The game that I fell for with strong feelings was Genshin Impact. It is an open-world adventure game set in six major countries. The player is on an adventure to find her brother, who was separated from her at the start of the game. It is a game, according to the reading, a narrative platformer. The player’s role is to move the character through the world and discover the story embedded in the world through: 1) accomplishing missions and daily tasks published by each country, 2) completing the main storyline quests, and 3) interacting with NPCs and characters along the way, which can prompt unexpected plot twists or even decide the final direction of the story.
My favorite game setting was in Inazuma, a representation of Japan. The story revolves around the ruling Shogun, who seeks eternity by stripping people of their desires and isolating the nation. The most memorable plot was when the character had to decide whether to fight the Shogun and rescue the people, as the Shogun could be extremely hard to defeat. When I played the game, I felt it was linked to Japan’s Edo period of isolation and tension. The strong emotional feelings make me think about freedom, the cost of eternity, and life’s price.
When I passed the experiential learning phase, I was excited to start the game and began to relate the storylines to real-world experiences. As I passed through Inazuma’s shops on the map, I remembered when I roamed across the streets in Kyoto, which looked quite similar. In the third phase of symbolic representation, I began to recognize the game’s historical and philosophical contexts. The game’s aesthetics showed that the character fits into a much bigger storyline. As I played, I felt a strong sense that I was unfolding something much bigger, as the death of my “brother” was caused not by someone else but possibly by the character herself. I transformed from an innocent player to a more sophisticated one, able to analyze the texts closely and interpret the hidden messages.
