Artist Journey into the Unconscious (2025)

Photo Credit: Jessica Field

The Artist Journey into the Unconscious is a video game project that allows a viewer to walk through a drawing in progress that is called the allegorical map of the mind. This drawing has five levels and this video game shows the immersive environment of the bottom level. The game is an educational tool to teach about mental health, how trauma affects the brain, offer ways to work through trauma by learning methods of reconciliation with estranged parts.

VISION

The game centers on a character, “The Artist,” who is disregulated and struggling with life while preparing for an exhibition. It is a metaphor for The Artist’s mind. The player retraces the steps of The Artist to discover that The Artist’s mental health issues are a product of trauma rather than psychosis or heredity. The player then goes on a quest to heal from the trauma from the point of view of The Artist. The environment is disorienting and is meant to put the player in a scenario where in order to navigate their surroundings they must learn about this new world they have entered. It is similar to Alice in Wonderland, where she falls down the rabbit hole and enters a new world that is very different from the one she came from.

ATMOSPHERE

This level is for the PILOT that is being developed. It is the “Trauma Injury Level,” where the player is aware that the Artist they play has been severely injured psychologically, and will need to discover what happened and try to integrate all the lost parts on the level. The level is a psychological metaphor space. It is the unconscious emotional space that is hidden by the mind’s defenses to avoid dealing with the extreme experiences of trauma that were impossible to process at the time of the events. In the game, the player has finished the first objective of discovering all their peculiar behavioural problems that stem from trauma, and they have made it to the second level where they will do the relational work to heal from trauma through inner child interactions.

OBJECTIVE

I wrote a fairytale that tells the backstory of all the characters in the game and why they are estranged from each other and how they reconcile. The player will experience this fairytale as 6 quests where they have to get the two adults to reconnect with to six children. The adults represent the two paths of abusive pathology towards another: passive neglect and aggressive overt abuse. The player learns that these two adults have trauma that need to be healed too which they do as two quests. The pilot is the quest story for one girl and her reconciliation with the two adults. The fairytale is about a Huntress who steals a quality from six girls and banishes them to a prison in the landscape. The Shepherdess, the girls’ caregiver, is neglectful, leaving them alone in a house. The player moves through the landscape talking to all the character to help them reconnect and rebuild their relationships to each other into healthy ones.

WHY PAPER?

The game is in paper because it is my artwork. Also, to share the larger theme of the game, that imagination and expression arts therapies can help heal the mind from trauma. It can also rewrite neuropathways to create new behaviours and emotional experiences. It is also a clue for the player to realize that they are The Artist by doing all this work to heal their trauma. The player is following in The Artist’s footsteps and experiencing the process of healing by playing the game.

Photo Credit: Jessica Field.