“[Redacted] Whispers” an interactive autobiographical text game of a South Korean student stuck in New York City during the height of COVID-19, that coincided with the heightened fear of anti-Asian violence. Built with a simple text-based conditional logic with very minimal HTML/CSS elements, the experience creates a simple but poignant poetic narrative for each person by choosing to interact with different text elements in varied sequences. The non-linear way the narrative is structured is an essential part of telling the story of alienation in a post pandemic New York City.

Language is an important motif in “[Redacted] Whispers.” While the protagonist “I” treads on the complexity of speaking a foreign tongue, the game too treats language as something volatile. The smallest interaction with a word or conjugation triggers a set of choices that hurtle players into unexpected narrative arcs.