RISE is a first-person vignette by Dr Dakoda Barker about living with chronic health conditions. The narrative is simple – the player has to get out of bed, get dressed and leave their house for the day. But Barker expresses the complexities of living with chronic illness by implementing intentionally hostile game design. The controls are unwieldy and incredibly demanding, forcing the player to use the controller in unexpected ways, to ask someone near them to help with the controls – or to make more conservative choices, like being too exhausted to bother with cool boots and settle for simple canvas sneakers instead. RISE’s challenging controls are designed to give the player insight into the physicality of living with chronic illness and pain, and the constant domestic negotiations that come with it.
