The games Imposter Syndrome and Depression quest are both text based games designed to put the player in the position of someone who’s problems they haven’t thought about before. They were both made relatively recently, though neither seem to see a need to give exact dates of publication, they both address topics that don’t have a date on them. Imposter Syndrome, being set int the near future argues that it’s subject, gender discrimination, will be a problem for some time. Depression Quest doesn’t need to argue that depression will be around, it is a result of pain, frustration, and fear, and those will not be going away any time soon. Both games tries to express the pain, frustration and anguish that the creators feel or felt and translate it into something someone who doesn’t face their problem can hopefully understand.
Both games were interesting and definitely showcased their problems fairly well. I can’t really speak to the validity of Imposter Syndrome since I’ve never really been in that kind of environment, from either side of Georgianna’s podium, though I can that Depression Quest fits my understanding of depression fairly accurately. It didn’t emphasize certain specifics in the way that I have understood depression but the general experience was definitely accurate. As a note, I describe an understanding of depression that was based on someone’s personal experience but I cannot and will not identify that person. One thing Depression quest described accurately is the fear and embarrassment of being or having been severely depressed.
There were a couple things in the games, though, that I thought weren’t quite explained well enough. In Imposter Quest, I was wondering throughout why Georgianna was so filled with doubt, so lacking in self-confidence. I suspect that the creators wanted to imply that prior experience made her doubt herself, but it is somewhat ambiguous how she came to doubt herself as much as she appears to in the game. Which brings me directly to the other thing that seems off: these are not games. I have been referring to them that way because the creators were but these a walkthroughs of painful personal experience. I don’t know what they should be called but they are not games, at least by my definition. I personally think of games as something fun, possibly something children do. To call these games, I think, risks trivializing the subject matter. The creators do counter that fairly well, but I do wonder why they call these games in the first place.
The answer to why Georgianna is so filled with doubt might be found (at least partly) in the Nakamura reading — she is playing on the highest difficulty setting and facing an audience who doubts her right to be where she is. The readings on harassment for this coming week might also shed some light!
Your last question, about whether interactive fictions like these count as games, is one that has been hotly debated. It all depends on how you define “game,” of course; meanings and terms are always slippery things! Rather than “is this a game,” a useful question to ask is “what’s at stake — what difference does it make — if this is or is not a game?” Anna Anthropy, for example, argues that games are an art form because she wants to include many works that do not fit the definition you are suggesting.