Yuen Hoang names difficult emotions in A God Who Lives in Your Head
In their interactive zine about navigating a Christian upbringing, Yuen Hoang has made a cool interface of analog art pieces that move around. When you move them the right way, you reveal poetry about their upbringing and the idea of Christian faith. It’s beautiful and tactile.
How long have you been making games?
I’ve been making games for around three years now!
What tools do you like to use?
The game engines I favor are Unity and Twine! For assets, I love using Clip Studio Paint and Procreate; occasionally I goof around in Paint 3D too!
What themes or genres do you like to explore?
It’s really difficult to encapsulate! I feel like I explore a lot of themes — but I suppose recently, I’ve been very interested in people’s relationships to others — to lovers, to family, to friends, to objects, to animals — so much to think about.
The main questions I come back to are: will you love me if I change? If you change? How do I accept that you are still you, in some intrinsic way, even if I see you in a different light? The idea that the same person is both the mask and the wearer. It’s an exploration of that particular brand of shame, that comes from not being able to uphold a certain image to yourself.
To be crude, it’s kind of like after you jack off for the first time ever as a kid, and realize that you’re beginning to experience these weird adult emotions, but you’re still a kid. It’s weird. It’s shameful. But, it’s human and natural, to be full of contradictions, and that kind of weirdness, acceptance of those emotions that feel like they don’t fit anywhere — that’s the thing I want to explore more.
As for genre, I feel like I don’t stick to any one particular style/format. However, I enjoy having the freedom to mix things up, and not limiting myself too much allows for interesting experiences. But to be honest, I really love making games that are character/narrative-centric, with less of a focus on infinite playability.
“[T]he reason I make art is very mysterious. It’s something that simmers up from inside of me, and I just can’t seem to stop it.”
What are your favorite and least favorite aspects of making games?
I love being able to have my story come to life — to have people be able to play a part in it. I think there’s something so magical about the fact that a game is an inert object until someone engages with its systems — that you are a central part of making the story move forward. It could be said that books and movies and art exist in the same way — that they are not real, until they are read, seen and absorbed, but I think games really force you to engage with the world it’s presenting you with.
Two of my least favorite parts of making games — a more technical answer: I’m not a great programmer, and I hate doing things I’m not immediately good at. However, I’ve managed to finagle my spaghetti code into workable forms before!
A larger, more creator focused fear that I have is that my body of work will come to represent who or what I am. I have created many personal works, and while they all speak to something specific to me, they are not representative of the whole of my being. They are a small part of my life experience, and I fear that someone would take it as something otherwise.
However, I’ve accepted that in some ways, I cannot control how other people consume/take in my content, and can only do my best to sculpt my message as best as I can. I think this is a fear that comes at some point to all creators — to separate themselves from their work while intrinsically being a part of it.
Is there a game that has affected you recently?
A game that has affected me recently has been FFXV! Very contentious pick, I know. However, I think that it gives me a lot of nostalgia, because I used to obsess over it all the time with one of my best friends in 2016. I’m 21 now, and I’ve managed to retain that friendship for a while — for the same amount of time as the characters in the game, and it really just brings me back. It’s been a really great feel-good play for me, and it’s one of those things that will stick with me for a while.
A God Who Lives in Your Head is an interactive zine — how did you decide on the format?
At the time I was working on this zine, we were deep into quarantine. Physical distribution was difficult. Some of the prior zines I’ve created are very heavily dependent on their format and physicality; for example, SNAPSHOT, a queer love story about shame, told through an old school envelope of film strip comics. I also figured it’d be a shame to just stick to the PDF format, when I had the tools to further explore a digital format.
What was it like making “analog” style assets for use in the digital collage?
It’s always super fun! I grabbed a lot of stock images from Wikimedia Commons, Pexels, and Unsplash! I think the best way to go about making things look “analog” is to accept they’re going to be a little imperfect. Also, emphasize and add texture if needed, to further that feeling of imperfection, age, and loving use!
“The main questions I come back to are: will you love me if I change? If you change? How do I accept that you are still you, in some intrinsic way, even if I see you in a different light?”
The poetry is very personal. Did making the zine help you process some of those feelings?
I have no idea! I think that the reason I make art is very mysterious. It’s something that simmers up from inside of me, and I just can’t seem to stop it. I’m always creating in some capacity — so I don’t know if it really resolves anything. But, I get the feeling that it’s more for the purpose of putting a name and face to some emotion. The emotions I have still linger within me, but at least now, I know them more intimately than before — and that’s still comforting for me.
How do you think being a queer creator mixes with these themes of religion and family and assumptions?
I think being queer, raised within a religious family has been a very painful and joyous experience at the same time. It’s given me a particular outlook on life — that two strong emotions, can or could possibly coexist — the love of your child, the hatred of the other; being the perfect child, being an adult queer person. Being raised religious has introduced a lot of black and white thinking for me personally, and being queer, or at least growing into my queerness and adulthood, has been about unlearning those things, and examining the nuances in my life.
What do you hope people take away or think about after playing through the zine?
I don’t think my role in anyone’s life, as an artist or otherwise, is to try to give anyone an exact solution to their problem. That if they do XYZ, they’ll be able to become successful, or deal with a difficult family solution. Everyone has to come to their own conclusion. It sucks, because there are so many people I want to save from themselves, or from further sliding down into some undesirable wormhole — however, no matter how many times you lead a horse to water, you can’t force it to drink — otherwise, you’ll end up drowning the poor thing.
My hope for my art is that it prompts people to try to ask a specific question — and that people can find their own solution to that question. I also hope that my art offers some form of comfort — to reassure people that there is always something to look forward to — to be a bit hopeful, even if it’s painful.
