Third World: The Bottom Dimension is a single-player PC game conceptualized by Gabriel Massan and built with a wide team of collaborators. It explores Black Brazilian experience as it intersects with the ramifications of colonialism across physical and digital realities. The game is inspired by simulation games like The Sims, which model social interactions between artificial lifeforms; cultural historian Saidiya Hartman’s methodology of Critical Fabulation, which uses storytelling to address archival omissions and generate possibilities; and the ‘consciousness-raising’ theories of radical Brazilian educator Paolo Freire. Freire’s influential book Pedagogy of the Oppressed champions harnessing individual experience to transform reality and effect social change.

This decolonial game aims to challenge the systems and behaviors that have built our social realities by using worldbuilding and storytelling techniques. Across two interconnected but distinct levels co-designed with artists Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro and Novíssimo Edgar, with sound design by LYZZA, each level or ‘episode’ in the game brings ideas central to the collaborators’ practices into the lore of Third World. This evolving and cinematic experience nurtures a growing awareness that leads players towards an expanded understanding of this world and the discourses, stories, and histories it simulates. 

Gameplay becomes an exercise of balancing competing consciousnesses: one imposed by the game’s extractive ‘Headquarters’, which is modelled around colonial concepts of ‘exploration’, ‘nature’, and ‘knowledge’. Others are gradually revealed through play, and propose alternative ways to navigate in the world.