Digital Narrative Games: https://reflect.creativitycourse.org/published/digital-narrative-games-reflection-2/
First Game Draft: https://reflect.creativitycourse.org/published/game-1st-draft/
Final Draft
Final Game: https://salma2005-web.github.io/New/
Since I began thinking about an idea for my own game, I was mainly trying to focus on connecting it to psychology. I love psychology, and I think I have the ability to sense people’s feelings and emotions. Therefore, I decided to make a game that can help people by focusing on a psychological topic. That is why I created a game about being optimistic. I wanted to encourage people to shift their mindset and way of thinking to think positively by converting all the life hardships into new positive points. Through daily challenges, people tend to forget that there is always hope in life, so I wanted to remind everyone that there is always hope in everything.
After finishing my first draft, I got multiple pieces of feedback, and all of them were talking about how the game’s answers are predictable, and someone recommended making the game more educational. As a result, I tried to adjust the scenarios to be harder at each stage by giving advice. To be honest, I did not feel that the answers were predictable; they were just simple answers. However, I see that people need these simple answers. Thinking about every challenge in our lives and searching for hope and positive points in it is simple, but we tend to forget this simplicity because we are always busy overthinking our challenges. I noticed that all of us need predictable thoughts and advice because we tend to forget them. Therefore, I decided to convert my topic from just encouraging people to be positive into being optimistic and dealing properly with life challenges through giving real-life advice. The game gives you solid advice: look for the bright side when life becomes tough, forgive people to avoid carrying that heavy baggage around, and enjoy the ride instead of just waiting for the finish line. The game reminds you that while you cannot change life circumstances, it teaches you how to change the way you look at these circumstances.
Another extra thing I added to the game is unlocking your archetype. The psychological answers in the game are divided into three emotional responses: shadow, neutral, and optimal. Based on your choices while playing the game, your resonance (i.e., a multiplier that drops if you make poor choices and increases if you make healthy ones) will be calculated, providing analysis, and will unlock your specific archetype: The Luminous Sage, The Shadow Voyager, The Stoic Realist, or The Adaptive Seeker. Based on your archetype, the game will give you recommendations.
If I had more time, I think I would read more in psychology to understand people’s different personalities. Every person has a different response to life situations; therefore, it was hard for me to realize and understand the different responses of people to different life scenarios. For example, it is something normal for any person to cry when someone they love dies. However, some people do not cry when they face the death of loved ones, which is something difficult for me to understand. This is a simple example of how people’s responses differ, even in the same situation. Therefore, I think reading more about people’s psychology would help generate more realistic and helpful scenarios.
While modifying my game, I learned that optimism is not about ignoring life difficulties; it is about how we decide to respond to them. Being positive does not mean pretending everything is perfect; it means choosing how to handle life challenges.
Scenarios Referencing:
While generating the scenarios and their answers, I focused mainly on my own experience in noticing real-world problems that people face every day, in addition to asking some of my friends about their different responses to different life scenarios. Through building the scenarios’ answers, there were always three types of responses: shadow, neutral, and optimal.
The article, “Five Science-Backed Strategies to Build Resilience”, discusses strategies like “radical acceptance”, which simply means complete, non-judgmental acceptance of reality as it is, and “cognitive reframing”, which is a technique to identify and challenge the negative thoughts. After reading this article, I noticed that true resilience means feeling the pain, then moving forward, and that helps me in building optimal answers. True resilience means accepting the messy reality and then trying to think about how to handle it.
https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/five_science_backed_strategies_to_build_resilience
The article, “Toxic Positivity”, discussed the meaning of toxic positivity, which simply represents how people reject their own negative emotions and experiences to focus on positive thinking instead, which is completely wrong. Psychologists proved that ignoring our pain does not make us stronger; it actually just stalls our healing. Understanding this new concept helped me in the game with generating the shadow choices, as these shadow choices are part of the possible responses for every real-life scenario.
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