Kitty is a hidden object game painted by hand in acrylic. Players navigate the events surrounding a historical murder by finding objects or clues, exploring six rooms in Kitty Genovese’s apartment building where she was murdered. Each room represents a witness or set of witnesses who lived there with Kitty. The first room is the apartment Kitty shared with her partner, Mary Ann Zielonko. The final room, the vestibule, is where Kitty spent her final minutes alive. Every item, figure, and element was painted, then animated, then coded to form a game that lives in the browser. This project uses small slivers of historical people’s lives and game-ifies them, reinterpreting them as vital pieces of a true crime story. Underlying the primary narrative of Kitty is a critical look at the bystander effect and the tendency to assume the worst about others, as well as the value of compassion in an apathetic era.

http://heartslob.com/kitty