If you visited the V&A’s Design/Play/Disrupt exhibition in 2018, you may have played an interesting minigame collection, in which you fought wobbly physics to feed a girl named Jenny, using a Tetris-style board to achieve the perfect calorie amount, and then twisting her into pilates poses.
Almost seven years later, the full version of Consume Me, which won this year’s Independent Games festival grand prize, is set for a September release. According to developer Jenny Jiao Hsia, the game has become a semiautobiographical tale about how she felt “stupid, fat and ugly” in high school. What started as a collection of minigames about Hsia’s struggles with dieting and disordered eating grew into a game that looks at the many facets of her life as a teenager, including her relationship with her mother – who appears accompanied by Persona-style boss battle music and always finds a reason to nag – as well as her insecurities around her first long-term relationship.
Hsia and co-designer Alec “AP” Thomson have been making games together since their time studying at NYU Game Center. The duo conceived of Consume Me when Hsia showed Thomson old diaries featuring her calorie charts and notes about dieting. “I said, ‘Hey, doesn’t this look like a game?’,” she recalls. Thomson agreed. “We had a little prototype and then we got funding, and the game grew from there,” says Thomson.
As Hsia and Thomson grappled with the challenge of making their largest game yet, the years went on. “The last big project we worked on together was essentially a student game for us,” Thomson says. That game was Beglitched, a match-three puzzler from 2016. “Compared to that, our whole process on Consume Me is completely different.” Hsia is self-depreciating about the experience: “On Beglitched, I physically worked next to AP every day, and I was happy to let him tell me what to do. My set of tasks on this and our smaller games was very clearcut – [with Consume Me] I had to take more responsibility. I don’t think I’m a very disciplined person, that’s why it took so long.”
Hsia stresses that Consume Me wasn’t a way for her to work through her issues with disordered eating, as she had left that time of her life behind before she started development on the game. Instead, she thinks that working from her own experiences makes for a more interesting story. “I think it’s boring if you’re just inventing something from your mind without any tangible experience, or at least I don’t have the imagination to do that,” she says. “The character of Jenny you see in the game isn’t solely based on me, either. She’s very much an amalgamation of AP and myself. She’s very diligent about reaching goals and crossing things off her list for example, because that also makes for a good game, but in reality, it’s AP who’s more like that, not me. I wrote all those calorie diagrams down, but I didn’t actually follow them.”
Hsia seems surprised at the idea that a lot of Consume Me feels very relatable. People who have difficulty concentrating will probably see themselves in the reading minigame, in which Jenny’s head perpetually rotates away from the book she’s holding. There also just never seems to be quite enough time to do it all, and more often than not, Jenny’s budget comes down to a lucky 20-dollar bill she finds on the street in a minigame that sees her walk her dog around worrying amounts of poop. Jenny’s habit of finding money on the streets of New York is apparently another well-documented facet of Hsia’s own life.
“I don’t actually know what people will take away from it,” she says. “That’s the interesting thing to me. You cherrypick parts of your life to show to complete strangers, and then you watch them react.”