Jenny Jiao Hsia, the creator of the award-winning indie game Consume Me, is surrounded by boxes of teenage memories.
She has the boutonniere from her high school prom. Saturated photos of family trips where a swoop of emo hair covers her face. Love letters and doodles and homework assignments. Hsia has kept all of it, and she happily shows it to myself and Polygon’s editor-at-large Giovanni Colantonio, as well as two of her co-developers on the game.
The reason is that Consume Me is largely autobiographical. It documents teenage Jenny’s quest to be hot and successful in high school, and get into an Ivy League college. The game is cute and funny, but nonetheless touches on real, dark anxieties. The to-do lists that Hsia shows us from her teen years are written in neat ink, and list anodyne goals like “stay positive” and “drink more water” alongside “stop binge eating” and colorful recipes with calorie counts next to each ingredient.
“This sounds so dark,” Hsia says as she excavates a bright orange shoebox full of notes and photos. It is dark, but it also truly reflects the way many teens live. The game purposefully skirts the darkest moments of her disordered eating.
“I feel like it’s hard to separate dieting and just have it been in its own vacuum,” Hsia says. “I don’t think it paints a true picture of what it’s all like to be sixteen.”
“This is also how we got the systems to come together,” lead programmer AP Thomson adds. “The whole ‘choose what you’re doing with your free time’ [mechanic] doesn’t work as well if you have a singular goal that you’re focused on.”
As Hsia showed us increasingly intimate snapshots of her youth — “I love you” written on an unused sanitary pad, “48-hour make-out session” checked off on a bucket list — I remembered trips to my mom’s storage unit, where I found my own deeply embarrassing teen journals. I hid them in my mom’s car, then ripped out the pages and threw them in a public trash can so that there was no chance anyone I knew would ever find them. But Hsia revels in these kinds of reveals, even as she shrieks in embarrassment when Colantonio points out the make-out session thing.
“I actually think it’s really fun to do stuff like this — share it with people that weren’t there in that time period,” Hsia says. “And just be like, hey, this is a part of me. Did you know? Do you see that in me now?”
Watch the video above to see the full interview, and check out Giovanni’s write-up of Consume Me here.
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Author: 360 Technology Group
