Escape Groom

Using voice recognition, Escape Groom forces a player to play the perspective of an adult American predator benefitting from persisting child marriage exemptions, trading her legal protections for himself. Exploring the arguments of the intruding stranger, an alternate ending at the Supreme Court hopes to inspire transformation from this game into the real world.

Escape Groom is a sociolegal commentary game aspiring to help condemn American underage marriages. By heightening nostalgia and hoping to comment on the ways that "child advocacy" often leaves out the voice of minors, the conflicting positive visual aesthetics and negative procedural mechanics force a player to speak the truth of this uncomfortable injustice.

This game was designed by Katarina Cook as a media capstone accompanying a written thesis in the Harvard Medical School graduate program in Media, Medicine, and Health, in collaboration with MIT Game Labs (Mikael Jakobsson) and EverydayArcade (Brian Moore).

A developmental biologist by training (UC Berkeley '22), this is the first game that Katarina has developed, although she now pays homage to hers, and many other young girls' early introduction to coding, through hosting the game site on Tumblr.