✓ Conducting EQ Research Interviews - Shahnoor

The blissful aroma of fresh roasted coffee beans fills my senses as I drain my cup of Philz iced latte, reaching for the last drops of caffeine to hype me up for story planning. Claire and I have been meeting at Philz Coffee every week to work on our project, where the drinks are heavenly and our brains can get a boost of never-ending energy. And trust me, we need the boost! So much complexity hides under the shadows of our wonderful characters as we weave together different plot scenarios and motives. It's easy to get lost in the fictional world we're creating.

Oh, but how rude of me! I'm Shahnoor Jafri, the amazing EQ researcher Claire has been talking about :) Continuing with our story, we're hauling butt to add depth to our characters by exploring their pasts, understanding their motives, and taking personality tests in order to determine who they are! We're pretty hardcore. But we want to make our characters as realistic as possible and that requires a lot of imagination and reflection on real-life people and scenarios! Currently, we're struggling with the middle of our visual story because there are endless possibilities of where our main character, Fey, can go. I can't go into too much detail (or else I'll give our story away), but I can tell you that we've officially established our main characters: Fey, Joel and Slater. Claire, the Van Gogh of character design, just finalized the first stage of faces for all three--though for all we know, we might switch up their appearances when we get deeper into the game-making process.

I created a Twitter account at the beginning of this project, and Claire made a Tumblr account, too. We'll eventually be using those for publicity, but before we post the links to those accounts on here, we wanted to get further into the process (there isn't much to publicize if we haven't completed the first chapter of our visual novel yet!). Overall, Claire and I LOVE our jobs. Our imaginations reach no boundaries as we constantly come up with extravagant ideas, wondering if we should include a nerdy freshman or choose to integrate alien-like aspects into our reality.

But as the story gets more twisty and turny, the more conflicting the psyches of the characters get. I've been doing a lot of research on identifying emotional intelligence. The only problem is how we can measure it in our game. Are there points (a number score)? Are there actually "right choices," or is that too ambiguous? These are the questions I'm faced with when I think of each character and his or her motives. (In case you need a refresher, our game--Sonder--will test your capabilities by presenting you with choices to select from. You'll be "graded" according to which options you choose.) Hopefully, after talking to some professionals and doing more research, I'll be more confident with the "psychological gaming" of our visual novel. Claire and I have scheduled an appointment with Jessica Wang and Erica Smith, two of  the CASSY (Counseling and Support Services for Youth) therapists at our school, for input. I'll be asking them a few questions about their expertise and experiences with dealing with the human mind. I will also make sure to include an outline of what I learn from them about measuring emotional intelligence in my final reports!

Until then,

- Shahnoor