Through its simple sprites and gameplay, that game has become an artifact of a time past. That game is exactly how I remember my life at the time, the colored cabinet was right there, and the table was over there. And that was what we would do, Diego would crawl frantically and I would chase him and we would laugh and giggle. That simplicity was precisely how I experienced life at the time, and when I saw the game again later it hit me that all of these elements were captured in it. It is, as I said earlier, an artifact. A little snow-globe, an interactive mirror into what life was like for me at the time.
I’m sure this sounds nostalgic, but the game didn’t make me want to live as a 4 year old again, it made me want to capture my life through games. Games can record life, like pictures. But pictures were never my thing. I believe they can’t capture the experience of what it was like to exist in that time, in those shoes. To play “Chasing Diego” is to experience or re-experience my childhood. From the moment I realized this I have tried to make what I consider self-portrait games.
In 2010 I attended the local Global Game Jam with two of my best friends. It was our first collaboration as the group we called Los Pingüinos Perdidos. The point of a Global Game Jam is to make a game in 48 hours, and it has a theme. That year’s was “deception,” but we ended up ignoring it and our game became “TrafficVille.” “TrafficVille” is a metagame and a satire of facebook, videogames, girlfriends, texting while driving, and teenage life in general. But more importantly, that game was a portrait. The conversation and events are based on real people, and I wanted to make the game because I wanted to capture that essence of being Esteban at 16. The team’s next game, “Bedtime,” tried to do the same thing, but instead opted to try and capture that feeling of being five years old. All of this was, on my part, inspired by that moving experience of playing “Chasing Diego,” years later. Games can be personal, games can capture moments of life. How fucking awesome is that?
when I read this, just wow.