Mio the virtual shaman is not going to happen. At least not for Game Design. In any case, if anyone wanted to see, here is the start of how it was going to be:
Hello there, I am Mio
I am a virtual character created to try to help. I am not a virtual therapist, this would imply that I have a formal preparation in the area of psychology. I would call myself an experiment.
See, I don’t know if I work. What I do know is that my creator is very serious about me. His goal was to create a character with the capacity to guide a thought process in order to help reframe an issue that is affecting your well-being in such a way that it either stops being destructive or as destructive to you or so that it becomes constructive.
I would say that you can think of whatever I say as if you were talking with a friend. When you go to a friend to talk about an issue which is affecting how you feel, you hope to get advice that will be helpful. You listen to what they say and then you go and think about it. If it makes sense, you might choose to go ahead and try it out. When you try it out, if it works for you, then you are happy and you might choose to adopt it for the future, if not, then we are not as happy and we stop using it and move on.
This is what I hope I can do. I’ll talk and try to guide you towards what I think can be helpful. You can then go think and feel and decide whether you want to try it out and see if it works for you.
Unlike your friend who might get a bit sad or angry if you choose to not do what he thinks is right, I am not going to get angry or sad, you see… I can’t.
I’ll say this, I think, that any issue we have, anything that is in some way affecting our well-being, arises from a perception of misalignment. We feel something is not working, something is causing us to feel the way we are feeling.
And this is important. It is important because what we feel is what is most true to us. If we feel sad, there is nothing that is false about this, we feel sad. If we feel happy, then we feel happy and there is nothing that is not true about this.
So when there is something that is affecting our well-being, we should address it, unless of course we don’t care about our well-being. In that case, we should continue to feel bad.
My presumption is that if you are here today, going through this experience, then you have at least one thing that is affecting how you feel. Something in life is not great and you want it to be.
And this makes sense, it is rational that we are concerned when things are not the way we would want them to be.
So my question to you is this, what is the cause of this thing that is bothering you? Do you know what the source of the trouble is? Perhaps you think you know or you are indeed sure you know. What you will often be told, is that you should attack the source of problems…
Before we try to attack the problem though, let’s talk about controlling our lives. Perhaps you will disagree with me but I think that any sensible human being wants to feel in control of their life. We want to have agency, a sense that we can control our life’s direction. Control gives us a sense of security, we feel that we can make choices about the future so it stops being as uncertain which brings us a feeling of well-being.
When we are told to attack a problem, we have to think about what this means and what the implication of this attack is. I am not too keen of the word attack, attack tends to be interpreted as destruction and we don’t really want to destroy… Or maybe we are very emotional about this issue and we really do want to destroy.
But destruction by its very nature is not constructive, it is the opposite. Construction often tends to happen after destruction but is it necessary to destroy in order to construct.
Whatever. So a different thing is happening. It is called the Forest of Dreams. It is a mix between my first and second project, its a branching interactive dream. It has a dialogue intended to feel loose and relaxed yet very serious. It uses a cool (blue, purple, green-blue) color palette to convey a feeling of relaxation and wander through the images. There is no happy or sad ending, there is just ending. I started the dialogue but it is a secret except for paolo if you want to see it. I also have some of the art, this was a test with Photoshop filters, but I think this is the visual style I will use (blurry light).
