“A Swift and Successful Onboarding” by Brad Kraeling, Erin Stearns, Katherine Tole, Egypt Archie & Jackson Zupa.
“[We] are happy to have you aboard the team here at Snexus Technologies. Your [orientation coordinator Lauren] is ready to assist you in with our onboarding process. It is incredibly important that you do exactly what she says and nothing else. You were hired to follow instructions[,] not to think for yourself.”
Video games often force you to obey to progress, but metagames like “A Swift and Successful Onboarding” try to subvert this old structure. It all starts as an interactive novel, where you play as a new employee of an electronic commerce corporation. You get instructions by a coworker named Lauren via an audio call, where she goes with you through each step of your future everyday work step by step. You get instructions, you follow them, everything is fine, you get to keep your job – that is the usual way it goes.
But “A Swift and Successful Onboarding” also shows some interface actions that Lauren never talks about. The deleted emails in your work account? Not important. Deleting your report file? That is not an option. Just ending the call itself? Why would you do that? By providing such interaction possibilities that never get highlighted by the game itself, the team around this jam submission does an excellent job in stirring up the curiosity of the players.
Thereby you can choose which path you want to take. You can either be a good, obedient newbie or you can go on the nerves of your orientation coordinator. Or maybe you could unravel the secrets of your new workplace? At least four endings can be found. Anyway, regardless of how you choose how to play “A Swift and Successful Onboarding”, you will surely be delighted by it for some minutes, especially thanks to the fantastic voice acting of Katherine Tole as Lauren. She knows how to make you feel warmly welcomed in one second, and then showing you the icecold shoulder in the next one, which is an absolute incredible ability. [PLAY]
