Dysphoria: Through a Mirror Darkly

This project got its start in my sophomore year as a short and simple test for my Gamefeel class, specifically focusing on kinesthetic flow. In my senior year, I used that project as a base to build on for my UX Capstone, and I tried to better focus the project and hone it's specific feel.

My main focus of the project was to take my own difficult to explain feelings of Gender Dysphoria and see if I could turn those into an interactive horror experience, to see if the medium of games could function as a way to communicate what words struggled to on their own.

This required focusing on many small elements of gameplay and polish from a variety of disciplines to ensure that it all came together. I spent months on just the mirror effect alone. The footsteps of the player go from sounding normal to sounding squishy and distorted. The timing of every aspect of the main sequence, a short cutscene where you see your own reflection change in between blinks of the eye, and then move from first to third person perspectives, was the main focus of development for it's first iteration. There is even a bug in the project that I decided to keep because it ended up contributing positively to the experience I was going for! After the switch in perspectives, the player's controls would invert, making movement messy and difficult to intuit, adding to the disorienting feel of the experience post transformation. This was not initially intended, but as it added to the disorienting feeling of Dysphoria I was attempting to convey, I kept it in.

I tried to create the experience to be more over the top than how I would actually experience the sensation, to both help in conveying the emotional experience and to abstract it enough to make it more comprehendible to those who don't experience Gender Dysphoria. To do this, I used a lot of horror language and references. A major source of inspiration was the trailer to Prey 2016, that showed the player character staring in a mirror as their own reflection distorted. Another inspiration was from the Resident Evil 3 Remake, where the player starts in first person, then interacts with a sink and mirror and smoothly transitions into Third-Person.

My greatest success with the project is that, while I was unable to discern if it communicated the experience of gender dysphoria to those who don't experience it normally, I at least felt gender dysphoria while playing back through it. This told me that I had succeeded in recreating my particular experience of it in the game.