I made an interactive narrative about the school experience in adolescence.
Not the nervous excitement version. The other one - where you already know you do not belong.
The Word You Almost Said - A Game About Identity, School And What Gets Left At The Gate
You play as a student. You make choices. The choices matter less than you think - but one moment in the corridor might matter more than you expect.
The game has a filing cabinet problem. Schools are built around particular assumptions about what knowledge looks like, what a student looks like, and whose ways of knowing count as valid. Students whose home knowledge, cultural background, language, or identity don't fit those assumptions aren't lacking knowledge. The institution just has no mechanism for recognising what they bring.
This is not a CALD issue or a First Nations issue or an LGBTQ+ issue - though it is all of those specifically. It is also a farming family issue, a conservative religious community issue, a kid-who-thinks-in-a-different-language issue. Thirty per cent of Australian students don't feel they belong at school. In 2003 the figure was 12%. The filing cabinet is getting fuller.
The game was built in a single HTML file - no downloads, no account needed, runs in your browser. It uses a zine aesthetic and a Twine-style branching structure. It has 28 clickable footnotes connecting the story to research on neuromyths, belonging, Indigenous epistemology, and adolescent identity. It was coded with AI assistance and made on Gunaikurnai Country
Play time is 10–15 minutes. Probably longer if you click the footnotes.
I'd genuinely like to know what lands and what doesn't — whether you're a teacher, a game maker, someone who remembers almost saying something in a classroom once, or just someone who found this by accident. Leave a comment. Tell me what you almost said.