Essential experience
What experience do I want my player to have when playing my game?
What is essential to achieve that experience?
How can my game capture that essence?
The essential experience is where I am starting with my games design documentation it is the experience that I want my player to have whist playing my game, this experience will be used to shape my game ideas around so that the game can capture the essence of that experience.
My Essential Experience
What Experience do I want my player to have?
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- after much consideration and hours spent pondering an idea for essential experience I finally landed on the idea of using Anxiety and constant fight or flight mode that human brains go into during dangerous situations, basically like a horror esque experience
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What is essential to that experience?
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- The main components that would be essential to portraying anxiety and constant fight or flight mentality would be OCD and other Anxiety triggers, pressure and time as well as phobias and fears.
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How can my game capture that essence?
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- the essence of anxiety could be capture through levels and sections that portray different anxiety types for example I could use phobias to create fear (kill spiders and more appear?) as well as calming sections of the game so the player doesn't receive a heart attack from the adrenaline overload of being in constant fight or flight and also sound can also capture the essence of anxiety through the use of sound effects like heavy breathing and heartbeats etc.
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Possible game ideas that portray this?
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- Horror game that portrays what anxiety is like for someone who suffers from it
- mini games that induce/show anxiety triggers
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In-Depth look at essential experience
In order to have a more in-depth look into the essential experience that i have chosen I looked at Jesse Schell's book "The Art of Game Design" and looked at a few of the Game design lenses that they believe should be looked at and answered when designing a game.
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Lens Of Projection
Do my players get to do something that they'd like to do in real life but cant?
- In a game based around anxiety the players may be able to develop a better understanding of what anxiety is and how it works, which is difficult in real life as its hard to understand what others are going through.
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What can my players relate to?
- Many people in society in the modern age exactly 5.9% of adults in the UK suffer from anxiety and over 40 million people in the USA suffer from anxiety and many more people around the world do so their is a large market of people that can relate to a game based on anxiety.
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Lens Of Beauty
What elements of my game are to be combined if they are to be beautiful?
- In a game about anxiety in order to make the experience "beautiful" the elements that would need to come together would be psychological impact as well as visual.
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What is beauty in the context of my game?
- In a game where the essential experience is anxiety beauty would technically be how anxious each of the game elements makes someone feel or portrays to the player. For example if a event was timed and the player and the player struggles to get it done making them stressed out the timer would make the game beautiful.
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How Can I make each element more beautiful?
- Research into anxiety (find most common causes/triggers and base elements of the games design around them). For example isolation/too much time alone to think is the most common trigger so I would base an element on this so maybe lighting could be very dull to portray loneliness and isolation.
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Change of Idea
After looking at Gameplay Loops and designing loops for the game based on my essential experience I came to the conclusion that portraying anxiety or mental health problems in a horror or bad way are quite common in existing games like Phasmophobia, Hell blade: seanu's revenge etc. and that the loop I had in mind of a level that triggers anxiety then immediately after another level that does the same may not work.
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I changed my mind on the idea of a game that's core experience is portraying anxiety in a purely horror format and giving the players anxiety through the fight or flight biological feeling we get because I thought that their was no motivation for the player to play a game that could harm them as a game based around using anxiety to scare people would not be well received especially with people who actually do suffer from anxiety.
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So I decided to change my essential experience from the prior idea of anxiety and putting players into constant fight or flight state whist playing into an idea that still uses anxiety but just simply portrays different triggers of anxiety which for some elements of a game based on this experience could be horror esche but not the entire game as the new eseential experience of the game is to portray what anxiety is like to suffer with.