Making and Playing for Catharsis

Iris Zhang's "Making and Playing for Catharsis" examines how autofictional game design can turn personal, emotionally difficult material into playable form. Building on Kara Stone's Reparative Game Design, which frames games around repair, care, and sharing, the work centers on a series of game sketches reconstructing the author's relationship with her mother as a first-generation Chinese immigrant. The argument is that care in games is inherently ambivalent, and that makers working from their own lives should embrace uncomfortable personal material rather than sanitize it. Four completed sketches, mapped to life stages from ages five to eighteen, serve as affective experiments in this approach.

The methodology is organized around a research-game-design cycle comprising self-writing, iterative game sketching, self-play, theoretical reflection, and revision. Its clearest demonstration is "I (have) memorized these streets," an autobiographical sketch about childhood immigration to Canada. Its bilingual English-Chinese text and audio, split across stereo channels, began as intuitive choices but came to embody the un/translatability of the self and a divided linguistic identity, a reading the author reached through self-play and engagement with theorists including Constantino, Gallo, and Simon. The cycle, in this account, turned raw emotional experience into an intelligible and playable form.

The work's central theoretical claim is that aesthetic catharsis, drawing on Schaper and Paskow, is better understood as recognition and intelligibility than as emotional purging. On this reading, the sketches do not resolve past grievances but make their emotional and structural logic legible through mechanics. The author articulates five contributions extending Reparative Game Design: positioning oneself as maker-player, using personal archives as design material, adopting an iterative cycle of self-writing, making, self-play, and reflection, re-storying autobiography through play, and treating catharsis as an evaluative tool. Presented as a single-author case study, the work offers a reproducible methodology for designers working with memory and vulnerability, though its generalizability beyond this individual practice remains to be tested.