Making and Playing for Catharsis

Abstract

This paper examines the cathartic affordances of game-making and game-playing through Like mother, like burr, a series of autofictional game sketches that reconstruct my mother-daughter relationship as a first-generation Chinese immigrant. Building on Reparative Game Design, I operationalize its tenets—repair, care, and share—into a cyclical methodology of self-writing, iterative making, self-play, and theoretical reflection. Through a close analysis of the sketch "I (have) memorized these streets," I show how bilingual dissonance, fragmented memory, and personal archival materials become procedural forms that re-story lived experience. Using aesthetic catharsis as an evaluative lens, I trace how game mechanics enact the untranslatability of immigrant identity and produce affective intelligibility for the maker-player. The paper contributes a transferable reparative approach centered on positioning, materiality, cycling, re-storying, and catharsis, offering designers a practical model for creating deeply personal, emotionally situated games.