A Dozen Dozen

A Dozen Dozen is a game created to celebrate the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage in the United States of America. The gameplay is intended to give the player a sense of the expanse of time (144 years) between the nation’s founding and the passage of the 19th Amendment. The player controls whether gravity pulls the avatar up, down, left, or right. The goal is to manipulate gravity so that the avatar (a suffragette) lands on a box. Each time she does, the game advances one year. Advancing the heroine all the way from 1776 to 1920 wins the game. Along the way facts about women suffrage are displayed to the player.

Team

The game was created by a team of Bradley University Faculty, Staff, Students, and Alumni from the Department of Interactive Media including Scott Cavanah, Lorena Chica, Ethan Ham, Dahia Jackson, Cailyn Talamonti, and Brent Wiley.

The game’s artwork features images and descriptions of quilts from the The National Quilt Collection housed at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. They match the timeline of our journey. The game is designed for an exhibition setting and uses a custom-built, table-top arcade cabinet. The expectation is that each player will advance the game a few years and then stop playing. The next person who plays the game will advance it another few years, and so on. The idea is that the game “won” by the shared work of many people, just as the passage of the 19th amendment was the work of many people over many years.