Liminal is a multi-media story and experience about living with dissociation and memory problems, made to be an example of how difficult it can be to manage these issues while living your everyday life. If you were to compare the human brain to a computer, my intent is for this project to show a potential glitch within the system, and allow you to explore potential fixes - if any actually exist. I decided to create a visual novel and a short comic. I aim for people to be able to feel first hand what it can be like to live with a mental illness that has a massive impact on your daily life. 

 

Dissociation is a mental health symptom that I struggle with immensely. It’s a type of error in the way your mind deals with memories, thoughts, feelings, and surroundings – with some people describing it as an out of body kind of experience. It’s a common coping mechanism in those who have experienced trauma of some kind within their lives, and it can be a defence mechanism that you continually fall back on throughout life after doing it once. Unfortunately, many people will have no idea about dissociation and the affect it can have on people’s everyday lives. This is exactly why I think my work in this project is important. It’s much easier to explain something complex when you have an example that you can easily digest.

 

Using an interactive medium was vital for this project. In my experience, the best way to learn to understand something is to go through it (or something similar) yourself. I believe that the audience will be able to connect to the comic much better after playing the game, because the emotional and mental connection will have been created. They will be able to understand how frustrating it is, because they’ve experienced that frustration too, only in a condensed form. This connection and understanding that transfers between the media I created is what makes this a transmedia piece of work.

 

When looking at transmedia theory, you can quickly see that I managed to create a “cooler” experience – meaning that it is more interactive than just watching a movie or TV show. People become more immersed within more interactive forms of media, and it allows for easier connections as the viewer feels that the story is in their hands, and is therefore their responsibility.

 

The game I made is unique. There aren’t many games I can think of that focus exclusively on mental health, let alone ones that intend to give the kind of experience to players that I have aimed for within my game. I know there’s demand for these types of games too, as I’ve seen people online wishing for media they could use to explain how hard things such as sensory overload can be to others – and there are now games which try to emulate anxiety or sensory overloads for people who don’t understand those experiences. My game is the first game like this that specifically focuses on dissociation.

 

My comic exists to be more focused on my specific frustrations with my struggles, and this ties in well with the game. The game allows the reader to have that extra context, meaning they understand the comic better – and vice versa, the comic allows the reader to have an outside perspective before going into experiencing those feelings for themselves. I deliberately chose to make my comic about making artwork while struggling with dissociation, explaining how frustrating it is to lose sight of what you’re meant to be creating. I chose to purposely leave this comic on a bittersweet ending, with the problem not being solved, but instead being forgotten.

 

I kept a glitch theme throughout every piece of work as a unifying element, and also to work as a visual clue for readers to understand that there is an issue. I wanted this to be a theme throughout as it’s something universal that many will understand as a symbol for errors, problems, and something going wrong. I also chose to give both forms of media very abrupt interruptions and endings, because this is exactly how days or moments can feel for me; segmented, broken, and without any kind of satisfying conclusion.