Developing a Choice-Based Digital Fiction for Body Image Bibliotherapy

Christine Wilks,Sarah Riley,Carla Rice,Megan Perram,Astrid Ensslin,Hannah Fowlie,K Alysse Bailey,Lauren Munro

doi:10.3389/fcomm.2021.786465

Abstract

Body dissatisfaction is so common in the western world that it has become the norm, especially among women and girls. Writing New Body Worlds is a transdisciplinary research-creation project that aims to address these issues by developing an interactive digital fiction for body image bibliotherapy. It is created with the critical co-design participation of a group of young women and non-binary individuals (aged 18–25) from diverse backgrounds, who are representative of its intended audience. This article discusses how our participant research influenced the creative development of the digital fiction, its characters and its novel ludonarrative or story-game design. It theorizes how the specific affordances of a choice-based interactive narrative, that situates the reader-player in the mind of the fictional protagonist, may lead to enhanced empathic identification and agency and, therefore, a more profoundly immersive and potentially transformative experience. This process of “diegetic enactment” is where we postulate the therapeutic value lies: an ontological oscillation between the reader-player’s mind and the fictional mind, which may induce the reader-player to reflect upon, and perhaps subtly alter, their own body image.

Highlights

Body image concerns affect the well-being of a generation who are coming of age immersed in our hyper-visual, AI-infused, social and mobile media culture
We deliberately do not depict eating disorders/ disorder eating practices in our digital fiction, we are thinking carefully about introducing narrative devices that will act as safeguards should we find it necessary For example, a textual intervention that breaks the fourth wall of the narrative to signpost the reader-player to sources of help and/or reroute the branching narrative to a safer path
White and Epston’s description of the interplay between story and lived experience is especially pertinent to our digital fiction, which calls for the reader-player to interactively enter the story and make meaningful narrative choices that affect the fictional character’s life and may reverberate in their own life reauthoring

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Body image concerns affect the well-being of a generation who are coming of age immersed in our hyper-visual, AI-infused, social and mobile media culture. Being fiction, Wilks inserted some other, more polarized, voices and viewpoints for dramatic (and therapeutic) purposes This assemblage dramatizes the affective network of kinship of the participant workshops and, because the narrative is interactive and choice-based, the network incorporates the reader-player in a concrete way. The intersectional cast of characters, who from time to time engage in discussion around the broader societal issues and offer casual or more politicized critiques of the effects of neoliberal consumerism, will contextualize and expand the individual-mind-centered drama This is critically important because, following the shift in our project title, it helps to shift the locus of the problem from individuals’ bodyminds to their body worlds. Whilst it is important to challenge and speak back to oppressive messaging from within the social media platforms, it is important to resist their dominance and control by offering content on and encouraging use of the open web

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

ETHICS STATEMENT