EMDD Projects

The Master's in Emerging Media Design and Development (EMDD) is a 36-credit, AEJMC-accredited program available on campus, online, or in a blended format — with no GRE required. The program prepares students to plan, develop, and deploy communication designs and storytelling across digital platforms, spanning fields like strategic communication, user experience, transmedia storytelling, and more. Students gain hands-on experience working with real-world clients, leveraging emerging technology, and engaging audiences through multimedia storytelling. Grounded in empathy, professional ethics, and design thinking, the program is taught by award-winning faculty and is an excellent foundation for both industry careers and doctoral studies.

For EMDD 630, students were tasked with creating an interactive digital narrative experience (IDN) through a visual novel game. Students developed the narrative, art, sound, gameplay, etc. The games were developed in Renpy. The full game page can be found here: https://livpng.itch.io/socail-...

My game, socAIl was created in collaboration with classmate Trinity Rea.

SocAIl (a play on ‘social’) was inspired by the growing prevalence of people using AIs like ChatGPT and Claude to serve as a friend, therapist or significant other to combat their loneliness.

The game places the player into the struggles of many young adults now, facing mental illness, finding meaningful work, and the reality that AI replacing potential jobs. It shows how AI can never replace humanity and connection, and it shouldn’t be encouraged to do so. AI is a tool- not a friend.

The game explores the ways that someone may navigate finding the balance of self-coping, reaching out to past connections and trying to use AI. It’s a game exploring the balance of dependency on AI and building connections to overcome mental illness.

All of the background was hand-drawn and illustrated by me, as well as the sound work. The character sprites were created and built in The Sims 4. While this may create a "thrown together" or "unprofessional" look, this was incredibly intentional in the development process by Rea and I. We did not want to use AI in the creation of the game where it was avoidable. So, while I am not a trained or skilled artist, I learned the new skills needed. 

While this game is about AI, and AI is built into many of the platforms used in production, generative AI was not used in any areas of development for this game, including in art, coding, music, etc. We recognize how generative AI is impacting the future of media, but felt that in order to tell a story that shows the importance of humanity in an AI-centered present, we wanted to highlight the beauty of humanity through artistic expression.

In EMDD 650, students were tasked with identifying a problem space and creating an interactive media project to serve as a potential solution. Students would create high-fedility protoype exapmles for what a potential solution to their chosen problem space would be. 

Having an intertest and passion for educaitonal design, I was interested in creating a digital game that students in grades 3-5 could play during free time to serve as an independent and supplemental educational tool for digital citizenship and online saftey. 

The game is inspired by popular video game, 'Papers, Please' where students are tasked with vetting potential friend requests in online social games like Roblox or Fortnite. Students can "ask for help" or "block a user" when they are unsure. The goal of the game is to teach students that they should only talk to people they know and trust in real life on these games, and not everyone you meet in games can be trusted. 

The game was developed in Figma. User reaserch was done by talking with teachers in these grade levels, parents of students at this age, and a computer education expert who works in an elementary school with students this age.