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• 1 2023-12-08T01:59:13+00:00 Violent Beginnings 3 Mica Murdoch plain 2023-12-08T17:19:12+00:00 Everything seems dark and chaotic. The background is dark, shifting and dynamic, but all is monochrome, except for the player character, the anxiety, who appears in bright red, and the health bars of the anxiety and its human. The anxiety wolf dominates the screen, and its human. You enter the scene as a coat for your human, enveloping them, keeping them bent over. You take away their health bar until only your redness remains on screen. The dialogue you control is represented in black, darkening the human’s white text. On video games’ visual storytelling, Nguyen writes in their work “Mindspaces: The Mind as a Visual and Ludic Artifact” that “It is no secret that media like film and video games can tell stories and express feelings and thoughts through methods other than text and dialogue…It is hard to overstate the importance of space in non-verbal storytelling.” Nguyen describes how the space created within the screen is a reflection of the thoughts of the player character. This effect creates an atmosphere for the player and deepens the emotional narrative of the game. In Adventures with Anxiety, the background is this space. It may appear dark, cluttered or chaotic, as the human feels gripped by anxiety. The space is filled and blocked out by the anxiety’s shouting blocks of text. The human and the anxiety are in total conflict. In controlling the anxiety, the player is able to grasp the range of damages that anxiety can do to a person, in a small, fictional dose.
  
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