Playing Herstories

: exploring techniques in reality inspired games and indie development cycles in women’s cancer journeys

Abstract

This thesis explores the connections between Reality Inspired Games (RIGs), Performative Documentary, Feminist Consciousness raising (CR) and complementary therapies in women’s cancer care. Using exploratory case studies, this research will investigate the analogous links between Nichol’s expository documentary and Bogost’s Procedural Rhetoric/Newsgames, and Bruzzi’s challenge of the performative documentary in relation to Florent Maurin’s reality inspired games. By establishing the theoretical underpinnings of the performative documentary and reality inspired games, this research will then discuss feminist consciousness raising and how the process of opening-up and sharing lived experiences allows women to identify ‘patterns’ of sociological issues that affect them as a group. These theoretical methods will outline the landscape for exploring women’s lived experiences of cancer in the practice-led research. This mixed-methodology research aims to address the central question of how interactive storytelling can contribute to the subject of ‘what it means to live with cancer’ by amplifying the voices of women in the practice-led design.

By exploring women’s lived experiences in healthcare and complementary therapies, this research will explore how the macro-narratives of women’s cancer narratives in media and women’s experiences in healthcare often pathologise and sexualise women’s experiences of cancer journeys, but do not take into consideration the more in-depth realities of women’s lived experiences. This can cause further disruption to women’s meaning making in the storying process following a cancer diagnosis and when trying to re-stablish a relationship with their body. Subsequently, the theoretical methods and the textual analysis of women’s lived experiences were used to inform the design, development, feedback and reflection of four interactive stories in the practice-led research: The Body Keeps Score and The Cancer Diaries.

Each of the practice-led interactive works explored how the creative process can incorporate reality into their design, through researching the lived experiences of women and using their stories to inspire the narrative and visual interactive storytelling works. Through the process of empathic design, the aim of the stories was to allow participants/players to learn about the realities of women’s cancer journeys, aid them in identifying patterns of experiences to demonstrate that they are not alone in their journeys and reflects the underrepresented experiences of such women in cancer narratives.

Consequently this thesis presents two main contributions, which are 1) A theoretical exploration of the analogous threads between Nichol’s Documentary and Bogost’s Newsgames; Bruzzi’s Performative Documentary and Maurin’s Reality Inspired Games through the lens of feminist theory; 2) A collection of interactive stories which represent a designer’s reflection on the various models of reality inspired games, performative documentary and feminist consciousness raising when applied to a real design problem. More specifically the design problem is, how do we create games/interactive stories that amplify women’s voices (lived experiences) throughout this creative process; by adopting the theoretical method of the RIG, establishing a dovetailing of game design, performative documentary and feminist consciousness raising techniques?

Date of Award	29 Jun 2023
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Abertay University
Supervisor	Darshana Jayemanne (Supervisor) & Iain Donald (Supervisor)