Dolly's World

Dolly’s World is an escape-room-style VR game for the Oculus Quest developed by student researchers, Drew Smeuniewski, Maddie Erb, Alex Groves, Arin Kaplan, Nathaniel Mejia, and Zack Sika at the College of Charleston with Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Dr. Sarah Schoemann.

In Dolly’s World players find themselves in the surreal environment of a fictional 1990’s/early 2000s children’s television show set inspired by the strange and kitschy aesthetics of real life kids shows like Pee-Wee’s Playhouse. While exploring Dolly’s World players will discover (through onscreen dialogue) that they are a female recent college grad named “Bee” in a queer romantic relationship with their coworker, Jess, at the fast casual pizza restaurant, Krust Krafters, where they work. As players complete puzzles, they’ll learn from Jess' about the complicated class dynamics of their relationship, the dubious state of workers rights at Krust Krafters, and the conflict between Bee and Jess over suspicions of wage-theft by their exploitative manager.

Despite positive strides towards more diverse in-game representation in the past decade, stories centering the experiences of queer characters remain an outlier in popular games, and this lack of representation is particularly acute in VR titles, which comprise a smaller if emerging sector of the overall games market. Simultaneously, as income inequality continues to climb in the 21st century, exacerbated by stressors like inflation, housing costs and decade of depressed overall wage gains, the service industry has seen an increase in efforts to organize worker power under movements such as the “Fight for $15”. Through sharing the story of Bee and Jess in Dolly’s World we hope to add to the growing body of independent video games exploring themes of identity and class through a lens that is both reflective of real world issues faced by workers today and representative of experiences that have been underexplored in games such as a romance between lesbian food service workers.