Yasheng She

By the Lighthouse

prototyping

The giant woman joins the parade of nuclear monsters, led by notable monsters such as Godzilla in the 1950s. Like her peers, she contributes to the conversations about nuclear power, militarism, and the legacies of World War II. The shadow of the Cold War, the stagnation of economic and demographic growth, the rise of neoliberalism, and various social and natural disasters cultivated a sense of precarity in the 1990s, often regarded as the onset of Japan’s “lost era.”

My creative intervention brings the giant woman and her beholder together inside a digital landscape to further contemplate her metaphoric function. What does it mean to share a space with the harbinger of the end? How does one feel about a feminine metaphor of absolute power? Does femininity render annihilation comforting? This project contains several implementation phases.

Created using Unreal Engine 5, Blender, Substance Designer, and Subtance Painter.

Composite

early development

My project, “Composite,” thinks through my own queer identity as a collection of defense mechanisms created through navigating the world as a non-binary person. A rogue-lite game that interrogates the process of identity formation.

The gameplay mimics the libidinal drive of different processes of seeking intimate relationships and identity formation in those encounters. Simply put, this game takes advantage of the shared quality of seeking mastery through failures between rouge-lite games and intimate relationships to metaphorically depict learning a little about oneself and gaining mastery over one’s ability to navigate situations through repetitions.

Created using Unity, Blender, Substance Designer, and Subtance Painter.

Argument Box

completed

Argument Box (AB) is an experimental prototype created by Rehaf Aljammaz , a social argument simulator where the player argues with clients visiting the shop. Arguments in AB center around the moral virtues and vices of simulated characters in the social simulation Talk Of the Town. I helped create early project versions through writing, modeling, and data collection.

Created using Unity, Blender, Substance Designer, and Subtance Painter.