I teamed up with my classmates, Xin Ye, and Guanqing Lin, in making a formal analysis of the game, This War of Mine, comparing it to the traditional shooter game, Doom. In our video, we highlighted serval important differences between This War of Mine and mainstream shooter games and explained how those differences serve the antiwar theme of This War of Mine. Our analysis draws on a theory espoused by the Situationists that media has the ability to influence the brain and shape the feelings of the audience. The guilt feeling that most players have after they kill a civilian in This War of Mine, we argue is a perfect example of how humans can be influenced by design. This guilt feeling is deliberately excluded from other shooter games to create a sense of carefree innocence but is deliberately featured in This War of Mine in order to advocate the core statement of the game.   

 

I was the director and script writer for the project and came up with this idea and wrote all the spoken text. And as the leader of this group, I managed, led and supervised the progress of the project. From doing this formal video analysis, I learned how to show my idea visually, direct an essay film, and write a script. I learned the importance of light, color, sound and pace, which is subtle yet influential in establishing the atmosphere of the whole game and how a seemingly abstract media theory can be applied in practice.