The Uncle Sam Atrium

Hot on the heels of Blossom, NY comes the author’s other local-history game focusing on upstate New York. But while the gently-pedagogic intention and conversational yet informative style are the same, actually Uncle Sam Atrium is notably different from the former both in approach and in subject matter.

Taking the first thing first, here we’ve got a visual novel in RenPy rather than a Twine game. Sure, in both cases the presentation is words plus pictures, but I found Uncle Sam Atrium to be more, well, visually-oriented than Blossom. I think this is just the nature of a VN engine: the pictures are bigger, spread out to the edges of the game window, while the text shrinks down to a small box that only holds a sentence or two at a time. There are advantages to this, because USA (oh hey, now I see what they were doing with that acronym!) combines contemporary photos with archival pictures showing how the eponymous building has changed over time, so being able to see more detail made these comparisons more arresting. At the same time, I sometimes wished there was a little more text – we don’t need Caro’s The Power Broker, here, but I missed Blossom’s footnotes providing additional depth and context. The narration is clear and coherent, don’t get me wrong, but I think the format wound up make the story the game presents simpler, or at least feel simpler, than it would have in the Blossom, NY format.

As for subject matter, I made that Power Broker reference advisedly because rather than a travelogue through a small town, the topic this time out is a forensic investigation of the death one particular building in the city of Troy. The game shows us the current, near-deserted state of this block-sized mall, then takes us back through consecutive strata of history to unpack the decisions that led to this point – and as with so many contemporary design issues in American cities, finds that a thoughtless, suburb-centric approach to postwar “urban renewal” set the project up for failure many decades on. What’s worse, the game closes by noting that current debates about what to do with the moribund building are in some cases retreading some of that same old ground, which will likely have similar results if followed through on, an eloquent testimony to the importance of paying attention to history.

It makes for a compelling story, but even acknowledging the upsides of the photos-first, limited-text presentation, I did find myself wishing for a bit more meat on the bones. We don’t get a sense of any of the personalities involved, or how the policies and economics around redevelopment have shifted over the decades, for example, which would help USA feel less like a cautionary fable and more like, well, history. I very much don’t want to begrudge what’s here, because I enjoyed it and it’s well done, and I have to admit that the average member of the audience is much less nerdy about this kind of thing than I am. But I think these two games, taken together (plus Swormville Sweep, the Google Maps one that I forgot having tested, thanks for the reminder Tabitha!) stand as a very strong proof of concept, and indicate there’s room to go both broader and deeper on these ideas.