Reflection

Building this game from scratch was an ambitious yet fulfilling experience for me. The concept of this game requires a certain degree of complexity, which can then provoke a feeling of frustration from the players, who are to empathize with the experiences of a fearful child. Most of my time and efforts were spent in creating the grey-box version of the game, which involved lots of rearranging, debugging and cleaning codes. Throughout the process, I came to understand more deeply the importance of the order of codes, and became more comfortable using arrays and for loops to make my codes more economic. Creating and incorporating assets into the game was more of a fun yet intense part of the experience — I had to draw and lay down everything in less than two days. Despite the prolonged process, the final result was rather satisfying — if not better than I thought — and granted me a little bit more confidence in my ability to create interactive experiences with coding. I’m glad that I took on this challenge and pushed to realize my original vision.

Backstory

The fearful attachment style is one of the three insecure attachment styles according to the attachment theory. The fearful type is the most complicated of the three, since it’s the combination of the other two — it sometimes shows traits of the anxious type while other times shows that of the avoidant type, and constantly switches between the two. Such attachment style is formed in childhood where the child’s mother demonstrates ambivalent feelings towards the child, confusing the child with mixed signals — she sometimes shows hospitality and affection and sometimes coldness and negligence. Yearning for maternal love, the child constantly keeps at a safe distance from her while trying to get her attention. The child grows up feeling that the world is a quasi-hopeful yet quasi-dangerous place.

Personal Relevance

Dealing with intimate relationships as a fearfully attached individual isn’t easy. I found myself constantly switch between being avoidant and hostile towards people who intrude my personal space and yearning for extreme intimacy and fusion with another. I grew up with a mother who would give mixed signals and change mood quickly and unexpectedly. I was never explained to as to why she became angry at me or turned down my requests and expectations. I became a rather independent person at a young age, thinking that I didn’t need emotional reciprocation or guidance from my parents. Now reflecting on it, however, I think I was trying at all costs not to become this “needy” child that would irritate my mom; I wanted to be loved and cherished, and independence is the only ticket. I want to impose a critical lens on my childhood experiences and find out the correlations between certain scenarios and emotions that give rise to my kind of attachment style. Through playing this game, I hope the players can get a taste what it is like to live as a fearful child, and be cautioned of the danger of emotional abuse and negligence in parenting.

Credits

This project was assisted by the lectures & tutorials give by Katherine Moriwaki & Xin Xin.