What If

An educational room escaped game discusses the boundary of domestic mental violence.

My Story

  • When I was little, my father slapped my mother in a ruthless way for a small thing. I was very shocked and couldn’t understand why my amiable dad did such a thing. My parent’s marriage was not one of those perfect marriages that people see in the movies. Many times it was filled with numbness and cold treatment. Problems were not solved perfectly but deferred until the next outbreak.
  • In middle school, I experienced severe school violence when a boy I considered was a friend slapped me a dozen times in front of my schoolmates for a reason: “she never gonna stop, and never let things go.” Since this event, my friends started judging and isolating me. “he so mad at you, you definitely do something wrong.” “come on, take it easy, no wonder he beat you.” Once people label the word “victim” in school, whatever people do has related to the experience. Such experiences make people apathetic and numb, and it took me a tough decade to heal the character flaws those events brought me. Learning to be vulnerable, open myself, and let others drive me through it. My experience also shapes my personality and gives me the ability to observe, feel, and understand peoples’ stories. I’m the lucky one because I realize that not everybody is surrounded by an understanding and lovely environment. “Victims are probably doing something wrong” is still rooted in some people’s ideas. To challenge this bias, I decided to do a story about us at the graduation design show.

Why it matters?

  • The definition of domestic violence is clear, still, based on a Chinese report, 50% of the interviewees don’t think mental violence is domestic violence.
  • About 1/4 of women and 1/7 of men have been victims of domestic violence. Most of them are silent, and some who have experienced severe violence still choose to stay. My game discusses one question: Why are victims unable to escape the circumstances that hurt them?

Duration:
4 months

  • Team:

  • Researchers: Kehan,
    Kexin, Nancy, Dauphine.

  • Game designer: Kehan.

Tools:
Unity, Procreate, Miro.

  • What If is a third-person perspective game about the boundary of domestic mental violence. In the game, participants can experience the victim’s situation and participants have the chance to decide the final ending, thus thinking about how we will act when we meet the same problem and how we will improve the rescue situation in China.





Clues and Reality

Bedroom In the beginning, the player can only move around in the living room until the player looks at the schedule. After understanding the schedule, players can unlock all the rooms. The purpose of the game rules is to allow the player to experience the game through a day in a victim’s life to feel the bondage of a victim’s life. While playing the game, the player can randomly interact with items but cannot choose the order to complete tasks. Once the order is violated, the player will trigger a reproachful sound and warning screen.

Room One

The schedule is the core of this game. The typical sign of an abuser is extremely controlling behavior. Every relationship is different and domestic violence doesn’t always look the same. One feature shared by most abusive relationships is that the abusive partner tries to establish or gain power and control through many different methods at different moments. (National Domestic Violence Hotline,2021)

The news and newspapers  are real, and from November 25, 2020, the World Day against Domestic Violence, but we can see that there are only a few pieces in the newspapers about domestic violence. My country doesn’t pay enough attention to the harm of domestic violence.Room Two

The first way I looked was on the Internet. China’s Baidu search engine is weaker than Google in terms of information criticality, and the top three pages are mostly about domestic violence Social News. My friend and I tested the average search time of 40mins from the start of the search for domestic violence to finding an organization that could communicate.

Room Three

The little note on the calendar can call the actual Chinese Domestic Violence helping center—HongFeng. The phone call record in this game is a real record from my investigation.
Why these forces that helped them didn’t work, I decided to find them by myself.

Tea Ceremony While the player is doing this task, the family’s husband – the abuser – returns, and the player can feel the atmosphere tense. At this point, the game will show the husband’s voice to sarcastic the victim represented by the player.
The Chinese tea ceremony has a strong norm and process, and I wanted to describe the abuser forcing the victim to live by specific rules.

Room Four

UV Flashlights & Invisible ink Learning how to clean the trace is a valuable lesson for victims.  If the abuser finds the trace, the victim will be dangerous, and domestic violence will happen again.

The diary I have taken snippets about spiritual violence from various interviews, conversations, and survivor forums, and I have made some changes to keep the diary related.The diary.

Different Ending I bring a lot of “what if “to my life. What if I am a good kid and let my parents be proud of me, does them will happier in their marriage? What if I never push the boy beyond his limit and never doubt his pranks? Can both of us have a normal junior high school life? I also added this “what if” to the end of this game. When all the tasks on the schedule are completed, the game goes back to the day the story takes place, when the long-time suffering mentally violent wife tries to kill her husband. The final key diary shows why the woman chooses to kill her husband, which is also the ultimate choice of thousands of women who have fled domestic violence.

Made in Unity

Final Video

https://youtu.be/3P_T-qrXSb8

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