About
Security experts warn of a 1-in-3 chance of a nuclear event in the next ten years!
Now's your chance to join the fight against nuclear weapons! Explore the globe as an agent investigating and preventing nuclear weapons incidents to track down "orphan sources" in this episodic adventure game.
Dive into an intriguing mystery as a detective, hot on the trail of avoiding a potential nuclear calamity.
Epic Orphan is a serially released comic-adventure game, with the player taking on the role of a government agent working on unraveling international crises that are wrapped around the challenges nuclear weapons, including the tracking of them in unstable countries, management of waste, and nuclear materials used in terrorism.
Gameplay is blended between an out-run themed comic narrative experience with a diverse set of different puzzle and/or practice-based minigames. Examples include cryptography to unlock data on a cell phone, or a resource management game to ensure a power plant can mitigate an earthquake with its fail-safes. While the games are designed to be engaging and novel, they are also intended to provide more context and a systems-level approach to understanding issues.
Along the way players will collect evidence, and assemble it to unlock the mysteries of each case they are working on, finding suspects and connecting evidence into maps of proof that uncover conspiracies.
Partners
Games for Change (G4C) is a nonprofit who’s mission is to empower game creators to drive real world impact through digital games. Through its, year-round programs, G4C convenes diverse stakeholders, highlights best practices, incubates games, and helps create and direct investment into new projects. Each year G4C holds The Games for Change Festival, the largest industry focused gaming conference in NYC.
N Square is a two-year collaboration of the largest peace and security funders in the US, designed to foster collaboration, ignite the public imagination and spark new ideas about how to eliminate the threat of nuclear weapons. The collaborative was created to catalyze innovation that moves the world toward nuclear disarmament while improving global safety and security. N Square is also pairing with the world’s top innovators to bring social awareness to one of the most threatening and haunting issues of our time. The threat posed by nuclear weapons is growing ever greater, yet it is approached the same way it always has been. Since the development of these weapons, we’ve never harnessed an effective way to mitigate their risk. N Square collaborative is funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Ploughshares Fund, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Skoll Global Threats Fund.
Filament Games is a design and development shop in Madison Wisconsin, focused exclusively on creating playful experience that improve people’s lives. Over the last 10 years, they’ve developed 100+ progressive and impactful digital learning games, reaching into subjects as diverse as oncology to civil rights to ecosystems. Filament developed the initial prototype of Epic Orphan in partnership with G4C and N Square, and crafted some powerful tools for motion comic creation that they’re excited to sharpen and bring to bear on full development.
What is Meant by Nuclear Risk?
Nuclear security means three key things: disarmament, nonproliferation, and safety and security of existing materials and weapons sites. Right now - we're more insecure on these three fronts than perhaps ever before - hence, the heightened risk.
Risks include rogue nations and non-nation actors attempting to get their hands on nuclear materials and their ability to do so with black market flow of nuclear materials (we've seen this recently with foiled attempts to arm Isis with nuclear materials), aging and decaying arsenals prompting nations to embark on weapon modernization programs, geopolitical instability and nuclear-armed nations acting unpredictably. All of this adds up to unprecedented risk.
Risks and challenges
This is our first Kickstarter and we are new to the crowdfunding space. Despite that, we feel very confident that we have the best possible partners working with us, and support from the nuclear security community!
Since G4C, N Square and Filament have already worked together to produce the first episode of the game, we have teased out the kinks of processes for collaboration and figured out the right flow for development - which will amplify our efforts if we are able to reach our stretch goals.
G4C also understands the subject matter of our game is provocative and may feel controversial to some, but we feel it is more important to raise awareness and provide an entryway for discussion regardless of position. We are working with top nuclear security experts to ensure content accuracy and are enlisting support from Filament, who has produced award winning games and are expert game experience designers. Working closely with our subject matter experts and designers, we aim to objectively represent the realities that we face around nuclear weapons.
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Funding period
- (30 days)