Articulating My Essential Experience
In our first exercise we looked at Behaviors and Experiences for what we wanted the players to have within our essential experience.
I initially said “I would like the players to experience empathy“
Then came the question of why? Why do I want the players to experience empathy? And to be honest I became a bit stuck with what I wanted my essential experience to be, because I didn’t want players to feel sad for the character as there’s nothing wrong with having autism so it made me think how do I want the players to experience empathy and I realised it was through understanding and connecting with the character that I wanted them to experience empathy.
Our second exercise was to extract that experience.
We had the following prompts: How does it relate to a human experience? A feeling? A memory?
Empathy is more a complex psychological concept than we think as it can be split into 3 different types cognitive empathy – which involves thinking about another persons emotions, emotional empathy – sharing another persons emotions e.g. being able to feel the same emotion or the feeling of compassion for them and finally motivational empathy – caring about another persons emotions.
So how does my experience of empathy relate? Well for most they will at some point in their lives experience some type of empathy whether that be for a friend, loved one or maybe even a stranger they don’t even know.
Questions & Reflections
What do I know about my experience? How does it feel?
Something I have realised throughout my life so far is that I’m an empath, I am able to connect to people on a high level through emotions and I also experience emotions very intensely. Sometimes this has it’s advantages as I can really understand how someone might be feeling, but it also has it’s disadvantages as on a rare occasion others emotions can impact my own.
I want to make a game about understanding and empathy. I want the players to experience a connection with the main character.
I guess I would describe empathy from my own perspective as someone who is an empath. I’d say many factors can influence empathy whether that be from you experiencing something similar to someone else so you can relate or just being able to understand that other persons emotions and what they might be going through.
I would like to make the players experience empathy and understanding.
When people feel empathy they can feel for another person.
When people understand they can see reason behind things.
Within the lesson we got handed this wheel of emotions to see if our essential experience would fit into an area on the wheel. And to be honest I was struggling and still am to try and find an area in which my essential experience would fit in.
Exercise 4 we looked at Play structures
On the board we got shown this graph below and were told to consider where we thought our own game idea might fall.
Again I found myself struggling as I wasn’t sure where my game would go but after some thought I decided to put it closer towards the structured side as I see my game being more story based where the player follows a set path with the occasion of having the options to interact with different items etc..
Exercise 5: What supports that
experience? We got handed out this sheet that I roughly filled out during in class. I’d say that the driver within my game would be the aesthetics.
A brief introduction to concept art
To start of the second part of Mondays lesson 14th, we started by briefly looking at concept art which I was looking forward to as this was my major focus.
On the board we had a selection of different art styles that we could potentially choose from.
• Photorealism or Fantasy Realism
• Pixel art
• Mixed Media art
• Cel shading
• Hand-painted, freehand
• Minimalist
• Anime
• Cartoon
I’ve always been drawn to pixel art as I find it was be so fascinating how pixels can be used to create beautiful pieces of art however this year I want to look at minimalism as a style of art and see how I can take on the style while also making it my own. This is also because I want to focus on the game having a really impactful storyline
Next steps:
I’d say my next steps are to start creating mood boards for the environment of the game and also start creating my characters. I think to help me with my characters I’m going to write down the personalities and names to help spark ideas of what I would envision them to look like.