The Doctor Will See You Now
By Whitney Pow
The Doctor Will See You Now is a game inspired by the designer’s experience of navigating the healthcare system as a genderqueer, Asian-American woman. The player’s relationship to the world around her is a central focus of the game—interacting with a teal object, for instance, will cause the world around the player to blur and shake, isolating the player with her stressor. TDWSYN examines feelings of belonging, visibility and discomfort in institutional spaces. The game team includes project lead Whitney Pow, Chris Russell and Ashlyn Sparrow, who work with the University of Chicago’s Game Changer Chicago Design Lab.
Whitney is a writer and Ph.D. student at Northwestern University who studies queerness, belonging, estrangement, archives and memory as they manifest in video games and new media technologies. She is a 2015 Graduate Fellow at the University of Chicago’s Game Changer Chicago Design Lab and has worked as a writer and graphic designer for places including Autostraddle, Literary Death Match, The Feminist Press, the Asian American Writers Workshop and Publishers Weekly. She is also a regular staff member, panelist and speaker at Autostraddle’s annual conference, A-Camp.