This is an educational game built on JS offering my (queer Vietnamese gen Z) perspective on the Western colonization of Vietnam told through the popular Vietnamese dish Pho. Scroll down to the next box to play it!
[Q: Explain your choices of design and stakeholders for this essay.] While the rich and the government had the power to tell their version of the war, the majority of Vietnamese people did not. They were lower-middle class farmers caught between the Western colonizer forces (first France, then the US) and the Communist party fighting almost blindly for their country. Their daily sufferings were censored or romanticized by either side into oblivion, but much is still passed down through dinner-table stories, and through the very way Viet cuisine emerged, having to adapt to extreme poverty and new foreign ingredients. That’s why conceptually, I wanted to use food to inform my audience of this Western-colonialism-inflicted trauma. Additionally, everyone’s close relationship with food would help them empathize more easily. But this means my audience would need to already have some sort of familiarity with the food I’m talking about in order to fully connect, so I chose Pho as a dish to highlight due to its popularity all over the world. Even if Pho was not a dish eaten during times of poverty, taking a closer look at the ingredients does give insight into how they evolved through these times. I’m assuming that the player has already tasted Pho, since there really isn’t a way to convey the taste of a dish without directly trying it. This is why I choose to omit a description of the dish itself, and instead provide my own illustration of the ingredients I’m analyzing. This adds a more personal touch, since it is also my own personal journey in exploring the meaning behind the food that I eat everyday. It also allows me to make fun animations that hopefully would be more engaging to the player. Lastly, I chose to compose a webgame because of its easy accessibility--anyone with an internet connection will be able to play it. I also took into account the capabilities of different devices that will be accessing the site, so that anyone can try it anytime.
