You Have a Secret

Game Structure

A game built around an emotional cycle

The experience is built around a cycle of behaviors that makes people lonely and feel disconnected from the people around them. These behaviors are often associated with skills related to emotional intelligence.

• Reflect - A struggle to identify what their problems are
• Disclose - Difficulty opening up and communicating their situation
• React - Immediately reacting, often lashing out
• Respond - Difficulty accepting how people respond to how they reacted
• Isolate - Avoiding other people and internalizing everything

Each step in cycle has associated mini games. As the player goes through the cycle as the main flow of the game, they encounter a random mini game from the pool associated with the step that they are on, pushing them to break the cycle in different ways:

• Reflect - Find reasons to reach out
• Disclose - Communicate details about the secret or internal feelings
• React - Being able to recognize emotions but not let them control them
• Respond - Communicating needs
• Isolate - Identifying people to reach out to

Why an interactive experience? It is an introduction for players to grapple with emotional intelligence skills they may not know about, while being in a low-stakes environment that allows them the comfort, safety, and support to struggle with the tasks presented to them

Art Direction

Mysterious and Metaphorical

To place people in the mindset of exploration, it was important to be a bit mysterious to prompt curiousity. That led to a lot of metaphorical imagery and dark colors.

All images were edited to match the art direction, regardless of source, and come from both personal photography and stock imagery.

Single Selection Mechanics

For hard topics, give them easy interactions

Asking people to confront their emotions is hard for many people cognitively, so giving them single selection mechanics reduces the barrier to letting them engage with the topic.

Text Prompt Interactions

Explicitly ask about their experience

To delve more deeply, being more explicit when asking about a specific emotion gets them to confront that emotion head on. Letting them freely respond lets it be more personal.

Custom Interactions

Address different emotions with ludonarrative coherance

Because the experience is built around a cycle of emotions, keeping all of the interactions the same may not address how users are feeling at different points in time.

For certain parts of the cycle, such as the react section which is about helping people sit with uncomfortable emotions, interactions may need to be soothing. For others, such as the respond section which helps people feel like they can take action and express themselves, interactions may need to be more active.

Zine Takeaway

Provide ongoing support beyond the engagement

The experience may be an interesting one-off experience for someone to explore, but to encourage them to take it back into their lives, there needs to be a reminder.

Pulling from the history of activism, the experience populates a zine as you play. At the end the player is prompted to print it out, along with folding instructions, so they can carry with them as a reminder of the interactions they encountered.

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