Use Dipper at Night

A game poem that takes you for a ride through dangerous roads

‘Use Dipper at Night’ is a game poem that takes the player into a 3:15-minute experience where they will understand the impact of road safety in India. In particular, they will control a minimalistic car with a top-down control system. In the game, they will be able to switch the mode of their car’s light beam to avoid blinding other cars.

What did I do?

The idea for this game poem starts with my personal experience of traveling in India by road. The signs written on the back of indian trucks inspired me to create simple mechanics for a game, and then I researched statistics and data from road accidents in India. I was again shocked by the numbers, which motivated me to create a game with an awareness message.
The game was developed using Unity using a template control system called ‘Top Down Engine’ by More Mountains.
In the context of creating a game poem, I knew that using minimal elements in the game was necessary. Vector graphics, a very limited color palette and powerful typography were the elements I chose to implement. I also added subtle particles to the player’s car and minimal camera shakes to convey the idea of driving. The last screens of the game show three illustrations that accompany the final thoughts.
I selected and edited the song “Aigiri Nandini” by Rajalakshmee Sanjay, I edited the song to keep the instrumental part and combined it with a techno rhythm using AI. The idea was that the player embodied a careless driver playing loud music making it feel like a fast-paced video game. At the end of the game, drums play in the background, and they are from a recording made at a festival celebrating the Hindu god Ganesha, the remover of obstacles and goddess of destruction.

The message

At the end of the game, players will be shown two statistics that will connect with the principal rules of the game:

- The duration of the game is always 3 minutes and 15 seconds, which is the time that on average a person dies from a road accident in India. This means that every time someone plays the game, someone else would die from a road accident in India.

- The scoring system records the amount of accidents that the player has caused. The maximum is 1264, which is the amount of accidents that happen daily in India (according to the country’s official reports in 2022). The ending screen of the game will state that “Your score tonight is N/1264”. This implies that the player has taken part in that statistic, and they have -at least- caused one death in this fiction.

The intention of this game poem is to use video game mechanics to show statistics in a different way. By focusing on the emotion and making the participants realize that the game they were playing was built on top of real-life data, the goal is to involve the players and make them reflect on the important topic of road safety - which should be a global concern and not a particular problem of the South-Eastern country.