Thousands of young people are heading to the streets for reasons within the family, such as conflicts with their families and domestic violence. Adolescents who are outside the social safety net are not easy to receive institutional protection, on the other hand, various types of violence and exploitation are always focused on those who have difficulties in self-protection.
In particular, out-of-home female adolescents are exposed to sexual exploitation too easily, and more than 80% of them enter into prostitution for the first time within a week from the day they run away.
Some may say that running away from home is your choice and you should take responsibility for the consequences. But are all these processes really the youth’s own choices? The more the development team wanted to know about the out-of-home youth, the more hidden stories were revealed, and they wanted to tell the truth through the game.
The out-of-home youth never wanted that kind of life for themselves, and they don’t want it now…
The experience of experiencing the position of out-of-home youth for three or four hours of playtime raises questions about the stereotypes that have been adhered to. And this little question will be the driving force to change the lives of out-of-home youth.
‘3LESS’ is a text-type adventure mobile game that aims to escape from the unconscious world by tracing the stories of teenagers outside the home by going back and forth between the dream world and the memory world. The gamer explores the story of an out-of-home youth through dialogue and options in the dream world, hints at central events in the memory world, and in the memory world.
After making eye contact with the owner of the falling dream, the protagonist who has lost his memory wakes up in a hazy world of dreams. In order to return to the original world, we need to find out who the owner of this dream is and why he was brought here.
The development team came into contact with ‘3LESS’, a non-profit organization ‘B-Spring’, through direct or indirect cases or data of youth in crisis. In the process, I came to know that they are socially marginalized due to the prejudice against youth at risk. It is said that he was planning a text adventure game from the perspective of the first-person protagonist.
The team consists of students from Yonsei University and Hongik University, and each team divides its roles into planning, story, and art. In the second half of 2019, ‘3LESS’ collaborated with youth shelters in the Higher Education Innovation Center workstation and non-profit organization vispring activities to plan the ‘Youth Accompanying Service’, and is currently conducting gamification to improve awareness of out-of-home youth. This project is under way with the support of the Institute for Higher Education Innovation at Yonsei University.
Currently, ‘3LESS’ has even been produced to a demo version, and the late visual work has been developed during the tumblr funding process, and the goal is to release it on Google Play when the funding ends.
