oh, to be loved

“oh, to be loved” is a game in which you play as Tachibana Minori, a young adult who struggles with mental health and concept of receiving love. He finds himself interacting with a psychopomp by the name of Elise, who attempts to offer a conjured scenario in which he converses with the souls of one of his loved ones.  Throughout the game, certain words and pieces of dialogue will  subtly stand out in a way that invites the player to click on them--however, doing so will result in Minori falling prey to intrusive thoughts, and being unable to catch certain pieces of conversation.

[currently in development]

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The creation of this game is in part, informed by the concept of “reparative art” detailed by Kara Stone. She describes reparative art as, “a process of bringing out difficult feelings, and working through them, and sometimes actually staying inside those feelings for as long as they need to be felt. And sometimes, it is a process of feeling even worse,” (Stone, Time and Reparative Game Design). This is shown in how the triggered intrusive thoughts in this game can be considered part of a healing process the main character must undergo to sort through his emotions. 

If I were to pick another quote at the core of this game it would be: "I would propose that games are queer because they provide us with a notably different way of looking at and living in the world," (Macklin,  Finding the Queerness in Games).  This game is one with a faulty narrator, and it purposefully  plays with the idea of how one's own perspective can be warped--even to the point that one fails to recognize and acknowledge the words of others.

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Macklin, Colleen. “Finding the Queerness in Games.” Queer Game Studies, University of Minnesota Press, 2017, pp. 249–257. 

Stone, Kara. “Time and Reparative Game Design: Queerness, Disability, and Affect.” Game Studies, vol. 18, no. 3, Dec. 2018, doi:http://gamestudies.org/1803/articles/stone.