Double Down
A game meant to be quit
Made by Joseph Soriano
A Game about desperation and addiction
Double Down is about recreating a fast-paced casino-style digital game. If you've ever played video poker you know the screen moves quick, the cards are fast and the decisions are also fast. It's meant to simulate the kind of simple and innocuous games that make you forget you're playing with real money. Real currency and value that can improve your life. When it's gamified and used as a currency in a video game, it can desensitize your relationship with money and its role in your life.
This game also explores autonomy within addiction, wherein people who suffer lose the ability to make choices of their own. This project tries simulating the helpless feeling people feel over their addiction. This game is about showing the realities of gambling and their effects through the seemingly harmless games and their simple buttons you press.
Game Design Ethos
This project draws inspiration from WarioWare. To recreate the feeling of fast-paced, fun and addictive gameplay that casinos use to gamify gambling, the player is subject to a timer for all their decisions. This quickens the pace, decision making, but also cheapens the value of each individual game. As the player plays more games, the decision making becomes more normalized and the weight of each hand becomes trivial. It becomes very easy to forget that we're gambling with someone's rent money.
This project also employs a visual-novel element to it, where you take on the role of a person who is down on his luck and needs to gamble to pay rent. Whether this is an endeavor that is fruitful or ends in ruin, the game allows for both endings to have narrative meaning and displays how winning and losing looks like when gambling. By using a narrative to guide the player, it helps better put gravity and personal attachment to the experiences of the person the player navigates this story as.
Exploring autonomy versus addiction
One major aspect of Double Down is the autonomy of the player. When making deciscions throughout the game, the player is thrust into the casino, learns the games and starts trying to make optimal decisions to maximize winning. However, as the game progresses, autonomy is eventually stripped from the player. They are forced to watch the person they play as gamble continuously, on end, until nothing is left.
This project is meant to show how addiction strips people of their autonomy. Theoretically, people are able to leave the casino at any time. Whether they are up, down, or even, they can make a reasonable decision to leave at that time and have it be a rational choice. However, in the chase for bigger and bigger numbers, the odds that are stacked against them ultimately always take their toll. The house always wins.
The Mind Behind the Mechanics
Double Down was conceived in a social landscape where gambling is more accessible than it has ever been in history. From prediction markets to daily fantasy sports, gambling is pervasive throughout almost all aspects of society. What is lost in all of this advertisement and excitement is the effects it has on the vulnerable in society. I wanted to shine a light on a very real story for many people suffering from addiction, wherein the stakes are much higher for them.
My vision was to create a visual narrative wherein people can viscerally experience this feeling of a loss of autonomy. The feeling of despair that comes from gambling is one that is uniquely tied to the feeling of desperation, wherein their vulnerability is exploited by the prospect of making money by playing a game. I wanted to juxtapose the innocuous feelings the game may present with the harsh real world implications.