Do No Harm

What it is

Do No Harm is a choose-your-own-adventure game developed using Inklewriter, produced as part of McGill University’s POLI 450 – Peacebuilding course and it is also my first ever shipped game! I produced it alongside my classmates Alex Temkin, Brittany Curry-Sharples, and Ifeoluwa Kolade. Our goal was to produce a game incorporating the themes of the course in a game based loosely on the Battle of Benghazi.

The game takes place over the course of two acts, each with a different protagonist. Act One has the player take on the role of Oxfam coordinator Anna Lundqvist, attempting to deliver aid to the besieged city of Ghazine. In Act Two, the player plays as Dr. Abdullah, a local doctor attempting to keep his small community clinic running as the war in and around the city escalates. The resources at Dr. Abdullah’s disposal are dependent on how well Anna Lundqvist manages to navigate the country’s volatile political situation, but in any event the player will be prompted to make difficult moral and ethical decisions in order to keep the clinic running.

It isn’t always possible, after all, to do no harm.

What I did

I was the lead writer and designer of this project, writing all of the game’s text in Acts One and Two and designing Act Two’s major decisions and crisis points. Some poor planning and communication on my part to the rest of the team meant that Act One is substantially more barebones, written (if memory serves) almost entirely in an afternoon from a very short outline. This was my first ever attempt at designing a choose-your-own-adventure game and it pretty clearly shows. In a lot of ways, this game was completely beyond the artistic, cultural, and personal capacities of all of us and I wouldn’t attempt something like this again, especially about something that is equivalently current and grounded in people’s real experiences, without a lot of careful consideration.

All of which is to say, more so than the end product itself, I’m proud of what I learned in writing this game. I experienced firsthand how important it is to do pre-production, how long it actually takes to implement seemingly simple passages and narrative branches, how the full set of consequences of a player’s actions can spiral wildly out of control.

There’s also the morphine passage. Still fond of that one for just how bleak it is. You’ll know it if it happens.

Where to play it

The game is playable in your browser through inklewriter.