I created these moodboards to get a tentative feel for what the game would be like. As I’ve already established in my bitsy project, I want it to be an introspective  game about a player finding out a grim story of lost hikers. The photos I used are based in North America, which I wanted to base the setting in as it’s one of the few places with extensive amounts of wilderness. More specifically, it would be the boreal forests in Yukon, Canada that’s home to grizzly bears.

I also did a study on a forest landscape to get myself thinking about the artistic side of the endeavour.

It’s really rough and i struggled with drawing it so I hope to continue this so I can improve.

TIM TREADWELL

Tim Treadwell (b. 1957 – d. 2003) was a man who was transfixed by Grizzly bears to a point of obsession that ended his life. For thirteen summers he went to Alaska to participate in risky and close encounters with the bears. Before he started engaging in that behaviour he had a long and troubled past where he struggled with addiction and identity. However, he attributed his connection to bears as being the thing that pulled him into sobriety.

What fascinates me about Tim Treadwell is this anthropocentric view of nature where he believes that wild animals have the capacity for human-like relationships to the extent where he was convinced he was accepted as a brother among them.

This analysis by Dr Andrew van der Vaart is extremely rigorous and goes into depth on his delusional behaviour and the major red flags that ended up in the mauling of him and his girlfriend. It touches on how his previous addictive tendencies and a narcissistic desire for affection contributed to his downfall.

 It was autumn and it was time for the bears to fatten up before winter. This instinct to search for food made them much more aggressive than usual and Treadwell and his girlfriend, Amie Huguenard were right next to a salmon stream. Huguenard was very nervous around bears (As any sane person should be) but they stayed an extra week after issues with the airport. A final recording captured the fatal encounter in an unfettered, horrific transcription as Treadwell liked to document all of his escapades.

In relation to my story, I wanted to flesh out the setting of the wilderness by adding narrative theming of man vs nature. In the tragedy of Treadwell’s tale, his self-serving idea of protecting bears (by risking his life and disturbing them) ultimately ended up in two bears being killed and nothing to gain for it. By covering this in the narrative, it confronts the audience on the way they regard ecology and the environment and refutes the concept that human beings are somehow separate from the natural world. This rhetoric is commonly perpetuated in society and religion to the extent that a lot of people believe it, even subconsciously.