This Summer, I was told by my school therapist that I might have mild depression. Although it is quite common among teens in their twenties, my heart was still shaken by a sense of loneliness and other unspeakable feelings. I spent quite a long time sorting emotions, but my attempt to find the root cause of my anxiety was fruitless. Life can suddenly feel too hard out of nowhere. For the first time, I paused my life in the real sense. To fill the emptiness, I tried everything, socializing, gaming, watching movies, and even picking up a half-read book just because its name includes the word solitude, and I thought it might have the answer I needed. Not surprisingly, one book cannot fix life problems, but I resonated greatly with the story. Suddenly dispersed dots were connected in my head, and I decided to make a game telling a story about perplexity. 

Our generations live in an era of information fragmentation. We are constantly threatened by the uncontrollable future, bad world news, and this crushing sense of powerlessness. Through this game, I shared a rather bitter interlude of my life with my peers to gain the courage to move forward. And also through this game, my peers opened up to me. We exchanged our stories of miseries, various but similar. We comforted one another, saying it is okay to stop sometimes. After months of isolation in the pandemic, I once again saw the rare, precious power one can grant each other through connections and stories. I have never been more sure about the role of games or other interactive media than I am at this moment: to communicate and to sympathize.