Creative Work

Bitsy Looks Pretty Sus (2022): https://psyjacked.itch.io/bitsy-looks-pretty-sus

Just a little experiment from when I first used the free game engine Bitsy.

Teaching Philosophy (2022): https://psyjacked.itch.io/crd-704-teaching-philosophy

For an assignment in my Pedagogy and Technology course in 2022, I turned my teaching statement into an interactive game! Decide the fate of Jack's career!

Duke University Silent Vigil AR Experience (2022)

My AR project was first developed during a course on creating immersive virtual worlds at Duke University in 2022. I was tasked with creating a project that interacted with the Duke campus in a political way. My mind immediately went to activism, and I decided to digitally recreate a student protest on campus. My goal with the project was to see if digital technology could help students reflect on the significance of a student protest on campus not just as passive learners of the event but as active participants in an archival representation. From there, I developed an AR experience that allowed students to enter a site and exist in two time periods at once, connecting struggles for civil rights decades ago to the present moment of civil rights activism.

I chose the Silent Vigil, where Duke University students occupied the main quad of Duke and mourned the death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I picked the protest for its cultural significance for Duke University, the ease of access of the site, and the opportunity for self-reflection through embodied digital practice. I used photogrammetry of my body to create 3D models of concrete statues in Maya as stand-ins for the protestors. I used Adobe Aero to arrange them into the formation that the students of the protest took based on historical documentation (Sites of Memory). However, I created gaps in the rows to invite users to fill the space and join the protest. I also included a sign with instructions on how to behave just as the students did: standing in revered, respectful silence. The augmented reality experience could be accessed via a QR code that can be placed in front of the James B. Duke statue. 

The project is inspired by research on memorial games, or games that “encourage players to remember meaningful historical events and to consider their significance” (Rughinis and Matei, 2015, 629). Rughinis and Matei (2015) argue that a strong memorial game is not only able to invoke a historical event but uses credible information and offers chances for empathetic understanding of the event as well as self-reflection on its significance. Memorial games can also take advantage of the “rhetoric of time”; not only can developers use time to control the pace of the game to encourage moments of reflection, but also craft the game to create a “temporal attitude” that posits an argument on how we should think about the memorialized event in relation to the past, present, and future. “The past appears as a plain object that might be assessed either based on its consequences in the actual world, or in relation with social values and norms,” (Rughinis and Matei, 2015, 637). The project was also inspired by the Virtual Martin Luther King, Jr. Project (https://vmlk.chass.ncsu.edu/), an immersive experience preserving one of MLK’s speeches. My public speaking students who experienced the event not only reflected on MLK’s speaking techniques but also about the speech’s relevance to our current moment of civil rights struggles and how they can carry the speech’s message forward. 

While the project aims to create a memorial for the Silent Vigil and draws from archives, the experience itself does not rely on presenting archival materials. Memorials of the civil rights movement rely on archival footage to illustrate stories and for emotional effect. As Brasell (2004) argues, news footage is chosen for its newsworthiness which often involves conflict and spectacle. Using archival footage, therefore, risks showing a skewed account of the movement and presenting it “as a spectacle, frozen in times past” (Brasell, 2004, 12) and therefore divorced from our current movement for civil rights. Therefore, this project takes a representative and experiential approach.

Through this project, I invite students to exist in two places at once: 1968 and today. Through a representational experience, I avoid relying on mediations of the past from news outlets that present the civil rights movement as frozen in time. The AR experience takes advantage of the rhetoric of time to transport students to 1968 while still existing in the present moment, creating a bridge between the two. Key to this process is attention to detail on how the vigil worked in real life so students can immerse themselves in a way that is authentic to the vigil, helping to preserve the vigil in a way that allows for deeper engagement with the campus. By using abstract representations of people, I invite students to see themselves in the protestors and better immerse themselves in the moment. Instead of just reading about the Silent Vigil, they get to live it. The virtual representation encourages students to imagine and understand what it must have been like to be a part of the event and ask themselves what they can do to carry the purpose and message of the Silent Vigil forward to today’s world. 

Covid-19 Shopping Simulator 2020 (2022)

For my final project for a course at Duke University, I wanted to capture a moment in time during the Covid-19 pandemic. I decided to digitally recreate the experience of shopping during the height of the pandemic.

Working with VR gameplay in Unity was challenging.  With VR, the player is rooted by the XR Origin. They are bound to a space in the virtual world by a box that correlates with the physical play area. I can’t use teleportation to have the player move with the XR Origin because the player needs to grab things off a shelf, put it in a basket, and carry it around. Then I had an idea. I knew how to make something move in Unity via keyboard inputs, so what if I could move the XR Origin with the arrow keys? Then the player could move the box wherever they needed to, grab the items off the shelf, put it in the cart, and then move again. 

However, it would be pretty disorienting to have the “magic carpet” of VR move around without the player moving with it. I had to come up with a way to have the movement of the “magic carpet” make sense within the context of the game. So I came up with the idea of having the players sit in a mobility scooter before moving the XR Origin to make the game mechanic make more sense within the context of the game. Players would sit in a chair in the physical space and move the XR point with the keyboard in front of them. But instead of seeing a chair and a keyboard, they would see a mobility scooter with a D-pad in the virtual world. I also added bandages to the keyboard so the player knows what buttons to press without taking off the headset. Not only did the addition of a mobility scooter give added context to the player’s movement but allowed me to explore the concept of disability through games – to explore what it’s like to have to use a mobility scooter to navigate a space that isn’t necessarily designed with it in mind. 

I wanted to immerse players in a story during a specific and relatable period in time. I had the player collect soap, eggs, toilet paper, and diapers. These were all items that were in short supply during the early stages of the pandemic due to not only demand for them going up but people hoarding them. With the diapers in particular, I wanted players to have some sort of sense of who the player character was (i.e. someone with a family to provide for instead of just providing for themselves). I wanted to recreate some of the challenges and frustrations of navigating the spaces of grocery stores during the pandemic. For instance, the diapers were hard to reach and required clever use of the environment (i.e. picking up a grocery item on the shelf and throwing it to knock down the diapers). One shopper had a cart full of diapers, but I didn’t make them interactable because you can’t just grab an item from someone else’s cart. 

I put a big green bubble around the other shoppers to represent social distancing. The act of social distancing felt like a game to me, in that it added a new contingency to life. Thomas Malaby (2007) argued that games were “domains of contrived contingency” where the rules calibrate predictable and unpredictable outcomes that were then subject to interpretation by the player.  With Covid, I now have to consider my movements in spaces and around people a lot more carefully. Especially narrow grocery stores suddenly looked like death traps to me. In fact, with the narrow design of grocery store shelves, I felt like Pac-man running away from deadly ghosts. I thought I could capture that same experience in a ludic experience in VR very effectively. That’s why I made the other shoppers red ghosts. The player wouldn’t be punished in game for entering these bubbles (though the real life consequences for doing this are very real), but I thought that players already used to social distancing in the physical world would still be encouraged to keep this contingency in mind. It was also important for me to keep the experience somewhat light hearted while still respectable since this is a pretty heavy subject for many people. The immersion of my project came from embracing the Kairos of a particular moment in time – doing my best to recreate a recent, relatable, and significant moment in many people’s lives today. 

The Other Side (2016): https://psyjacked.itch.io/the-other-side

The Other Side was created in Inform 7 for an Honors College seminar about interactive literature under the supervision of Professor Stuart Moulthrop at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee in 2016. Our team wanted to create a game that not only had fun puzzles and dialogue but would engage the player beyond a standard adventure game. We incorporated themes of love, death, loss, and acceptance as players collected memories of the protagonist’s family to help defeat the monster in the closet. The whole process not only trained our problem-solving skills and determination needed for a game’s designing, testing, and debugging phases, but gave us invaluable skills in how to make digital media meaningful.