Experimental — strawberrycongee

Digital Scavenging: using the debris of capitalism to critique itself.

The game is built almost entirely out of scavenged digital objects: CCTV livestreams and Internet Archive footage from around the world — factories, farms, casinos, liminal spaces, vintage TV commercials. The digital debris of late capitalism becomes the very language used to critique it.

Anti-Game

The game deliberately plays with expectations of the traditional gamer, through an apporach I call anti-game.

It borrows the grammar and clichés of traditional video games: tasks, collectibles, first-person interaction, the promise of progression, but intentionally withholds every payoff:

A gun never fires,

work-like tasks offer no reward,

and interactions leave you empty-handed.

The dopamine loop is initiated but never resolved, turning the gameplay itself into the statement: an unresolved tension the player is forced to sit inside.

A MAZE. Berlin 2026 Most Amazing Award [nomination]

Nominated for A MAZE. Berlin 2026 (Most Amazing), exhibiting 13–16 May,

with an invited talk “Counterfeit Games: Anti-game Approaches to Playable Experiences.”

• A Maze./Berlin 2026

Leftfield Collection, EGX 2026

Shown as part of the Leftfield Collection, EGX at MCM London Comic Con 22–24 May 2026

Featured on

Sidequest (Game criticism) Warpdoor (Experinmental game site)

• Gather Quest: Sketches from A MAZE part 1/2 ...on slowing down, counter logics and solo-devs - SideQuest
• Gather Quest: Sketches from A MAZE part 2/2 ...on puppeteering performances and collective decision making dynamics - SideQuest
• Warpdoor

About

A narrative game / interactive essay that centers the subjectivity of the patient within the medical-industrial complex, driven by my own experience through a lens of institutional critique. It tells the story via multiple perspectives, sampling notes from personal medical reports.

Intentional Use of Repetitive & Restrictive Gestures

Mechanically, the game intentionally limits player agency with limited movements (players are only allowed to move their hands and head, they can only perform limited tasks through puppet like movements such as taking pills, filling out forms, etc.) while juxtapositioning this with unconventional controls (ie. playing as a patient but the control moves the doctor; playing as a file in the file room), reflecting the lack of control the patient experienced within the medical system. And the performative nature of patient-doctor relationships.

Storytelling Through Multiple Perspectives & Agencies

The game is played out like a video sequence that cuts between scenes. There are two main narrative tracks, one is the voice over of my essay that reflects on the medical journey and critiques the system that failed me. The other narrative of the game emerges through objects and perspectives that assemble the medical system that define me - hidden in the forms, on the CCTV monitor, patient document, through gestures and backgrounds that emerges through time. There are also two separate perspectives, one is from “me” in first person perspective, and the other is in CCTV monitors, with sections from my personal medical documents rearranged into short bullet points, and displayed line by line on mouse click over the CCTV image, while the “me” is always centered in the screen performing the same repetitive gestures. These two perspectives crossover in fragments and tell the story in parallel, contrasting between what I see and how I am perceived and processed in the system.

Environmental Storytelling through the Liminal Space of the Medical-Industrial Complex

Rooms in this game are reconstructed according to my memories, but purposefully remove the doors. Here I reference a criminal interrogation technique that involves positioning a suspect’s back against the door, thereby removing the door (and psychological escape route) from their sight, this is a tactic often used to make the suspect feel “trapped” and heightened their anxiety, while establishing a spatial dominance in the room. In a way, the counselling rooms work similar to interrogation rooms, where I need to constantly prove that my feelings are real, are important, and prove that a re-evaluation is necessary. These clinical spaces are liminal in that they exist at the threshold between sickness and health, between patient and person, between institutional and personal identity. They represent the reality of being trapped in diagnostic liminality.

About

An introspective VR walking simulator that explores the sensation of post-surgical memory loss through the lens of “machine forgetting.” Navigating a non-Euclidean labyrinth of impossible portals, the player moves through surreal, decaying environments textured by custom next-frame-prediction models (pix2pixHD) trained on my personal video archives.

Shortlisted for FIVARS 2024 (Festival of International Virtual & Augmented Reality Stories), showcased in Canada in Nov 2024.

Training “Machine Forgetting”

Because the model only predicts the next frame based on patterns, my original memories are fundamentally destroyed in the dataset. The resulting images are uncanny and unstable; the machine's process of data degradation mirrors the human labor of forgetting, and the absent presence of the memory lingers as traces in what remains.

Level Design: constructing broken memory space via Non-Euclidean architecture

spaces you can't return to. Rooms loop back into themselves, and spaces you walk into can never be returned to. Because VR rendering makes these portal transitions visually seamless, the medium itself does the conceptual work: your body believes the impossible geometry before your mind catches up. The architecture physically simulates the grief of memory loss — the harder you try to retrace your steps, the further you get from where you started.