Chasing Meaning is an interactive art video game that examines the emotional architecture of human relationships through the lens of language and depression. Built in Unity, the game weaves gameplay mechanics with computational linguistics to reflect how unspoken connections—those hidden beneath surface-level conversation—can reveal emotional depth, conflict, or loss.
Set in a surreal, dreamlike environment composed of digital textures and lens-based photography, the game challenges players to collect symbolically charged objects before being caught by a lurking entity—representing anxiety, memory, or relational breakdown.
This project merges the emotional terrain of language with the immersive potential of interactive media, proposing that language datasets—when treated poetically—can surface relationships too fragile or fragmented to articulate directly.
Conceptual Framework
Chasing Meaning reflects on the way language encodes our most intimate psychological experiences—particularly how depression and emotional estrangement can be felt even in the absence of direct communication. By working with linguistic data that contains partially expressed or repressed sentiments, the game highlights the ambiguity and unresolved tension embedded in human relationships.
The player is dropped into a symbolic landscape—neither fully abstract nor fully representational—where each object is tied to an underlying linguistic trace: a word or phrase derived from computational models trained on relational discourse. The looming monster in the game is not merely a gameplay mechanic, but a metaphor for psychological rupture, surfacing when unresolved meanings remain uncollected.
In this way, the game becomes both a poetic and psychological map, where interaction is governed not just by spatial logic, but by language as an emotional system.