Private/Public Self on Twine

Our first project in Design Studio 1 was to make a piece that expresses some aspect of our private and/or public self in relation to fashion.

My research into myself from my own view of myself was overwhelmingly negative. My self-image stems from myself, not from the views of others. Other people I interviewed about me had nice things to say, like that I’m calm and supportive and all that, and I agreed with most of what they said. There’s no significant difference between how I am in private and how I am in public.

But at the time that this was assigned, September/October 2016, I had so much stress and anxiety that I was beating myself up over. I had very bad things to say about myself, to myself, that I generally did not tell others about. I never expressed my anxiety; it looks to be at odds with my calm demeanor.

So I originally wanted to make an interactive word game where the audience would have a box of words and they would use the words to create sentences about me, which they could then enter into the computer. If the sentence they completed was true, they would get a green check-mark. If it was false, they would get a red x. The sentences would be predetermined by how I think of myself and how others think of me. But this did not relate to fashion.

I changed the focus of the project to explore how my past self’s relationship with clothes and physical appearance, how I look to others, shapes my present self’s mental state, which would represent my internal thoughts. I didn’t want to make something super angsty and depressing, so I made a Twine game, which can be played here:

http://philome.la/lunarui_/beforeafter/play

The “she” path is from my past, while the “he” path is me in the present. It is NOT a masculine/feminine divide; it’s more that the things that happened during the “she” path was before I realized that I was a boy, and the “he” path represents my emotional state circa Fall 2016.

Anyway, I’m doing better now.

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