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Autoethnographic Research through Storytelling in Animation and Video Games

Chen, Renee Chia-Lei
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1461270639

Abstract Details

2016, Master of Fine Arts, Ohio State University, Design.
This thesis serves as a deep exploration of myself through my storytelling work in animation and video games. In this thesis study, I seek to build a philosophy that explains my value about what storytelling can do. The objective is threefold. I aim to use storytelling to reveal a deep sense of myself, unpack social and cultural biases to express my values within my design work, and affect the viewers by fostering empathy. By adapting my attitude and my values to visual components, I seek to find ways to use storytelling as a voice for social-justice purposes. The reflective process of this thesis provides me a way to see a holistic picture of the relationship between society and me, and how my pessimistic worldview may have been formed. Storytelling, in my philosophy, can serve as an acceptable reprisal to seek social justice. For this reason, I choose to use storytelling as a social experiment. I see the viewers’ responses as an acknowledgement of my emotional pain, and as an attack to the offenders in society. I use storytelling as a cathartic method to tell society that it has wronged me. I see this process as a coping mechanism for artists who are as hopeless about changing society as I am. Each of my animation and video game processes is led by storytelling. Each one is a micro-lens focused on a particular personal crisis that connects to a larger cultural and/or social issue. In this study, I use autoethnography as the research method to discuss my work and how it relates to my pessimistic attitude towards society. Autoethnography is a method to describe personal experiences in connection with cultural contexts (Ellis 2004, 37). It acknowledges the state of multiple truths, such as the truth I believe and the different truths that exist in different people’s minds. Instead of looking for a universal truth, my thesis explores my values and my beliefs expressed through storytelling. Autoethnographic research often results in written texts only. However, my approach to research is first initiated through making animation and video games, then analyzing the storytelling content and identifying themes inherent to them. The autoethnographic research method then serves as a self-reflective process, and promotes awareness of the relationship between self and other, self and society. The reflective nature of this thesis study enables me to become critically aware of my values and my own deep-seated feelings and enables me to contextualize my storytelling work into broader socio-cultural phenomena. I have been labeled as a person with special conditions including MDD (Major Depressive Disorder) and PTSD (Post-traumatic Stress Disorder). Through a new lens of personal development, my research process itself has helped me explain my psychological wounds developed during my socialization process in childhood and early adulthood. With a new understanding of the socio-cultural causes of my discomforts, I can gain more control over my anger and anxiety towards society. With an elevated knowledge base of my cognitive process, I can understand myself beyond any label.
Susan Melsop (Advisor)
Linda Mizejewski (Committee Member)
Alan Price (Committee Member)
132 p.
Design; Gender Studies; Mass Media; Social Psychology
Autoethnography; Personal Narrative; Animation; Video Game; Social Psychology; Storytelling; Gender Studies

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Chen, R. C.-L. (2016). Autoethnographic Research through Storytelling in Animation and Video Games [Master's thesis, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1461270639

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Chen, Renee. Autoethnographic Research through Storytelling in Animation and Video Games. 2016. Ohio State University, Master's thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1461270639.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Chen, Renee. "Autoethnographic Research through Storytelling in Animation and Video Games." Master's thesis, Ohio State University, 2016. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1461270639

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1461270639
3,489
© 2016, some rights reserved.Creative Commons License Autoethnographic Research through Storytelling in Animation and Video Games by Renee Chia-Lei Chen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at etd.ohiolink.edu.
This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.