You play Sol, a child whose parents – unhappy with their life on a dying Earth – flung themselves into space intending to create a new human culture from the ground up on the planet Vertumna IV. I Was a Teenage Exocolonist is a genre-spanning game about growing up on an extrasolar colony: part life simulator, deck builder, roleplaying game, and dating simulator.

I’m Lindsay Ishihiro, and as the narrative designer of I Was a Teenage Exocolonist, I’d like to tell you about the ways our game follows in this tradition, breaking new ground in how players represent themselves and their gender, sexuality, and relationships in a video game. It’s long been used as a vehicle for representation, from Star Trek exploring new frontiers of romance, to Octavia Butler positioning a Black woman at the forefront of humanity’s escape to space in Parable of the Sower, to dystopian YA like The Hunger Games tapping into every young woman’s desire to change the world by burning it down.

Speculative fiction often turns the lens back on the reader, making the previously unknown become knowable by turning it into story.

Instaling I Was a Teenage Exocolonist