Building a World

I hadn’t realized that I needed to build a paper prototype last class– I didn’t remember what Marianne had told us in class, and misread the syllabus. As the next assignment was to build out our world, however, and I don’t have a traditional world to build as I’m not doing VR, building a paper prototype of the app was still an appropriate way to ‘build my world’.

I then built logos for the major players in the universe– the oil company that Cassandra works for, Troy Oil, as i”n the original story, she was a princess of Troy, and the messaging application she uses to communicate. Since the idea is that Troy Oil is testing out a new communication platform for secure messaging– a trend nowadays, with players like Signal and concerns about encryption are more commonplace after the election– the idea was to create a fake encrypted communications platform. I went with the name “Soothsafe”– safe, to imply the encryption and security, and Sooth for the pun on soothsay, the power of Cassandra in the original story.

I then mocked up digital copies of the prototype– they’re my “world”– and also a file of the document that Cassandra is whistleblowing about.

The readings this week were more personal than I’m accustomed to for readings for this class, and I’m refreshed by its candor. It is problematic the way we’ve normalized child abuse, and it’s great to see someone directly address it– I feel like Bettleheim would’ve done so, but he was also a practitioner of abuse. It is still disappointing to see a continued eurocentrism, even if it is at least acknowledged. Are there any academics who write about fairy tales and also have actually studied anything in other cultures? So far I’m not certain this exists.