"Elude": designing depression

This paper describes the design process of "Elude". "Elude" is a single player game intended to inform friends and relatives of people with depression about what their loved ones are going through. It was developed at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab with a team of nine students over the nine week summer period of 2010. "Elude" is intended to foster tolerance and understanding for depression, thus alleviating complex feelings of anger, helplessness, guilt and sadness amongst caregivers. The paper focuses on the process of creating a clear vision for the game and how this vision was systematically translated into a concrete design that achieved the game's communicative goal. "Elude" is part of my larger research on modeling abstract concepts in games via metaphors in order to expand games' expressive and experiential scope. Since depression is an abstract concept, the design of "Elude" relied heavily on the use of metaphors. Hence, this project contributes to an understanding of a systematic approach to metaphorical game design. "Elude" is a Flash game for PC and Mac and is free to download from the GAMBIT website at: http://gambit.mit.edu/loadgame/elude.php