| > Seems to me that anyone could play this and decide their own interpretation of "anxious wolf" which is exactly my criticism of it. Right, I think this is very intentional. The author even interrupts the game at one point to tell the player that they should choose the choices that personally give them the most anxiety. My playthrough ended up focusing in on a lot of the "productivity" lines; are you wasting time doing X, is it responsible to engage with people if you don't have a clear set of goals about where it will end, that kind of thing. > Things that contain more depth are less subjective in their interpretations. I'm not sure about this. A vision of anxiety that focuses on "this specific action causes stress" would be less subjective, but I think it would also be less accurate. Anxiety (particularly clinical anxiety) is often all-encompassing, when anxiety gets really "fun" is in the moments where you're simultaneously scared of every possible choice at the same time, including inaction. I've been fortunate enough to avoid the worst of these experiences in my life, but from what experiences I do have, the feeling the game invokes of being scared almost just for the sake of being scared, as if fear itself is some kind of defense against the world falling apart -- that does resonate with me, and I think the game does a good job of capturing that. The other thing that I suspect that some people online have latched onto with this game is just the process of sitting down and visualizing yourself and asking "what am I scared of right now." It's not universal, but for a lot of people I think disassociation can often be a really powerful cognitive technique both for self-analysis and for staging self-interventions during some types of panic attacks, and disassociation is not always something that comes intuitively to everyone. It's interesting to see the different reactions though. :) It's funny because if anything my criticism of the game is that near the end it gets a little too specific and too prescriptive for my tastes about how to address fears. I like the idea of having a healthy relationship with anxiety, and I do think that idea captures something meaningful; but I don't think that's something that can be set up in only one conversation, and I don't think the motivations/solutions the author lays out for fear are broad enough to capture what that process will or should look like for everyone, the game feels overly optimistic about how hard that process is. But like you said, it's a short game. I think it suffers a little bit from not having the necessary time available to avoid an abrupt ending that sort of implies treating anxiety just requires having an emotional breakthrough that solves everything. |