This creative project is a visual and sonic exploration of emotion in a video game format. The game is a 2D side-scroller created using PyGame and Python that focuses on a character who uses "emotions" to navigate their increasingly unrecognizable world. This project was taken on to explore the ways in which technologically-created media can relate to the human experience of emotion, and the ways in which emotions are like software to the human body's hardware. Additionally, this project conceptually comments on and rejects the idea that human situations always require a specific "appropriate" human emotion in response. Credit for the music in this game goes to Markus Rennemann.

The past two and a half semesters have been extremely difficult for college students. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, student motivation has been slipping. I felt my own productivity slowly diminishing shortly after March 2020, and a number of students that I have spoken with share a similar mentality. In addition, the social lives of students have taken a toll. Social distancing, event cancellations and online classes have led to a serious lack of social interaction with their peers. I felt as though the theatre community, in particular, was suffering, because of how much of our lives are centered around social interaction. Not only is social interaction recreational for us theatre students, but it’s integral for our careers as well. We are very conditioned to getting together multiple times a week just to experience emotion with each other, and this was all taken away very abruptly in March 2020. The remaining theatrical events last season were cancelled, and the events this season were mostly moved to an online setting. I began to think that the theatre community at ASU needed some way to stay connected despite these unfortunate circumstances, and that is when I found out about Alpha Psi Omega. Alpha Psi Omega is a National Theatre Honors Society which used to have a chapter here at ASU, so I took it upon myself to reactivate the chapter.

Research has shown that being a female athlete in a male-dominated sports world is an oppressive burden, yet the experiences of being a black female athlete have been largely ignored. To combat this lack of attention, this paper invokes communication and feminist theorist Bell Hook's concept of moving black women from margin to center to reveal the intersectional oppression of gender and racial narratives that they face in sports. By outlining the difference between white and black femininity and studying media portrayals of popular black female athletes such as Venus and Serena Williams and others, it becomes obvious how black women are typecast into certain social and athletic roles. This research also includes an auto-ethnographic component of my own experience as a black female lacrosse player at the NCAA Division I level. This component functions as a point of comparison and contrast of the ideas and concepts I discuss. Lastly, I offer recommendations and suggestions as to how to empower young black female athletes and retain them in a variety of sports. The goal of my thesis is to place special attention onto black women in an area which there is an extreme lack of representation. My own empirical research has led me to the conclusion that not only is such a discussion important, but it is absolutely necessary. If we are to fight back against hegemonic social structures such as racism and gender roles in the sports world, we must first understand what we are up against. My thesis gives us a glimpse into our imposing opponents, and I hope that future research continues this trend so that black female athletes like myself may one day be considered an athlete in the same sense that our white peers are.