yugo-the-non-game

Yugo: the non-game is a virtual space where you can drive a car, listen to the radio, and invite people to talk and share the experience with. It's a space that allows long conversations and hangouts that are often harder to come by when communicating digitally. It's a non-gamification of common voice chat sessions between people playing a game. It is a game for non-gamers. When a player starts a session, they are the car driver, and each person that joins is seated in one of the other three passenger seats. Players are automatically connected via voice chat. The radio stations are real-life internet radio streams and several of them are available by default, and more can be added or removed by the players. The environment, while it is abstracted and contextless, still contains elements of a certain time and region. The serpentine roads in the game are inspired by the mountainous roads going from Kosovo to Montenegro. The car is modeled after Yugo, an iconic car produced in Yugoslavia in the 1980s’. The time of the day is reminiscent of dusks in Kosovo, mostly because of the omnipresence of crows and the sounds they make at evening flying back to their nests for the night. Similarly reminiscent of that region are also the monolithic-like objects on top of hills, inspired by Socialist-era Yugoslavian monuments in Kosovo and the rest ex-Yugoslavia. Aside from the significance they have for the area and people there, they have a striking visual appearance that blur the time and place perceptions.