Bed Bugs

Our game Bed Bugs was created for the course Critical Making, under our second topic, gender, and under the subtopic/gender concept, Reparative Game Design.

Reparative gamed design is a method to work through difficult feelings, but it is also a means to stay in them as long as they need to be felt. Sometimes the work is to bring out difficult feelings. Sometimes the work is to make yourself and others feel worse. Reparative art, like reparative reading, does not seek to expose wounds, but to focus on healing--the many states that need healing and the many forms that healing takes, including the “negative,” the difficult, the unwanted. (Stone, 2018)  

The tone we used is silly + celebration and the game itself follows four teenage girl bugs at a sleepover, narrating a story altogether, introducing different chapters, each with its own minigame. We wanted to celebrate girl power through a story that shows some of the different kinds of personalities girls could have, except for the normative ones. Those bugs make themselves the protagonists of their own adventures. 

Our team:

Angela Prim Liu

Clara Bohnsack

Evi Sotiriou

Oriol Viu i Duran

Thanursan Mahesan