http://goodwin88.github.io/Bounce/
Bounce is the title for a prototype game I worked on periodically to self-examine very specific issues around despair and the need and aversion for assistance. Unlike Three Grandmothers that was designed and considered openly with the oversight of a mentor, this was made without an in-progress reveal to anyone. It was made when feeling particularly low, during spurts of activity that then felt repulsive after a certain catharsis was achieved. Then I avoided the project for stretches of high functioning until needed again.
While nominally presented as a game with a tutorial phase to introduce mechanics, the actual core gameplay loop is frustratingly difficult, if not impossible to navigate. I am still working on this, intuitively adjusting and adding mechanics according to personal expression.
Future concerns are to allow for visual customization of the player character at the beginning to establish more personal connection. The faces are references to the Facial Affective Scale as designed by Patricia A. McGrath et al in 1996. There have been other designs and similar sets made since then; giving the player a choice of presentations may encourage empathy. The overall aesthetic references collage and piecemeal block construction; this can make modular character design easier to implement.
In conversation with a colleague (image shown to the right) the notion of games as a medium for expressionism came up. I had not thought of it quite this way before. My understanding of creative expression involved-in-the-moment, unmediated output; made as felt. Something that was more evidence of the emotive experience than an intellectual exercise of construction. The description clarified a lot of what I was doing, however – not just in terms of this project, but others in the recent catalog of work. I am often engaged in sustained emotional expression that can look impulsive but I am also making work that is deliberate and designed. These concurrent moments resemble neurosis, as defined: a relatively mild mental illness that is not caused by organic disease, involving symptoms of stress (depression, anxiety, obsessive behaviour, hypochondria) but not a radical loss of touch with reality.
But I posit that this is perhaps the natural and inevitable situation of any person making what they can in accordance with their understanding of their life, good, bad, and otherwise.