Ugly Boy — P2 Reflection
This is my reflection of the process of designing Ugly Boy, an interactive story about an abandoned dog. Here is the link, so you play before: http://philome.la/mgarzaron/ugly-boy
Writing for me has always been challenging. My creative expression as a designer naturally goes through other mediums such as prototyping with wood or other materials, sketching, designing visuals or taking photographs. This meant my work took a double effort, but a triple learning outcome.
The value I decided to focus on is the importance of empathy for pets and the need for responsibility when taking care of them. In Argentina, a country with 45 million inhabitants, it is estimated that there are 20 million pets, many more than available homes. In the streets of Buenos Aires province, it is estimated that there are 6 million dogs and cats living on the streets. During summer months, when people usually take time off is when most pets are abandoned, something that reflects the lack of responsibility, education, and empathy towards the life of an animal*.
With this problem in mind, I proposed the story of Ugly Dog, a dog that is suddenly abandoned by his owner. Taking the role of this dog, the player goes through different situations in which he or she makes different decisions with consequences on the path of the story.
I decided to start by creating an overall storyline, with situations written on post-its, that later would be turned into one of the possible paths of the final story. The exposure to different users, their emotional reaction and their fresh ideas made me iterate on making the story more appealing, but without losing the objective of generating empathy on the reader. Then, I started to work on the interaction design, learning how to use Twine and get to know its affordances so I could use them to make the story more engaging and generate the appropriate mood. In further iterations, I worked not only on adding different paths in which the story could go but also on improving the narrative. For example, one of the users came up with the idea that I found very useful: trying to focus the story not so much on the physical locations where it was happening, but more so on new situations, characters and their interaction.
Finally, through the final testing I found out that even if the objective of generating a little more empathy around pets was achieved through the sad story of Ugly Boy, I also learned that this doesn’t necessarily mean that their behavior towards them would change. Even though this last testing, I defined further improvements for the story, like improving the feeling of resolution, working on the pace of the story towards the end, and maybe adding some real-life facts to anchor the message. In terms of aesthetics, much could be done, but I envision the story being much more potent if it was accompanied by sketches or even stop-motion animations.
In conclusion, through the creation of Ugly Boy, I learned much not only about creative writing, but also about interaction design, using the power of iterations to understand and improve how players interact with our design, based on our intention.
