Looking Outwards 08: The Creative Practice of an Individual

Christina Phazero Curlee is a game designer, specializing in emotional impactful and narrative driven Art Games. She describes herself as a “multi-disciplinary game designer” since she works seamlessly in multiple 3D editors, and does script coding, and uses her traditional art foundation in her game design process. She studied traditional art in college and even formerly worked as painte but also she is self-taught in game design, 3D Art, and programming. Her visual art foundation and self-teaching gave her an unusual framework as a game developer as she blends a principle, techniques, and subject matters found in fine arts with game conventions to create her own design style and language in game development.
Her body of work usually explores emotional experiences, marginalized identities, and digital consciousness. I admire her work “Artifacts II” the most as her passion in emotional storytelling is well brought out in this game. Artifacts II is a surreal narrative game about personal discovery and trauma such as chdildhood neglect; The game is set in a surreal storybook-like series of environments, representing memory spaces in the character’s mind. The character engtangles trauma in the mind and body and go through process of introspection and self evaluation as he/she plays. I admire the way she utilizes symbols to convey her personal experiencs, making an game environment conceptually rich, imaginative, and compelling.
To effectively present her work, she uses symbols such as enemies, scores, and timers to represent the concepts of love, fear, and defense mechanisms. Also, Artifact II uses elements of exploration (walking sims), RPG, and survival MDA (mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics) to effectively reveal the fragments of character’s past memories.

http://www.christinazero.com/