Using Games for Reflection

It was incredibly difficult for me to complete this project and then share it publicly. My past experience had been working with commercial software with cross-functional teams so the motivation to create something on my own was my first hurdle. The work I can create alone within a limited time frame is significantly below the quality of work I would expect of my team. Additionally this product is not valuable in a monetary sense and the amount of time I spent working prevented it from having a visual fidelity that would attract notice.

But most importantly this experience is unlike anything I have shared before, its very personal and the content I am working with is emotional — what will people think of me after experiencing it? I thought of how important other games with similarly challenging themes have been for my personal growth as well as for the industry so it seemed meaningful to get it into a shareable state.

There are a growing number of games that explore serious emotions and cover serious personal topics such as loss, depression and unhealthy relationships. They allow the player to live through an experience and consider someone living through that problem in the real world. There are fewer games that inspire or create joy or build resilience under those circumstances and would like the explore the genre in general further in my work.

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