November 2023 - Present
Recollection
Transformational Narrative VR Game
Description
Recollection is a pitch project created by a team of six ETC students, whose goal is to create empathy and understanding for people with trauma by depicting it in an interactive narrative VR experience. We are working closely with the Pittsburgh VA to create an accurate representation of trauma as it affects a person’s mental state and perception of memory. Our interactive experience is about Sam, a young painter who’s suffered a car crash that killed Sam’s mother.
The Player navigates Sam’s memories by painting objects in the VR scene, uncovering aspects of the memory Sam has forgotten, or traveling to a different scene altogether.
Our goal is to showcase this project in serious games festivals and open dialogue about the nature of trauma, and its effects on the people in our lives and our communities
Using Interactions to Communicate a Mental Experience
Our first step as a team was to research how trauma and PTSD were understood in psychiatric circles, and what impact the experience had on a person’s memory and habits. Through talking with our SME, Dr. Sarah Butterworth at the Pittsburgh VA, exploring articles and books written by researchers, and looking at first-person accounts, I isolated a key experience that I believed lent itself well to both VR and interactive narrative: intrusive memory and avoidance.
The Player explores a set of memories from the PC and interacts with objects in the scene. There are two types of interactions: pleasant interactions (which the Player has fun doing) and unpleasant interactions (which make the Player uncomfortable, something they would be hesitant to do). As the Player travels through each memory scene, they can either continue the game loop by picking the comfortable interaction, like painting or break out of that loop by doing an uncomfortable interaction, like picking up a piece of broken glass. Breaking out of the loop means confronting an unbearable memory of the trauma.
As the Player stays in a place of comfort and fun, aspects of the traumatic memory bleed into the benevolent memories the Player is in, intrusions that shouldn’t be there.
The goal of this design was to evoke in the Player the same mentality and emotional experience that a traumatized person might have: memories of the trauma “corrupt” memories that used to be pleasant. Avoiding the memory does not work. The only way to confront the trauma is to expose oneself to mental experiences and feelings that are painful or scary.
Diagram of initial narrative interaction design
Focusing the Design
As we moved toward a more non-linear narrative, I realized that the complexity of our topic was creating an unfocused design process. We had very different ideas on what aspects of traumatic experience we should focus on.
I asked us to isolate the three big aspects of trauma we are depicting. In the end, we settled on the three below:
How trauma affects our sense of self
Intrusive memories
Feeling stuck in a cycle
Storyboard of example transition: The Player uncovers a memory by painting on a blank canvas.
Prototyping and Playtesting in Twine
We wanted to start playtesting our concepts, imagery, and narrative beats as early as possible. I created several interactive demos using Twine. The playtesters would walk through the core beats of our experience, and we used text and images to describe what would be happening in the VR experience itself.
Current Playtesting Results
The goal of the playtests we conducted during the first half of development was primarily to understand the Player’s emotional state. We used the emotion when to help Players with their emotions during play, and see if they understood the player character’s emotions.
The results were mixed. While some playtests were successful, as the Player understood the character’s emotions, and felt strongly for what the character was going through, others correctly matched the emotions the PC was feeling at certain moments, while not feeling much themselves. Some assumed things about the character we did not intend them to. Some were more focused on the gameplay and thus did not feel like they were emotionally engaged with the experience.
We are currently seeking ways to mitigate the gap between what the character feels and what the Player experiences, in order to move forward toward our goal of evoking empathy in the Player.
