Manjusaka

Manjusaka is a game that explores the phrase 'Hell is other people' by Jean-Paul Sartre. It is an art game for social satire. To achieve this, the game built a Hell that has a small society similar to a human world, and asked the players to work their way through Hell residents who were eager to kill them, thus Hell is the central manifestation of unbecoming side of humanity. This article describes the design and development process of Manjusaka, giving reasons to why each step was made and how the game mechanic served the phrase. The lessons learnt here will likely benefit future games that intend to find appropriate mechanics to support and express their concept.