YOU ARE NOT A MONSTER

SINBI LEE - FINAL PROJECT - CRWR 312 

(This game contains mentions of violence, death, suicide, and swearing.)

ARTIST STATEMENT

You Are Not a Monster is a choose-your-own-adventure game based on "Dread; Beneath The Full Moon" by Epidiah Ravachol and Nathaniel Barmore, where a group of undergrad students try to escape a werewolf on a camping trip at Grand Canyon. I was inspired to create a origin for the werewolf in the game, and decided to make Morgan, a character depicting grief, love, and just absolute fear. I was also heavily impacted by "Queers In Love At The End of The World" by Anna Anthropy, which made me go through 10 different emotions within only 10 seconds. The game allowed me to reflect on themes of love, relationships, and grief even after the game had ended. "Anxiety is the dizziness of Freedom" by Ted Chiang. which is one of my favorite short stories of all times (I just decided that, it’s been decided,) invited me to this idea of continuous realities and the regret of taking one action over the other. The three components of the class evoked me to write this dark text-based game. At first, I had a hard time defining exactly how to build a story with multiple branching ideas and endings. Because my own definition of a story was "telling someone something," it was difficult to allow myself a proper boundary when it came to interactive storytelling. I eventually came up with choosing a goal- which was to tell the backstory of the werewolf through a playable game. After the goal, it was easier to create the characters and allow them to tell their own stories, as well as coming up with 2 different endings. This game's themes include grief and loss, choices and consequences, and overall love and relationships. By allowing players to make choices with their dialogues and shape Morgan's plot within the boundaries of the screen, I wanted to give players a chance to reflect on their own life without coming in contact of real danger- along with an realistically-unachievable monster element to it. I hope to involve the player's emotional engagement through interactivity in a unique and immersive way, while still allowing relatability from Morgan's emotional downfall.