One of our chief goals with Executive Command was to help the player get a sense of the scope and impact of the President’s actions. Most Americans' only interaction with the President of the United States is via the news media, so we decided to leverage that to give the players a familiar feedback mechanism. Imagine turning on the nightly news and seeing the news anchors talk about how you are doing your job! We’ve done similar things with other games, such as Do I Have a Right?, where each turn ended with newspaper headlines about the player’s performance.
Executive Command also needed feedback between game turns and this seemed like the ideal spot for this type of news solution. Specifically, we wanted to show the President watching the nightly news on television. My immediate thought was, “when and where does the President watch television?” I couldn’t imagine the President lounging on an Oval Office couch munching pretzels and watching Dancing with the Stars, but certainly the President must have a TV somewhere in the White House.
Our games don’t usually require ultra-realistic depiction of specific details, but when it isn’t overly difficult we try to make it happen. In this case I felt it was interesting to answer my first question and show players how the President watches TV. I’m always amazed at some of the bizarre nuggets of information I learn in the process of creating games at Filament (The Dept of Homeland Security is in the process of moving their headquarters into an old psychiatric hospital; who knew?!), and in this case it was fascinating to learn more about how the First Family lives in the White House. Yes, there is a living room attached right to the President’s bedroom! It’s a pretty simple square room that the President may decorate however he or she likes, which meant we didn’t have to worry at all about the living room in our game matching the real living room in the White House.
The parquet floor and carpet were the only new assets we needed to create specifically for this room; almost everything else was repurposed from other iCivics games. We try to reuse or adapt art assets when practical, both to save time and to tie the iCivics games together with a consistent visual aesthetic. In fact, the couch, tables, bookshelves, plants and television came straight out of Do I Have a Right?.
The first challenge was to orient the room so that the player could see what the President was seeing on the TV screen. Unfortunately, we only had the couch drawn from the front, so we needed to draw the back of it. More importantly, that meant that the player would only see the back of their character’s head. I was concerned it wouldn’t be apparent that the player was looking at the President’s living room, so I added some details to help make it clear. To that end, I added the Presidential flag we built for Branches of Power and the White House emblem. It still looked a little empty, so I looked for something I could hang on the wall and discovered that there is a painting titled Avenue in the Rain that former Presidents have hung in their living room. It worked out to be a great finishing touch.
I hope that the end effect works as it should: a simple room that doesn’t distract too much from the information on the TV, but makes it clear you’re looking at the President’s den!
