Gameplay Journal Entry: 8

I'm about to get really personal with my life and how this game affected me as a person and a game designer. I have for the last year slowly been struggling with my depression and anxiety. I really reached a tipping point when I lost my grandmother to covid in October. Since I was in the thick of school I didn't allow myself to process the pain. The pain of that and other things has been building until last week where I couldn't get out of bed to do anything but the things that would keep me living.

This game is about sorrow and processing through your internal demons. The game is raw and it hit me in a way I've never had a form of art that has touched me. The game doesn't have a beginning tutorial phase you basically stumble through the game until you get to your first ability. This makes you feel lost, I found myself questioning things like am I going the correct way? Am I doing the right thing? The questions started to build as I continued to play. Each section had a new feature that was a symbol of what I was feeling already. The first notable one was the wind storm. I would be progressing then a storm would push me back 2 feet. It felt like I was fighting to keep going. That's how I feel now, fighting every day to keep ahead of my work and my emotions when all I want to do is let the wind take me.

I felt not alone anymore after this game. I would defiantly say the game creators have so far been effective in their message. I haven't played that much into the game so I can't say as to how they end the game if it is still effective. I hope that it still progresses into the stages that people feel in grief. I can definitely say it helped me understand more on how to talk about my issues and not be afraid to. In the week's reading, it talks about how some of the social values are usually understood in an abstract form and I would have to agree that this game is just enough abstract that it approaches the ideas from a none threatening mentality. I was able to play through and process the game while playing. I didn't ever feel I was overwhelmed by the ideas given to me. “Creating the design for a game, then, involves making meaningful play happen through the incorporation of these values.” (Flanagan Nissenbaum 185) As a new game designer I want to bring these ideas into my future I want to give my games values because I want my players to have meaningful play and to grow into a better stronger person.

Work Cited

Flanagan, Mary, and Helen Nissenbaum. “A Game Design Methodology to Incorporate Social Activist Themes.” Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems — CHI ’07, 2007, pp. 185–185., doi:10.1145/1240624.1240654.