This week we focused on brainstorming following the feedback we received from ¼. On Tuesday, our team did an internal design game jam focusing on the Passthrough functionality of AR. Throughout the week, we have talked to many faculty members to seek advice, and by the end of the week, we have a design direction in mind.
Design Update
Party Simulator: An experience targeting social anxiety through perspective taking and self reflection.
- Genre: single-player, simulator, first person
- Length: ~5 minutes
- Art Style: Surrealist, abstract, minimal, NPCs look like a big eyeball with a torso. This style is chosen so that player thinks less about the look and focuses more on the emotion
- Concept:
- Fear and Self Judgment
- The player enters the party room from the hallway, because they forgot their phone inside. Door opens, all the NPCs look at the player. Player leaves. The phone becomes a wallet. Oops, you were too nervous, and you accidentally took someone else’s wallet
- Goal: This is how people with social anxiety feel: being stared at and scrutinized. Because of fear, you accidentally took someone else’s wallet, instead of your own phone.
- Emotion: nervous, anxious, embarrassed, feeling like everyone is looking at you
Originally, we designed an experience with 3 stages.
- Stage 1 is Fear and Self Judgment as described above
- Stage 2 is when the player realizes that they picked someone else’s wallet, and now they have to return it.
- Stage 3 will have an NPC enter the scene. The NPC will look like the player and do what the player just did in stage 1. The goal is to let the player see themselves from a outsider’s perspective
Why did we choose to create this experience?
- We want to focus on eye contact. Eye contact is an important way for people to communicate with each other. However, for people, it can be scary to make eye contact with someone. For others, it’s scary that nobody is trying to make eye contact with them.
- Originally, we designed 3 stages, but we decided to focus on stage 1. The reason is that the moment you open the door and see lots of people is the moment that people’s anxiety goes up. This is the moment that’s most useful for exposure therapy. If we can find and create many moments like this, they can become a valuable tool for the therapist.
- On Tuesday, we had a chance to talk with Anthony Daniels, a visiting professor of ETC. He brought up an interesting point about social anxiety: people are anxious, because they are always thinking about themselves. People with social anxiety are hyper focused on their own behavior, however, to overcome social anxiety, they have to realize that other people are not really focusing on you —- they are also focusing on themselves. We want to let people know that, so we are trying to incorporate different perspectives into our design.
Meeting the Faculty
This week we meet visiting professor, Anthony Daniels to talk about design. We also met Jesse Schell on Thursday, and got a lot of good advice.
Teambonding
On Thursday, our team went to ax throwing together as our team bonding event. We learned how to throw axes from the coach and did an internal competition. Then we ate pizza and chicken together.
Agenda for next week
- Prototyping stage 1
- Meeting with Dr.Silk