In "A Lab of One’s Own," players can explore the scientific discoveries of women at MIT through pages from their notebooks in the archives and microscopic imagery. Credit: MIT
A new video game, "A Lab of One’s Own," creates an immersive environment in which players discover archival materials that tell the stories of women from MIT’s history. Created by multimedia artists Maya Bjornson and Mariana Roa Oliva with collections from MIT Libraries’ Women@MIT archival initiative, the project aims to create a multi-sensory, choose-your-own-adventure-style experience that challenges the idea that the past is behind us.
"A Lab of One’s Own" (which you can download here) is a fantastical virtual world in which players encounter quotes from memoirs and oral histories, newspaper clippings, audio clips, and ephemera that all speak to women’s experiences at MIT and in the STEM fields. The visuals of the game are incredibly unique and, quite honestly, a treat to navigate through. I recently spoke to Bjornson about how the game came to be, and why it is so important to acknowledge the past with our set on the future.
Michelle Taylor: What would you describe as the overall goal of the game? After people have "played" it, what do you hope they walk away saying?
Bjornson: We ultimately wanted to craft an experience in which conducting archival research felt natural and joyful—to create a sense of fascination and discovery while presenting academic-adjacent and sometimes heavy content in a way that felt accessible to people who aren’t necessarily engaged by traditional history or science lessons. We wanted people to feel that they could take their time and explore casually, as if moving through a dream, while slowly and cumulatively gaining new insight on perspectives that they hadn’t necessarily thought about or been exposed to before. In many ways it is a proposal for anyone who engages with it, offering a different way of encountering and processing history, an alternative means for interacting with those who came before, and a novel way of presenting narratives so as to both honor and validate past lives while also engaging imagination, possibility, and wonder.
Q: The game has six chapters, each designed to be a different world. Why/how did you settle on those six specific settings?
A: Even though it’s a relatively young archive, there is an overwhelming amount of content available in MIT’s Distinctive Collections, and knowing we had only a few months to select, access, analyze, and distill all our final materials, we approached our research thematically from the get-go. The synchronous barriers in physical and social space were immediately apparent—that the first challenge historic womxn faced was, quite literally, getting out of the home. But before we dropped players into the kitchen, we wanted to have a more diffuse introduction of the project’s themes, and settled on a primordial realm of “pre-consciousness” as the introduction level, where you would learn key commands, navigation panels, and the basic logic of environmental interaction so that by the time you get to the second chapter you could (hopefully) focus more on content than form.
Chapter 2 is the most extensive in terms of environment—a portion of forest with cabin, lake, and winding path between them… upon which it is easy to get lost at night. We felt it necessary that this level be the most expansive since in many ways it represented centuries of lives, all those who labored in the proto-sciences, the ones who materially took care of others and so gained a very pointed/poignant understanding of the physical world, and as such were able to bring a unique lens to STEM without which we wouldn’t have contemporary nutritional or water sciences, among many other things.
Beyond the home, the next battlefield was the workplace/institution, or as we call it, the Rat Race. Chapter 3 was an important level because it allowed us to loop back to some of the themes introduced at the “dawn of the game” in Chapter 1, where we affirmed that while this is a deeply feminist issue it is also a humanist one—of concern for all genders and professions. The toxicity of a workplace/institute that does not value living a balanced life, or one that belittles, devalues, or penalizes childcare in order to glorify overwork. These are issues that every working person faces, past and present. We felt it important, however, to follow the marathon of staff and student workplace concerns and complaints with a chapter that paid homage to the intense love and passion for the work that underlined the life of every person in this archive. The knowledge accumulated here is overall a testament to lives that were dedicated to asking questions and then methodically and creatively looking for answers, and we wanted at least one level of the project to hold space for a more lighthearted celebration of the investigative process.
So, in Chapter 4 we attempted to viscerally translate the surreal experience of glimpsing life on a different scale—that strange and beautiful sensation of perceiving the microscopic realm—through speed and perspective distortions surrounded by high-definition renderings of molecules and cells, couched in approachably conversational discourse about the history of microscopy.
There is an incredible selection of content in MIT’s archives from the first national conference concerning issues pertaining to Black female scholars, which took place in 1994 and was titled “Black Women in the Academy: Defending Our Name." Probably an entire fellowship should be done just about this event, but if nothing else, this game will serve as a free and public host for the Keynote address given by Angela Davis, a talk that is unsettlingly relevant and gripping from beginning to end, and accessible in Chapter 5, The Auditorium.
In the final chapter, we wanted to bookend the opening level with another surreal environment that exists somewhere between life and death, a moment of meta-reflection where we could wrap up the narrative arc in a way that was both somber and joyful. I think the final chapter nicely concludes the motif of “space” that was central to the project (the title of the piece being a hopefully obvious reference to Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own,” which contends that independent, autonomous time and space are necessary commodities for self-fulfillment).
The six chapters evolved very naturally as we parsed the information, we felt most relevant to today’s socio-political landscape and several clear themes emerged alongside consideration for the visual journey we felt would best “frame” these select voices.
Q: What about the women you included in the game? What was the thought process like for deciding who to include, and even not to include?
A: This is the Women’s History Archive, but we started the project asking ourselves, who are the womxn that aren’t being heard and seen here? The central theme of this piece was always going to be gender, and when in our line of research, we found Lynn Conway, an early computer scientist and electrical engineer who has been a big transgender rights activist, we knew her story would be a key component to the narrative arc we wanted to devise. There was never a desire to flatten or simplify the archive in order to cultivate a tidy picture—we actively looked for moments/sources that would complicate and deepen connections. We wanted to simultaneously mine the rich content of primary sources, while also addressing the gaps and tender spaces in documented “history,” so as to produce an honest contemporary take on the progress of womxn in STEM.
This game is populated by dozens of historic individuals—some painted in extensive detail and others only in passing—but what we hoped to generate was a cohesive story that incorporated a breadth of realities, something that feels both personal and lived, even while being a necessary distillation. It felt important to pay homage to the different generations of womxn we were uncovering, and also acknowledge how the challenges they faced were unique to each group/era, but that they are all indebted to each other. I think the level of exposure that a player has and the depth of knowledge they cultivate about each source is a bit up to them (in this way it’s very much a choose-your-own adventure experience), but my personal ideal player would be someone who could just get lost in the footnotes, because that’s where the real gems are.
Q: In each chapter of the game, there are newspaper clippings. Why was it important for you to include those?
A: I think one of the most exciting things about going through an archive is the sensation of imminent revelation, as it were—maybe that’s something it has in common with the scientific process. We wanted to privilege primary sources over everything else: ephemera that was produced by and for a specific moment in history. Newspapers, letters, and advertisements from the past have an uncanny sense of realness, and journalism in particular has a striking aura of familiarity that makes it an excellent conduit for the sensation of immediacy. By introducing an element that existed across all chapters we hoped to provide a control/base component that players could feel grounded by, even if the spreads in question were collages of several publications/sources.
In many ways this project is an experiment in storytelling that revolves around the issue of how to translate factual, disparate, and potentially dry material in an engaging, organic, and coherent way. The individual structures of “newspaper clipping,” and “transcript,” and “equation” all serve as strokes with which to paint a larger picture, and so we pulled certain strings from the tapestry and attempted to weave a generous picture made up of real instances.
Q: The game obviously shines a light on the sexism women in science have had to deal with. But there's other kinds of discriminations to take into account. For example, Black and other minority women being left out of the conversation for a long time—even after white women were included—and the exclusion of transgender/non-conforming individuals. How did that knowledge affect the design of your game?
A: When approaching an institution that dates back centuries, there are many levels to address, and we knew from the beginning that this project had to be both grounded in hope and centered on exclusion. The barring of not just women but all minorities in Western academic pursuits held collective knowledge back unimaginably, and we tried to include in every chapter a mention/homage to the small groups of individuals who produce/maintain entire bodies of knowledge against all odds.
Since this project was created in a contemporary age but sought to directly address the near-distant centuries past, we tried to highlight struggles that were both specific to historical moments, as well as those endemic across multiple generations. From the outset it became apparent that the role of Black women in the academy needed to be specifically addressed—this manifests early on in the game as physical barriers such as paths with dead ends, and later on in an entire chapter where you meet an audience of “coral” characters who offer insight into the experience of minority scholars.
The Women at MIT archive is unique in that in many ways it already exists to fill an outstanding gap—the individuals documented here were not valorized or markedly supported in their own time, and most materials gathered have been done so decades after the fact. It was also apparent when approaching this project that the majority of available “voices in the chorus” were white women, who certainly faced their share of adversity over the centuries of slogging progress, but who were not, we felt, equipped to tell the whole story.
Q: Generally speaking, why is it important for today's generation to reflect on archival information?
A: I personally grew up not knowing I was interested in history until a very late age, and I think that had I been introduced to more primary sources from the beginning I might have felt that lively and electric connection with “those who came before” sooner. Something changes when you access the contents of an archive firsthand, when you process the remnants of a somatic experience that was, for all intents and purposes, identical to yours, even as it’s separated from you irrevocably across time. There’s something invaluable and essential in evidence, and I believe that there is a united purpose in this regard between scientists and artists, a desire to connect through the beauty of observation, and a wish for understanding that supersedes difference.