PORTFOLIO
Memory Traveler
This is a warm VR game focuses on Anxiety Disorder and childhood memories by helping them walk the memories through and get new understandings.
Partner: Siyan Mao
(Bachelor's degree in psychology in UW)
Overview
It's 2021. Anxiety Disorder has become the top-1 mental disease on this planet among people of all ages. It's posing a great physical and psychological threat, like a lurking monster that wants to take all your energy and happiness away. Since then, the sense of emptiness has often accompanied people. People are robbed of motivation and feelings, and even almost forget who they are and where they come from.
According to New York licensed mental health counselor Ramon Lantigua Jr., 'Memory' is an underrated element of Anxiety Disorder. Childhood memories can often affect one's whole life, whether they are empowering or traumatizing.
Revisiting and overcoming memories (memory desensitization treatments) is a commonly used treatment for Anxiety Disorders. By voluntarily going through childhood memories again, adults with mature minds are more likely to have new understandings, reach reconciliations with themselves and make positive changes in real life.
Are you still keeping your childhood memories? The answer is Yes. Things that seemed so long ago seem blurred but for some people, they remain in their subconscious. If you don't remember, that's fine. This game is about to take you back to your childhood.
To fight Anxiety Disorder, people take means of professional counseling therapy and self-treatments, which include many ways, the most popular ones of which are exercising, traveling, gaming, etc. Overall, they're more economical and less constrained than therapies..
Mcdull, a lovely pig created in Hong Kong by Alice Mak and Brian Tse, had its first movie My Life as Mcdull come in 2001. The film tells the story of a Hong Kong kindergarten child's life, with warm memories with his friends and mother, as well as his own future thinking and outlooks. With its daily-life scenes and child-like storytelling methods, this deceptive simple animation is actually surprisingly philosophical.
My design goal, to reveal the daily warmth and help anxious people recover from old memories, is just as
simple cartoons that evokes people's memory and eases their mind, therefore helping them find their inner power.
The game is positioned as an easy puzzling game that doesn't require intense control skills.
When the game ends, player does not fall into emptiness. They can
get fullfillness from resonating and thinking.
Also, this game has shorter time duration and more flexibilities. Chapters are not related. Players can start and stop playing it from anywhere they like in the whole story.
About the Game
This VR game allows people to get away from their anxiety for a second. Through the immersive interactions, they go back to their childhood, resonating in their memories and gaining a deeper understanding of both others and themselves, so as to re-gain the courage to overcome difficulties.
Like a delicate and touching movie, people will get spiritual satisfaction and senses of taste after watching it, instead of falling into emptiness after the end screen is out like most games.
Together we interviewed 15 people online with the 'source' of their anxieties. And many of the interviewers can trace these 'sources' back to their childhood memories.
But according to psychologists, many of the embarrassment and sorrow that 'arise from childhood memories' are caused by people reexamining these experiences with the eyes of adults.
Are those memories really that sad? Now, if you have chances to experience or witness them again, to touch your loved ones again, and to relive life as a kid again...
This time, can you find the warmth, love and trust?
The game has 3 chapters that cover the top three 'sources' above. It will lead players to walk through the childhood memories again as a kind of desensitization treatment.
A Close Look - chapters
Everything is strange today. All pedestrians disappeared, the street is so silent. You've been tired of everything in your life, so when you received a weird invitation, you chose yes. The street starts to change, and it starts to become the way it was when you were young.Your mission is to save your childhood favorite cafe from being closed. Along your way to the cafe, you met many people in your childhood memories, and some of them need your help. To your surprise, as a little kid, you can be helpful to a lot of people.
You blame mom for always being so harsh on your study. She always makes fun of you. 'Does mom really love me?' As a kid, you've always been wondering this question after arguing with her. Now, it's time to sneak in her memories, when you were first brought to her by God, in her tummy.
You once dreamed to be the next Darwin, because you think that will be cool to know every bug's name--until your secret was found out by others. You are afraid of caterpillars. 'You're so timid!', said your friends, 'how come you can become the next Darwin!'
