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• 1 2023-12-01T18:23:16+00:00 Adventures with Anxiety 9 Page 2 plain 2023-12-04T00:15:58+00:00

  One of the key factors that brings the wolf, and the idea of anxiety, to life is the active engagement and immersion of the player into the game. To maximize this interaction Case has the player play as the wolf itself. Additionally, the street fighting style of the game pits the player, the wolf, against the girl. In turn, the game gives feedback based on the responses and actions of the player as seen in the image. This sort of victory screen gives off the idea that what they are doing is right and that the player is protecting the girl and not hurting her. This relates to anxiety in that people who experience anxiety often think that they are protecting themselves when in reality they are most likely just overthinking the situation. This turns out to be exactly the case in Adventures with Anxiety and does more harm them good.
  The feedback that Adventures with Anxiety gives the player also contributes to what allows the player to feel immersed in the game and therefore further conceptualize what anxiety is. In Janet Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck, she explores the many facets of what it means to be immersed and to create immersion. In particular how “the great advantage of participatory environments in creating immersion is their capacity to elicit behaviors that endow the imaginary objects with life… Our successful engagement with these enticing objects makes for a little feedback loop that urges us on to more engagement" (Murrary 110). When applying this idea in the context of Adventures with Anxiety, without these little feedback screens, like the one pictured, the player would feel no need to engage in the text thus taking away from the experience. The displaying of how the player impacted the girl shows the reader their active participation in the idea that they are the wolf and what they are doing is impacting the girl regardless of whether it is real or not. The feedback also creates a sense of importance for the reader because now the reader knows that their actions have consequences; by allowing the player to interact with the text and showing them the result they become a part of and immersed in this non-existent reality.