Anger

 ANGER

EMOTIONS

Once you start to live in "actual" reality again, anger might start to set in. This is a common stage to think "Why me?" and "Life's not fair!" You might look to blame others for the cause of your grief and also may redirect your anger to close friends and family. You find it incomprehensible how something like this could happen to you. If you are strong in faith, you might start to question your belief in God: Where is God? Why didn't he protect me?

Researchers and mental health professionals agree that this anger is a necessary stage of grief. And encourage the anger. It's important to truly feel the anger. Even though it might seem like you are in an endless cycle of anger, it will dissipate - and the more you truly feel the anger, the quicker it will dissipate, and the more quickly you will heal. It is not healthy to suppress your feelings of anger - it is a natural response - and perhaps, arguably, a necessary one.

(However, while suppressing anger is not advised, neither is letting it control you. It's important to seek help from a trained counselor or therapist if you are struggling with processing your anger.)

In everyday life, we are normally told to control our anger towards situations and toward others. When you experience a grief event, you might feel disconnected from reality, that you have no grounding anymore. Your life has shattered and there's nothing solid to hold onto. Think of anger as a strength to bind you to reality. You might feel deserted or abandoned during a grief event. That no one is there. You are alone in this world. The direction of anger toward something or somebody is what might bridge you back to reality and connect you to people again. It is a "thing." It's something to grasp onto, a natural step in healing.

I want to avoid any religious aspects of this as it doesn't fit with the theme of space travel and may discourage some non-religious players, instead looking more at how to replicate the necessity of anger and how it may be represented within the environment and mechanics in relation to our knowledge of other planets and worlds as well as what's come before in other space-based media such as games, books, and films (avoiding actually making the player angry as this is a completely separate issue with competitiveness and video games) Firstly once again looking at synonyms of emotions expressed when angered.

Strongest synonym

Strong synonym

Weak synonym

RAGE

Animosity, Bitterness, Exasperation, Excitement, Frenzy, Furor, Fury, Indignation, Irritation, Madness, Mania, Obsession, Outburst, Passion, Resentment, Temper, Violence.

Acerbity, Acrimony, Agitation, Apoplexy, Asperity, Blowup, Bluster, Choler, Convulsion, Dander, Eruption, Explosion, Ferment, Ferocity, Fireworks, Gall, Heat, Hemorrhage, Huff, Hysterics, Ire, Paroxysm, Rampage, Raving, Spasm, Spleen, Squall, Storm, Tantrum, Umbrage, Uproar, Upset, Vehemence, Wrath.

Wingding.

Questioning

Examination.

Catechism, Inquest, Inquiring, Inquisition.

ANGER

Acrimony, Animosity, Annoyance, Antagonism, Displeasure, Enmity, Exasperation, Fury, Hatred, Impatience, Indignation, Ire, Irritation, Outrage, Passion, Rage, Resentment, Temper, Violence.

Chagrin, Choler, Conniption, Dander, Disapprobation, Distemper, Gall, Huff, Infuriation, Irascibility, Irritability, Miff, Peevishness, Petulance, Pique, Rankling, Soreness, Stew, Storm, Tantrum, Tiff, Umbrage, Vexation.

Blow up, Cat fit, Hissy fit, Ill humor, Ill temper, Slow burn.

CRY

Bawl, Blubber, Howl, Lament, Sob, Wail.

Bawling, Bewailing, Blubbering, Howling, Keening, Lamentation, Mourning, Snivel, Snivelling, Sobbing, Sorrowing, Wailing, Weeping, Whimpering, Yowl.

Tears.

FRUSTRATION

Annoyance, Dissatisfaction, Failure, Grievance, Irritation, Resentment.

Blocking, Blow, Bummer, Chagrin, Circumvention, Contravention, Curbing, Defeat, Disgruntlement, Downer, Drag, Fizzle, Foiling, Hinderance, Impediment, Letdown, Obstruction, Setback, Vexation.

Bitter pill, Nonfulfillment, Nonsuccess, Old one-two, Unfulfillment. 

When looking at these synonyms of emotions themed around anger it is important to make sure that these are represented in the game either through other characters or environmental assets not to cause these feelings in the player through challenging puzzles or interactions, I do not wish to make the player feel the several stages of grief as they go through the game but to observe and understand them and hopefully gain the tools to overcome them.

We can observe this tactic in a number of ways with games such as Zelda: Majora's Mask opting for NPC interactions to display the stage of anger, where the Deku of Woodfall have had their princess go missing and take their anger out on an innocent monkey instead of calmly planning out what to do to save her. Gris opts for both an environmental display of anger as well as a player ability with the Terrain becoming red in colour and intermittent storms forcing the player back with their new ability to become a heavy block preventing this and also allowing them to smash through fragile floors, all three effects are representative of anger. It is interesting to observe the studio opting to have the player character display an implied level of anger through this ability, though with them being a human female character the player can have some intended separation from them and perhaps see the gameplay as a way of helping the character through grief rather than joining them on the journey themselves and thus overcome the earlier problems I suggested could be incurred. 

One early idea was to have the suit travel to different planets that each represented the 5 stages of grief, similar to how Link travels to various places in Majora's Mask, but this seemed counter-productive to the idea that the ship had crash-landed and all inhabitants had gotten into their space suits and used evacuation pods to arrive here with the player character discovering that there was no human in him thus leading to the journey in the first place, a crashed ship wouldn't then be traveling around looking for answers. The serendipity of this would lead me to develop the idea of the suit traveling deeper into the planet rather than just the surface to solve their dilemma as the journey of grief cannot be solved purely on the surface level.

Having to travel below the surface offered an answer to how I would represent anger in this stage as well, a planetary mining operation. The drills and hammers used in this operation would be massive and cause reverberations across the planet leading to earthquake-like disturbances for the player and intrusive noises with movements like the lashing out we do when angered whilst also offering the opportunity for platform puzzles and such as well as a motive for the how the player moves downward through the planet. If they start at the crash site, or part of it, in the denial stage (moving away from it to deny the event) and end up back there in the acceptance stage to discover their human was the Captain who went down with the ship they will come full circle whilst having learned something along the way, akin to the hero's journey archetype. Also, the mining would kick up a lot of dust and debris which could discolor the armour of the suit to a more reddish hue, with colour being easier to change throughout the game for representative purposes rather than medium or texture which can be attributed to emotions can cause too much disorientation for the player if it affects the art style of the game too much.

Let's create a spaceperson

 So after the last post researching the denial stage of the Kubler-Ross model of grief and how this theme could be represented within the art and mechanics of a game to benefit the player by giving them the tools to deal with their own grief or help others suffering I'd already started to ponder where the game could take place and what the character would look like.

From my understanding grief is a journey we have to travel through and overcome all of the necessary stages to finally reach a level of acceptance, so it made sense for the protagonist to be some sort of explorer. Grief is such an alien experience to most of us, especially the first time we experience it from the loss of a loved one (though it can feel different every time we experience it as grief never acts the same or evokes the same emotions for an individual) having an explorer on an alien world felt right to me. This could lead to some of the feelings previously explored in the last post, a world alien to the player could lead to apprehensive behaviors and a fear of what could lie ahead. Mechanically having a fictitious world like this could free up ideas of what could be accomplished during gameplay as the same set of rules would not apply to the game as do in the real world. Gravity could be altered to cause the player to be slow-moving and sluggish during depressed stages, storms could ravage the land with a different air pressure to simulate the rage and frustration of the anger stage, before the player moves to the dark side of the planet to reduce light levels and succumb to a dark and foreboding feeling during the journey to acceptance. The main advantage of having the setting as an alien world is to have the player feel lost, they don't belong here and are confused as to how they got here or why they have ended up in this place, perhaps denying that a grief event has taken place and that this may be a training exercise in a simulation. 

So with a preliminary setting and protagonist established it was time to start sketching out ideas for the look and feel of the character. How they move and act, what abilities they have, and what their purpose was could all play a part in the design but firstly I wanted to look at what was out there to see if that could spring some designs forward. Choosing to mood board a lot of space figures alongside sketching and asking questions about the design hoping to lead toward some sort of semblance of a protagonist. 

Starting with current-day astronauts and understanding the functions of the suit, what was necessary to the design but could possibly be altered through an artistic license, and what could be removed, edited, or added as something entirely new for the new environments to be explored.

However, as I started looking more and more into the design of the spacesuit and current games that had space or an alien world as the primary environment it was often the case that a more futuristic suit was used, this would also be like the environment allow for more freedom in the design as it wasn't focussed on representing what we already know to be true for spacesuit design and could be experimented with more to best represent the feelings evoked by grief. Looking at games like Starfield and their expansive range of space suits as well as interest, the aim was to make it non-gender specific so that there was more scope for any player to identify with the protagonist which was essential if we want them to empathize with the.

As you can see from the above Starfield armors even though all the player models are female, if they were wearing a helmet I doubt there is any design features that would give a hint of the gender but still retain the human form, so I started to rough out some armor designs using copic alcohol markers, brush pens, and Prismacolor pencils. Focusing on having a large visor on the helmet with no identifying facial features after first attempting focussed shapes for the visor made me realise I wanted a large rounded shape for the visor.

Experimenting with different colours and 'futuristic' textures for the visor itself and how mechanical it could be, still looking at what other designs had come before with other games, Artstation profiles, and Pinterest pieces as well as Warhammer 40k models.

What seemed to draw my attention the most during this continued process of research and design was the larger mechanical suits with less focus on human form, suits that had an almost pilot space for them, the idea behind this was having a suit that was empty and after the crash was attempting to find their pilot (or find what was missing from inside them) as when suffering through the journey of grief or loss we often feel a hole within us like a piece of us is missing and I liked this form of representing this feeling by having a hollow suit.

Looking in particular at games like Bioshock which had two themes collaborating together to form the design (steampunk with underwater) I felt this was a direction to look into as well as keeping a more rounded shape due to the cognitive dissonance between the protagonist and the environment or enemies as explored in one of my first posts (round character and sharp pointed enemies or objects allows the player to easily gain visible reference for what are going to cause damage to the player.)

Firstly knowing one of the two themes would be space travel I started to opt for medieval or knight-like aesthetics as the theme to pair it with in the design due to the inference on my part that someone offering to help another through grief was an act of a 'white knight' so to speak and having a pale colourless armor in white or light grey would represent this but also allow for the environments to colour the armor as they progress through the journey, imagine a red dusty rocky environment like Mars that kicks up dust as you travel through it giving the player character some red stains on the armor representing the anger stage of grief.

Secondly, as I was looking at shapes for the design, mainly rounded shapes as previously mentioned I also liked the idea of the main bulk of the shape being an upside-down triangle. Triangles are known as the most stable of shapes when sitting on their base when it comes to engineering or architecture but if we turn that on its head the triangle struggles to stand up without falling over and I liked this idea of instability in the player design to represent how unstable our emotions can be during this journey, and as I progressed through thumbnail designs I opted more and more for designs that had a more isometric theme with one side looking heavier than the other to further enhance this theme.

So now I have a distinct set of guidelines that are working as I both thumbnail and illustrate armor designs for a spaceperson I can continue to do this until finding a design I am happy with which I can then start experimenting with mediums for.