Visit the cremation site of Pol Pot as a sleepwalker. Interpret the world your character is inhabiting by their gestures and brief glimpses inside their head.

This game does not have an ending until you decide to leave. Game time is connected to the current real time in Cambodia.

The real life cremation site of Pol Pot in Cho-Am* is a place of contradictory spiritual and political significance. As a "good-luck" shrine, offerings are continuously left by visitors who hope to have assistance in their prayers from a main architect of the Cambodian auto-genocide. One of these visitors, a Thai businessman, constructed a hand-made spirit house at the site as thanks for Pol Pot appearing in a dream to him and giving him winning lottery numbers.

This is a way of dealing with the memory and presence of someone responsible for pain and destruction that is outside of the realm of forgiveness and punishment.

The site itself, across from a casino in a small town on the border with Thailand, in the region of Anlong Veng (a previous base of the Khmer Rouge), has very little aside from a tin roof covering a mound of dirt where Pol Pot's ashes used to be, a burn bin, a couple of spirit houses, and a hut near the entrance where a guard (the wife of a former Khmer Rouge general) sits and takes admission payment. It is an otherwise empty area with a powerful history.

Much of the experience of the site takes place in one's head.

"The actions themselves are recognizable, familiar, and affecting, but alien . . . ." - Daniel Fries, Kill Screen

"The chilled out tone and ethereal texture of the game suggest a certain degree of pensiveness and maybe even transcendence. [ . . . It] captures some complex and not altogether noble feelings evoked by engaging with historical trauma of this magnitude. It's difficult to wrap one's head around, and feels far away, and yet there's the lingering phantom of something terrible just out of view." - Lana Polansky, Sufficiently Human

"I dreamt of visiting the place where Cambodia's former dictator Pol Pot was buried [ . . . . and] woke up, dripping with sweat. This was after I played Cho-Am." - Southeast Asia in Video Games

Selected for Games and Playful Media Exhibition at A MAZE. / Johannesburg 2016 and Signification exhibit at A1LabArts in Knoxville, TN.

* Normally transliterated as Choam, this less common spelling helps with pronunciation. Also CHOAM appears to be thing in the world of Dune.

Visit a quiet town in the Peruvian desert at night searching for spirits and taking photos, then sharing these pictures with locals who free-associate based on them. This game is based on time I spent with a brujo in the desert suburb of Cachiche, a town that was founded by witches during the Peruvian Inquisition. Here descendants of witches still live and continue to practice traditional healing and fortune-telling.

"What works here is that uncertainty space... In a number of places you'll see shadows that don't have a body. And you'll also see people discussing secrets in dark rooms or running past you hurriedly from behind fences. But this only adds to the underlying feeling of something sinister and ominous present, watching you, following you wherever you go..." 

Kill Screen

"It's all pleasantly dizzying, like a fever dream." 

Baltimore City Paper

FEATURES 

• Explore a 3D world with ambient sounds, voices and textures from the Peruvian desert, a living environment at night.
• Use your photography as a means of conversing with non-player characters, revealing what they see as well as what they imagine.
• See yourself as an outsider, lurking in alleys, eavesdropping on conversations, going where you're not supposed to go.
• Watch the forces of tourism at work and the conflicts rumbling beneath the surface of a small town.
• Discover that your camera is not just a passive recorder, but that its act of observation can change the environment.
• Complete progressively more abstract quests and delusional journal entries.
• Export and share your photos.

Selected for the International Indie Den Showcase at Game Happens! in Genova Cornigliano, Italy. Exhibited at Synthetic Zero Event at BronxArtSpace, New York (2015) and the Maryland Artist Registry Juried Exhibition at Maryland Art Place, Baltimore (2016).