User:Thijshijsijsjss/T4 Assessment/What

Human Parser is a project around a text-adventure game that is an exporation of feelings of disassociativity, particularly those caused by mental illness and neurodiversity. This exploration is abstract yet intimate, stemming from personal experiences of myself and others.

Using text-adventure gameplay, a player uses text input to play. In working with a parser, this genre is crucial in conveying the theme of disassociation mechanically. While informed by classic games of the genre, Human Parser does not limit itself to text: it makes use of pixel art visuals and gaming conventions of contemporary and experimental games. The game is about assembling and embodying robots. Following a loose story, a playthrough consists of 2 parts: robot creation at the Robot Assembly Line, and playing as the created robot in the Performance Testing Facility. One playthrough should take 10-15 minutes. By the end, user inputs are chained together to form a poem that is shown when one of a handful of endings is reached. (Game content may change over the course of research and development)

The game is accompanied by a physical game manual, providing insights into the game and adding more thematic cohesion. It might contain visuals taken and / or re-imagined from the game, guides for gameplay, (fictionalized) behind the scenes information, poems created by playing, but also a broader exploration of the theme through e.g. interview snippets. In particular, this manual will house the thesis. The thesis will support the project by being a collection of manual components like described above, and will aim to ground the project (both academically and personally) in the project's larger context. 

Finally, for exhibition at e.g. a graduation show, I could see this project being playable and hooked up to a pen plotter. After a playthrough, the generated poem is automatically sent to the plotter, and a book is kept of all poems generated this way. This can hopefully allow for the conversation on disassociativity to continue beyond the realm of digital, individual experience.