A World Without You (Un mundo sin vos)

A World Without You is a poetic video game set against the backdrop of Argentina’s last military dictatorship (1976–1983), beginning in the months leading up to the 1978 FIFA World Cup, a moment when national celebration and state terror coexisted in deliberate contradiction. While stadiums filled and flags were raised, thousands of people were forcibly disappeared, their absence rendered invisible by spectacle, propaganda, and fear. It was originally developed for the Ex-ESMA Jam: The First Game Jam for Human Rights and Memory, organized by the Public Entity Memory Space and Human Rights and Women in Games Argentina. A World Without You follows the search of a female cat for María, her human companion, who vanishes within this political landscape of repression. Refusing the language of ownership, the game frames their relationship as one of mutual presence and care. Through hunger, disorientation, and persistence, the cat navigates a world that continues to function as if nothing were missing, asking questions of humans and non-humans alike, listening to objects, observing rituals, and sensing time as erosion rather than progress. Reconstructing historical events from an non human historic perspective, the project explores the social and symbolic mechanisms that sustained enforced disappearance:  domestic spaces as sites of quiet rupture,non human sensory-perceptual worlds, systems of surveillance, the violent appropriation of identity through the theft of babies, the rise of collective resistance embodied by the Mothers and Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, and mass sport as a technology of distraction. These phenomena emerge not as explanations, but as atmospheres, felt through absence, repetition, and interruption. The game adopts an ecological, interspecies perspective, reimagining political violence through the eyes of the non-human beings who coexisted with it. Flora, fauna, stars, and objects are treated as witnesses rather than metaphors, inspired by the philosophical work of Vinciane Despret, Donna Haraway, Val Plumwood, Alenda Chang, and Timothy Morton. In this framing, memory is not exclusively human, and history is not only recorded in archives, but embedded in places, routines, and matter. Formally, A World Without You experiments with the representation of time, grief, and perception within the constraints of the Bitsy engine: using low definition pixel art, music, scale and color shifts, and expanded illustrations to stretch its minimalist language. The result is not a game about solving a disappearance, but about inhabiting its consequences.