Kerry Richardson kerry richardson
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    • Discharged

    Discharged (2023) is an art game depicting the experiences of a Latinx veteran returning home and reacclimating to civilian life. In the prologue, you play as a teen recruited to join the military while still in high school. Upon returning from combat duty, you must make your way back to your house. Bureaucracy, apathy, and a lack of understanding stand in your way.

    Background

    Discharged was created by the warGames Tactical Media Collective, a collaboration between Chicano artist and US military veteran Eric J. Garcia and Plug-in Studio Co-founders Steve Ciampaglia and Kerry Richardson. The War Games project is prompted by the US military's long and tangled history with the commercial videogame industry. On the hardware side, there has been a mutually beneficial relationship between the two since the 1960s; this has been called the “military-entertainment complex.” In 2002, the US Army launched the free multiplayer game “America's Army” specifically as a recruitment tool, exposing young players to military culture and encouraging them to enlist in the actual military. After a 20-year run, the Army shut down “America's Army” and shifted its focus to esports. Today all the branches of the Armed Forces have esports teams who compete professionally and engage young gamers directly through platforms like Twitch. The military also uses videogames and simulations for training, and it is hard to miss the similarity between remote warfare (using drones for combat) and a gamespace.

    At the same time, the US military has increasingly targeted Latinx youth in their recruiting. The percentage of enlistees in the Marines that are identified as "Hispanic" has risen rapidly in the last 20-some years. As a result, Hispanic men and women both are now over-represented in the military compared to their percentages of the civilian workforce. The warGames project grew out of the merging of these two threads.

    1 / 7
    Title screen
    2 / 7
    Once you return from service, you make your way through the airport
    3 / 7
    Talking to another vet at a bar
    4 / 7
    Make your way to the VA Hospital
    5 / 7
    Navigate the bureaucracy at the VA
    6 / 7
    A recruiter spies on a kid in an arcade
    7 / 7
    The final level

    Credits

    Concept & Design: Steve Ciampagli, Eric J. Garcia & Kerry Richardson
    Illustration: Eric J. García
    Animation, Level Design, Project Management: Kerry Richardson
    Sound Design: Steven Ciampaglia
    Game Development: Austin Wilson (Lead), Kerry Richardson, Amanda Dittami
    Custom Arcade Cabinet: Kerry Richardson
    Cabinet Design: Luca Ciampaglia

    Funding

    The project was generously supported by Chicago Art Department; School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC); the Shapiro Center for Collaboration and Research at SAIC; Northern Illinois University, and the Propeller Fund—administered by Threewalls, and funded by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.