The Project

Prisoner’s Cinema is a narrative-driven, expressive game being developed by a student team of four at Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center. It is a 20-minute, non-linear experience focused on moral choice which is compounded by the protagonist’s insomnia, and is meant to be the “pilot” of a longer, episodic “season” of content.

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The game conveys the subjective sensation of living a life subdued by sleeplessness, and we aim to evoke from players an empathetic response. We want players unfamiliar with feelings of alienation to gain an understanding of how an affliction like insomnia can impact the sufferer physically, mentally, and emotionally, and we want players who have experienced or are experiencing the existential, societal ramifications of sickness to understand that they are not alone.

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Our project is influenced by modern, socially conscious games like Gone Home, Papers, Please, and That Dragon, Cancer, as well as other surreal and iconoclastic media sources, such as the films of David Lynch and the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre.

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2 thoughts on “The Project”

  1. Liam McKay -
    This looks like a game much like the stanley parable, in that it was an interactive story. The combination of one of its genres being horror and the fact that the protagonist is an insomniac makes me think that there will be many scary hallucinations or shadows that play with your mind. Looks fantastic, guys! Is there a proctologist's version called "Prisoners Enema?"
    • Arseniy Klishin -
      Thank you very much, Liam! During the pre-production phase of our project the question of how to convey the feeling of insomnia was very important, and one of the solutions we found were the visual effects. So we are, indeed, planning to use a lot of hallucinotion-like effects, you just wait and see =) And to answer your question - no. Just no.

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