2 min to read
Checkpoints - An evening in Nicosia
A game to discover the geopolitical situation of Nicosia, Cyprus. Developed during Scientific Game Jam 2.
Scientific Game Jam special prize: Borderless Game award
You are a French tourist just arriving in the historical center of Nicosia, capital of Cyprus, trying to grab a drink with friends. As simple as this quest may seem, you’ll quickly learn the realities of the citizens, living in a divided city.
itch.io: https://barbiche.itch.io/checkpoints-nicosie
The Scientific Game Jam
This event is quite unique: it’s a game jam gathering researchers and developers to create science-themed video games. Teams are formed around a researcher thesis or subject, and the challenge is to build a game that can introduce this thematic, or that can illustrate it.
This jam occurred during a festival named La Science Entre En Jeu (Science enters the game), organized by the French association Lyon Game Dev. Alongside the game jam was set some conferences on how video games can be a tremendous support for science and education.
Checkpoints
With Charlotte, Drestin, Roilbauk andNathan, we worked on a subject brought by Pierre Le Mouel, who wrote a thesis in Political Geography and Geopolitics about the external borders of the European Union in areas of conflict, comparing the inter-Irish border following Brexit to the Green Line of Cyprus: we focused our game on this particular area.
The Green Line of Cyprus, also known as the United Nations Buffer Zone in Cyprus, is a demilitarized zone which was established in 1964 and extended in 1974 following the the Turkish invasion of the island. This invasion divided the area in two parts:
- the Republic of Cyprus in the South, which has legally the sovereignty on all the territory.
- the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, controlling de facto the northern part of the country.
Moreover, the Green Line can notably be encountered in Nicosia, the capital of Cyprus, actively dividing the city in two parts. The fact that the the Republic of Cyprus is part of the European Union and the Schengen Area, but not Turkey, creates a lot of troubles for Northern Nicosians who want to cross the border to the southern part of the city.
Through Checkpoints - an evening in Nicosia, we tried to express these issues in a narrative game, where you explore freely a simple representation of the capital, going through the border and discussing with citizens. What seems to be a very simple task - gathering friends to have a drink - can indeed be way more painful due to this particular context.
On this project, I’ve been working exclusively on the dev part of the game, which was made using Godot Engine.