\n<\/p>\n
I<\/span>f you visited the V&A\u2019s Design\/Play\/Disrupt exhibition in 2018, you may have played an interesting minigame collection, in which you fought wobbly physics to feed a girl named Jenny, using a Tetris-style board to achieve the perfect calorie amount, and then twisting her into pilates poses.<\/p>\n Almost seven years later, the full version of Consume Me, which won this year\u2019s Independent Games festival grand prize, is set for a September release. According to developer Jenny Jiao Hsia, the game has become a semiautobiographical tale about how she felt \u201cstupid, fat and ugly\u201d in high school. What started as a collection of minigames about Hsia\u2019s struggles with dieting and disordered eating grew into a game that looks at the many facets of her life as a teenager, including her relationship with her mother \u2013 who appears accompanied by Persona-style boss battle music and always finds a reason to nag \u2013 as well as her insecurities around her first long-term relationship.<\/p>\n <\/span>The many facets of life as a teenager \u2026 Consumer Me.<\/span> Photograph: Hexecutable<\/p>\n Hsia and co-designer Alec \u201cAP\u201d Thomson have been making games together since their time studying at NYU Game Center. The duo conceived of Consume Me when Hsia showed Thomson old diaries featuring her calorie charts and notes about dieting. \u201cI said, \u2018Hey, doesn\u2019t this look like a game?\u2019,\u201d she recalls. Thomson agreed. \u201cWe had a little prototype and then we got funding, and the game grew from there,\u201d says Thomson.<\/p>\n As Hsia and Thomson grappled with the challenge of making their largest game yet, the years went on. \u201cThe last big project we worked on together was essentially a student game for us,\u201d Thomson says. That game was Beglitched, a match-three puzzler from 2016. \u201cCompared to that, our whole process on Consume Me is completely different.\u201d Hsia is self-depreciating about the experience: \u201cOn Beglitched, I physically worked next to AP every day, and I was happy to let him tell me what to do. My set of tasks on this and our smaller games was very clearcut \u2013 [with Consume Me] I had to take more responsibility. I don\u2019t think I\u2019m a very disciplined person, that\u2019s why it took so long.\u201d<\/p>\n Hsia stresses that Consume Me wasn\u2019t a way for her to work through her issues with disordered eating, as she had left that time of her life behind before she started development on the game. Instead, she thinks that working from her own experiences makes for a more interesting story. \u201cI think it\u2019s boring if you\u2019re just inventing something from your mind without any tangible experience, or at least I don\u2019t have the imagination to do that,\u201d she says. \u201cThe character of Jenny you see in the game isn\u2019t solely based on me, either. She\u2019s very much an amalgamation of AP and myself. She\u2019s very diligent about reaching goals and crossing things off her list for example, because that also makes for a good game, but in reality, it\u2019s AP who\u2019s more like that, not me. I wrote all those calorie diagrams down, but I didn\u2019t actually follow them.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Hsia seems surprised at the idea that a lot of Consume Me feels very relatable. People who have difficulty concentrating will probably see themselves in the reading minigame, in which Jenny\u2019s head perpetually rotates away from the book she\u2019s holding. There also just never seems to be quite enough time to do it all, and more often than not, Jenny\u2019s budget comes down to a lucky 20-dollar bill she finds on the street in a minigame that sees her walk her dog around worrying amounts of poop. Jenny\u2019s habit of finding money on the streets of New York is apparently another well-documented facet of Hsia\u2019s own life.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t actually know what people will take away from it,\u201d she says. \u201cThat\u2019s the interesting thing to me. You cherrypick parts of your life to show to complete strangers, and then you watch them react.\u201d<\/p>\n Consumer Me is released on PC on 25 September<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If you visited the V&A\u2019s Design\/Play\/Disrupt exhibition in 2018, you may have played an interesting minigame collection, in which you fought wobbly physics to feed a girl named Jenny, using a Tetris-style board to achieve the perfect calorie amount, and then twisting her into pilates poses. Almost seven years later, the full version of Consume<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16751,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[10029,4266,6978,413,378,949,4928,2517,334,4161,3451],"class_list":{"0":"post-16750","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-consume","9":"tag-fat","10":"tag-feeling","11":"tag-game","12":"tag-games","13":"tag-high","14":"tag-highly","15":"tag-personal","16":"tag-school","17":"tag-stupid","18":"tag-ugly"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16750","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16750"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16750\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/16751"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16750"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16750"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16750"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}