The visually impaired and liminality

“In my world, I perceive only a few points of my surroundings, and the rest is all white space for me to imagine and for my mind to fill in …"

--Kun Zhang

The visually impaired use imagination to make up for the lack of vision while receiving information about sounds, touches, and tastes of the real world; in a sense, the visually impaired live in a world where truth and simulation are intertwined, and where liminality emerges.

And such liminality between the truth and the simulation even more ubiquitous in the game world. Because games are simulations of the physical world, the process of sampling the real world in order to build the game worlds has given rise to a number of technological ways that provide pathways for liminality to generate itself. For example, in games, developers use frame-switching and the transient nature of human vision to create artifacts that simulate the continuous motion of objects. The breaks of such liminality are often eye-opening, such as the dropping of frames by a game character, reminding the player, who is absorbed in one side of the liminality, that the other side exists.

I want to make a 2d game with liminality breaking as its core experience. This is the drafts of its design.

A draft of the gameplay

Drafts of the level design

Drafts of the concept art