Bad Feelings

“Pick up one feeling at a time.

Shout or say every feeling you pick up.”

Intention & Influence

Intention:

Are negative emotions bad to have? 

Nowadays, we’re told they’re not. That it is good when we express our feelings, talk about them, communicate to others how we feel, and be empathetic. Emotions, especially negative ones, and expressing them are important in order to process them and let them go. They’re not bad to have, but they’re bad to hold on to.

However, traditional Asian households think differently. I remember the multiple arguments I had with my friends. They wouldn’t tell me how they were feeling and kept it inside until I eventually found out, got angry at them for not telling me, and for not trying to work it out with me. It was frustrating to hear that they were feeling left out, or that they got upset at something I did from another person and the way they resolved those issues and those feelings were by keeping it in and distancing themselves. After talking to them, they told me this was how they were raised. This was what they were used to, that it’s hard to be confrontational, and that it’s hard to express what they were feeling, especially the negative feelings.

In a way, I was raised similarly. Mental health was a faraway fantasy in my mom’s and some of my Asian friends’ parents’ minds. You had to focus on your grades and get As. You weren’t allowed to stay home if you were sick or feeling mentally unwell. 

As we know now, this wasn’t healthy for us. Bad mental health DOES eventually affect one’s physical health. They affect your grades, your work, your relationships, and your life. If left alone, it takes over and breaks you into pieces. 

That was why I decided to make this my final piece. It took my mom and I multiple years of arguments, crying, misunderstandings, and hurt. However, she’s begun to understand its importance. I wanted to create this piece to simulate that feeling of being unable to express your negative emotions in a traditional Asian household, having you hold chopsticks and pick out noodles with feelings on them from a dinner table. If you talked about happy emotions, you weren’t reprimanded. However, if you picked the negative emotions, you would get hit. This was the conditioning that many Asian children experienced that eventually made it so that they were scared to express their own emotions, especially the negative ones.

 

Influence:

So, this artwork was a combination of a score and appropriation. When I first saw the prompt for this project, compared to my last two artworks, I wanted to create something more simple but meaningful. For a while, I didn’t know what it was that I wanted to create. A lot of the experiences I’ve had I already put into an artwork; my score was about the significance of gift giving, my appropriating artwork was about the cultural appropriation of my religion, and my intervention was about societal pressure and sheep mentality. So, I was stumped for a while thinking about what I would like to create an artwork out of. 

However, that was when I ran into trouble with my group of friends. We had a long talk, and one of my Chinese friends justified a friend’s failure to communicate the problems he was facing because he came from a traditional household and that was the culture in his family; to not express emotions or problems. She expressed that she was similar and would rather let it pass over than talk about it. So, with that in mind, it influenced the meaning behind this game. 

I also took inspiration from the case studies Sharp mentioned in his book “Work of Games” — “The Marriage” by Rod Humble and “Dys4ia” by Anna Anthropy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Both utilized simple shapes, mechanics, and colors to convey the experience that they wanted to tell players, whether it was the balance of a marriage or the experience of societal pressure and gender dysmorphia. The focus was on the expression, feeling, and experience rather than how polished the game was, which I enjoyed. Similarly, in my game, the player only has some fake clay noodles with emotions on them, a bowl to hold them, and some chopsticks. Despite its simplicity, it creates a scene and mechanic which has meaning that the player understands when playing the game. Like in “The Marriage” and “Dys4ia”, they have basic shapes and mechanics, but it communicates an idea and creates a scene for the player. For example, in the beginning of “Dys4ia”, the player doesn’t exactly ‘fit’ into a slot when trying to get through a hole in the wall blockade. Although it doesn’t directly mention it until later into the level, the player automatically understands that the blocks they were moving were an abstract representation of this person’s body. The player has a sense that the person didn’t feel like they fit into the body that they had. When playing my game, players automatically see its relation to Asian culture without anything directly telling the player what the artwork was about.

 

In general, Sharp’s book explained how games are legitimate art that DO parr traditional artistic mediums like cinema and paintings which convey ideas, emotions, and aesthetics through its mechanics, interactivity, and symbolic/abstract design. He also exclaimed about how art games are similar to artistic movements like the Fluxus and Dada movement, which emphasized simplicity, conveying a message, and which  strayed from traditional art (in this case, straying from the tradition of games simply being fun and entertainment). So, I wanted to make a game that was a combination of those movements while following Sharp’s definition of art games. 

Process

For the process, I went through two iterations and tweaked the score a bit. This artwork contains a score, which tells the player what to do, and has elements of appropriation as I borrowed a bowl and chopsticks from a friend of mine that, to me, represented Asian culture the most. The noodles were made from baked clay that I then wrote emotions on after it was fully baked. At first, they really looked like worms. 

Before all of this process, I had originally wanted to make it so that the negative emotions would be impossible to pick up. However, if a player decides to pick up the negative emotions, then they would get punished for it. The problem with this iteration was that one, the punishment was too hard and was not inclusive of older, younger, disabled, or weaker individuals and two, because I laid the emotions on a piece of paper and they only had chopsticks to give them that hint, players couldn’t really tell the cultural background the artwork was stemming off of. So, instead of a harsh punishment, a slap on the wrist was enough to condition players to avoid the negative emotions, and instead of making it impossible to pick up the negative emotions, I made it so that players would have to repeat the game over and over again until they no longer picked up negative emotions. Not only was this more efficient mechanically, it carried the message that I wanted to convey more accurately. Traditional Asian households are always very passive aggressive, and most of the hurt comes from the words of our parents when they choose to ignore the emotions we are trying to convey to them. Then, in addition to the bowl and noodles as my medium, it created the game what it is now.

 

 

Playtests

There were a total of 4 playtests, however I only had photos for two of those playtests. One of them is seen above with the lined paper used to write out the emotions and the pens to be the chopsticks the players use to pick up the emotions and the second was the third to final playtest where I just changed the wording to the score a bit from “Pick up your feelings; Shout or say every feeling you pick up” to “Pick up one feeling at a time; Shout or say every feeling you pick up”. The playtests, except for the first one, went as I would have expected with every player eventually avoiding the negative emotions and only picking up the positive emotions until there was none left. I think it was a fairly successful artwork, but if I had more time I would add more color to the noodles and maybe some other ingredients when eating udon or pho.