Imagine a video game where you’re a squirrel in a beautiful forest, gathering acorns to prepare for the winter.
At first, collecting them is satisfying. But then a narrator warns you: acorns with sap attract predators. Now you need to clean every one.
The pressure mounts. You realize you need to clean more and more acorns if you want to survive the winter. It becomes less obvious which acorns are contaminated or not. Now you’re worried that you are contaminated, and you have to clean all your acorns again because you’ve touched them. And once they’re wet from being washed in the river, you realize they’ll rot if you don’t arrange them in your nest in just the right way.
“It becomes essentially incompletable, to the point where it causes a sense of anxiety,” said fourth-year Haley Breslin, who is designing the game as her capstone for the Media Arts and Design (MADD) major.
Breslin’s game—which lulls players with comfort before slowly accumulating unsettling elements—is designed to give players a visceral feeling of what it’s like to live with contamination OCD. The condition is characterized by an intense fear that objects, people or oneself have been tainted or made unsafe.
Breslin is one of several UChicago students using their MADD capstone to test what interactive media can uniquely do—not just represent an experience, but invite you to participate in one. That instinct is at the core of MADD. Since the program launched in 2021, students and researchers have converged around clusters ranging from games to algorithmic music, creative computing and expanded cinema.
The University recently received a milestone gift to create the Mouly Carlson Chair, marking the first endowed professorship in the fields of media arts, design and game studies at UChicago.
For Breslin, the MADD capstone project is personal. She designed it from her own experience with OCD, hoping the game could do what conversation often couldn't.
In her game, subtle triggers—a jittery camera, and ghost frequencies too low to consciously hear—build into a creeping sense of dread. The game's insistent, worrying narrator represents the mental voice of OCD, giving players a firsthand perspective about what Breslin has long struggled to communicate.
“I can explain these feelings to someone, but they’re inherently irrational,” she said. “So I made something for people who haven’t experienced these things at all.”
Playing the prosecutor
Like Breslin, Aimee Stachowiak believes games can make players feel things no other medium can. A MADD and human rights double-major, her capstone video essay explores how two very different games implicate players in questions of justice and punishment.
“Games offer a safe space to engage with very complex moral quandaries,” she said. "When you are forced to do those actions, it's much more personal.”
Her project grew out of a research question that kept nagging at her: Has the United States confused punishment with justice? And should justice always entail retribution?
She was drawn to two games in particular. The first is Ace Attorney, a game she discovered through her older sister—who was also in MADD—that casts the player as a defense lawyer carefully thinking through arguments to exonerate the wrongly accused. When evidence cuts against your own case, the game doesn't let you ignore it: Both sides pause, return to the scene and keep looking.
The second, L.A. Noire, is a detective game where players patrol, interrogate and arrest their way through 1940s Los Angeles—and where tracking down a parolee gives you a choice: arrest them, or throw them off a building. The game rewards both equally.
"In L.A. Noire you are trying to figure out who did it and punish them. In Ace Attorney, you are trying to figure out the truth. It's a very simple difference," she said.
For Stachowiak, games can show us that justice isn’t an abstraction. It’s carried out by ordinary people with assumptions they often never examine. While L.A. Noire makes those assumptions feel natural—even rewarded—she loves Ace Attorney because it forces you to question them at every turn.
“It makes you go through the processes of determining everything for yourself—what it means to engage more critically with evidence, to engage with justice systems, to notice corruption and ways to address it."
A passport to anywhere
Stachowiak, like Breslin, shows how games can do things other media can't—forcing your hand in an ethical dilemma.
But for fellow MADD student Mack Minter, games and the fantasy genre can also do something more boundless: take you somewhere that never existed. They can immerse you in worlds built from imagination, ruled by different logic and alive with creative potential.
"Fantasy for me is a philosophy—a way of interacting with the world that draws on utopia and imagination," said Minter.
Minter's video essay project aims to answer a deceptively simple question: why does that feeling matter? And why, as we grow up, do we learn to take it less seriously—to treat fantasy as something to be set aside rather than explored?
For Minter, what they see as the academy's indifference to the fantasy genre is both a symptom of that problem and a provocation.
"Everything I know about fantasy studies has been because I sought it out," they said. "It’s a pretty niche field."
To drive at that theme, Minter's video essay on fantasy and tabletop role-playing games blends scholarly analysis with autobiography—scenes from Minter's own childhood rendered as a fairy-tale. We see a 9-year-old Minter cracking open a novel from the Percy Jackson series for the first time, surrounded by costumes, props and theatrical sets.
“It’s difficult figuring out how to make other people understand how engaging fantasy feels,” Minter said. "It’s also a fun exercise in creative writing to dramatize things that happened to me as a kid."
As Minter reflects in the essay, J.R.R. Tolkien argued that fantasy lets you reclaim something lost in growing up. Minter's project partially tests that idea and challenges everyone who decided losing it was inevitable: from skeptical family members to those literature scholars who scoff at the genre.
"So much of this project is really me trying to prove to people that this matters,” said Minter. "It feels like I'm treading new ground in a way that’s intimidating, but exciting."
Say it or play it?
Breslin, Stachowiak and Minter arrived at their capstones from very different places—a personal struggle, a conversation on human rights, a childhood full of dice and dragons. But they landed on the same conviction: that games don't just entertain. They put you somewhere you've never been, make you feel something you couldn't have predicted and ask you to reckon with it.
Through the MADD program, all three have appreciated the chance to bring their perspectives to life through games and videos—especially in a world where they’re such dominant forms of popular culture.
“People my age watch YouTube videos and play games,” said Stachowiak. “If I'm trying to get that message across, I should use a medium they're more likely to engage with.”
Patrick Jagoda, a professor and chair of the Department of Cinema and Media Studies, sees that thought as central to what the program is for.
"The MADD program helps students make sense of the rapid developments in media and design that have fundamentally transformed contemporary life," he said. "It supports students’ passion for cultural objects: like video games, anime and interactive film. It invites them to both criticize and experiment with generative AI and design methods. The program gives students the tools to be able to contribute to emergent media cultures in a meaningful way.”
