Her Room

Irene Yang

Irene Yang is a digital artist focusing on building virtual environment and game narration. She also loves dogs!

Thesis Faculty

Barbara Morris
John Roach
John Sharp

Her Room is a text-based storytelling game experience about a cyber-romance story based on an episode of the TV series Black Mirror called San Junipero.
It simulates the process of two protagonists named Yorkie and Kelly who fall in love from the virtual world to real life through a series of transmedia narrative methods. The player, in the role of Yorkie, explores a virtual town called Bradford where the elderly can visit and the deceased can live. The story happens in a world where technology allows people to upload their consciousness to the cloud and live in their younger bodies.
There are three game scenes which are presented in different dimensions in this game world, from text to image to 3D world.

The intro of the whole game starts with a virtual brochure which has been sent to Yorkie. It gives the player a brief sense of the virtual world settings as well as the introduction of the whole game experience.
The brochure is in a promotion advertising language. The QR code of the final page would lead the player to the game page.

The game starts with a chatting interface composed of texts. At the beginning of the story, Yorkie, which is the player here got a free trial to Bradford. She met Kelly by the matching system here.
In this scene, the player could only get to know Kelly by text. It simulates the first stage of their relationship.

As their relationship develops, Kelly shares her social media page with Yorkie. The scene here transfers into a 2D pixel computer interface where the player could go through Kelly's social media as well as chat with Kelly's friends.
At the end of the 2D scene, Kelly suddenly disappears. It made Yorkie follows her address in Bradford and try to figure out everything over there.

Yorkie was transferred into Kelly's house in Bradford. This is how the walking simulator scene as well as the 3D scene starts.
Kelly is missing. The player needs to find out all the clues in her rooms in order to find out the truth and unlock next level.

I made all her rooms in different visual styles to present Kelly different layers of personalities.
In this game, I'm trying to shape Kelly as a round character.
Including the conversations between Yorkie and Kelly's friends, the player could always find more perspectives about Kelly.

After completing the missions and filling the loading bar, a key of the real world would appear and transfer Yorkie into Kelly's room in real life.
Kelly stayed in a hospital room everyday in real life. It turns out that Kelly was a late stage cancer patient. She and Yorkie were both over 80 years old in real life.
The player would find out that Kelly has already passed away and upload her consciousness to Bradford.

At the end of the story, the player is going to face the decision of whether to upload Yorkie's consciousness to Bradford with Kelly depend on their own impressions about Kelly.
During the online social process, our perception and impression about the person largely relies on things they post and texts they sent to you. It is easy to ignore how social media tricks our feelings about one certain person. The tension of this is built up from day to day observations. This project tends to approach this tension by simulating two people met online and had to know each other from zero. Hopefully it could provide a joyful experience for you.