About the term stillness as a native of China, it is easy to understand it as silence or freezing，but after reading Notes toward the concept of contemplative gaming on canvas, I understand the inner meaning of stillness, which is synonymous with the Zen of Chinese Buddhist culture. This word has a lot of meaning, and since I come from a Buddhist family, it's no stranger to me, but it's hard to get a complete overview, so my Angle of entry may be a little shallow.
In my family, my parents are proficient in meditation, which is one of the acts of reification of Zen. The way to meditate is different from place to place, and the way we understand it is to completely empty your mind, which is my inspiration.
Our meditation requires us to focus only on my own body, and it has a specific process: first feel my body, from the top of my head to my five senses, to my neck, to my shoulders, to my chest, to my abdominal cavity, to my buttocks, to my thighs, to my calves, to my feet. Feel your body from the top down and relax it. In fact, it seems very simple, but I have a hard time doing it because I can't keep my full attention in this process, so I wonder if there is any way to guide us to better start this meditation.
So I'm going to make a game that allows us to follow the guidance of the game into a state of meditation, which will give us a better introduction to meditation.
Relaxation of the body, seemingly simple, but many times we will be distracted. It is difficult for us to fully enter the state of relaxation. Even though there is a certain process as mentioned above, it is easy to be distracted in the actual operation. For example, we only relax our neck but frown again, which is difficult to be detected and corrected by ourselves.
So what I do is I use sensors to connect the parts of the body and send them to a computer, and if the program senses that a muscle is tense in that part of the body, it will play the corresponding background music to tell us that our body is not relaxed enough, and then it will form muscle memory.
After several experiments, we could listen to the summary of background music in sequence when meditating, and then we would consciously relax. I think this kind of muscle memory is very subconscious, so it can facilitate me to meditate more quickly.
Since I am not good at programming, I used animation to show my experiment process.
By Huang Yangkai (Sam)
Email Huang Yangkai (Sam)
Published On: 14/10/2021