Dispossessed

A story about the essence of life and death, hell and heaven, that takes you to the times of repression, terrible hunger, and millions of deaths during Stalin's regime.

Introduction

Dispossessed is filled with horrible events and pain, but despite that, it manages to be about love. A love that threads through life and death, betrayal and help, fear and courage. Every choice you make in the game dramatically shifts your fate. When making a choice, you realize that the events of your life are subject to fate, and it is impossible to change the predetermined future. As in real life, the difficulty lies in the will of chance and the circumstances beyond your control.

Historical Context

The action of the story takes place in 1929 when the Soviet government adopted the collectivization policy, which was pursued between 1929 and 1933 to transform traditional agriculture and reduce the economic power of kulaks (prosperous peasants). Under collectivization, peasants were forced to surrender their farms and join large collective farms, i.e., kolkhozy. This campaign was undertaken to industrialize the Soviet Union as quickly as possible. During the winter of 1929–30, Stalin urged the party to “liquidate the kulaks as a class” (December 27, 1929). The government took harsh measures against around 400,000 families of peasants, including confiscating their land, arresting them, and sending them to prison camps. Over half of the peasantry (a greater proportion in the agriculturally rich southwest region of the Soviet Union) were forced into collective farming by March 1930.

In many cases, peasants were evicted far into Siberia to virgin land, where they created settlements from scratch. The process of collectivization, or so-called dispossession, took many lives and left the present generations in ignorance about their family roots. 

Most ordinary families in the post-Soviet space have no idea about their roots beyond their great-grandfathers. My cultural background and that of the people around me make this story very important to me. I wanted to write this piece to emphasize how many destinies were broken in the name of industrialization and to illuminate the value of human life and freedom. 

Obsession

To develop an idea behind this piece, I turned to my obsession list and chose “Russian Literature” and “Family Genealogy.” Linking these two obsessions, I immediately thought of The Gulag Archipelago (1973) by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Virgin Soil Upturned (1932) by Mikhail Sholokhov. I've always been interested in mid-20th-century literature because of the horribleness of the times it was written. My interest has to do with the patterns I see in our time, and thus, I want to find support and correlation with the past. One of the contemporary writers who inspired me to write this story is Guzel Yakhina, and her novel Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes (2015). 

 Thematic Argument and Craft Elements

Dispossessed's primary purposes are to make people feel, to immerse them in another historical and cultural context, and to evoke an emotion, whether it be fear, pain, empathy, or love. I used different craft elements or a specific ‘ingredient list’ that made it possible to accomplish this. The ‘ingredient list’ consists of the setting, plot, POV or narration, characters, structure, and voice. 

Setting: 

The action begins in 1929 in a remote village in Bashkiria during collectivization and Stalin's brutal regime. I tried to convey this through the vocabulary I used, descriptions of the area, and distinctive references to the time. 

Plot:

The plot of my game involves many different events, locations, and interactions with various characters, leading to nine different outcomes. 

It was vital for me to write completely different outcomes to emphasize that each of our actions is extremely important. This kind of plot tries to ask the question: Is everything that is happening to us for the best? Can we be in charge of our fate?

POV or narration:

The story is told from the woman's point of view, putting the reader in her shoes. In other words, the reader takes on her role and becomes fully immersed in the events of her life. 

Characters:

The reader, in the role of the protagonist of the story, meets the characters as the play progresses. He meets various people on different paths in the game; some overlap, and some exist only in the universe of a particular path. 

Structure:

Talking about the structure, I wanted to create multiple endings to emphasize the importance of every choice. Thus, I chose the tree structure, where the reader is presented with a choice, resulting in two (or more) story outcomes that result in more choices (see Figure 1). Ultimately, I ended up with nineteen passages with nine different endings. Essentially, there were two outcomes: death and survival, but each of the nine endings involved different circumstances for those two.

Figure 1

Note. The structure of the game. Screenshot from Twine. 

Voice:

Voice is a complex parameter to write about, and it can be split into diction, detail, imagery, syntax, and tone. Dispossessed is a heartfelt and intimate story. The POV creates this sensation because it feels like an honest conversation with yourself, the sense that no one will hear or see it. 

Definition of a Game

“An interactive structure of endogenous meaning that requires a player to struggle towards the goal” — a definition introduced by Greg Costikyan that helped me keep the game engaging for the readers/players. 

I've already touched on some of these points above (e.g., interactivity, structure, endogenous meaning). The game's goal is to survive, and the struggle lies precisely in the fact that sometimes, despite your desire to survive, fate (in this case, the game's plot) decides the outcome for you. 

Playtesting and Feedback

For the playtesting activity, I first created a list of questions based on the strategies Nat Mesnard proposed during their visit. 

• How did you feel? What do you think?
• What surprised you? 
• Did you feel that your choice influenced the outcome of the story? 
• What would you do better?
• What did you expect, and how did you interact with that expectation (in terms of how your expectations influenced your experience)

I picked three people with different backgrounds to playtest:

1. Alina

She/her; participates in CRWR 312 course; has a post-soviet cultural background.

Alina felt very sentimental and could empathize with the character on a deeper level because of her familiar cultural background and her role as a woman. Talking about expectations, she thought each choice would feel more meaningful, like choosing whether to escape, but many decisions were seemingly insignificant. By the end of the game, she realized that it resembled real life, where even the smallest choices are extremely important. She said she would like to add a little more detail about items within the game and a couple of passages on one of the branches. I heeded her advice and made a few edits to my game. 

2. Luca

He/him; Participates in CRWR 312 course; doesn’t have a post-soviet cultural background.

Luca’s feedback was necessary because of his different cultural background. I needed to make sure the story made sense without knowing the details. He highlighted the surprising choices he had to make (such as the knife and the scarf) that “really underline the dystopian reality of the horrors of this historic event.” He had to weigh out all his chances before making a choice. The thing he would do differently was to make passages shorter, not by getting rid of text but rather by adding more passages if there wasn’t a limit. He didn’t expect such substantial shifts in the plot, which surprised him. 

3. Eugen

He/him; does not participate in CRWR 312 course; has a post-soviet cultural background and a family history related to collectivization. 

Eugen was an example of the perfect target audience for me because of his cultural background and perspective outside the classroom. He felt excited due to the context of the story: “I was surprised every freaking minute. The situation I was trapped into was scaring me.” He also said it lacked a couple of riddles and plausibility in some story elements. After his comments, I changed a few aspects to make the story better reflect reality.