Body of Play
Body of Play is an interactive experience that interrogates the ease with which we explore, manipulate, and impose expectations on the female body. Through a tactile, almost ritualistic interaction design, players sift through drawers of disassembled doll parts—eyes, faces, torsos, limbs—selecting and assembling them in a work area. The game renders an otherwise mundane act of play into something truly uncomfortably, but also intimate. Explore the cultural and psychological mechanisms that normalize bodily fragmentation and reconstruction.
Designer, 3D Designer and Animator, Full-Stack Experience Developer
Unity, Blender, ZBrush, Adobe Illustrator, C#
Critical Design, UI/UX, Interaction Design, Feminist Media Theory
Purpose
This project—my senior capstone— explores the cultural mechanics of doll play as both a site of joyful self-expression and a conduit for internalized ideals. Dolls like Barbie often function as talismans in early girlhood—objects through which aspirations, expectations, and identity are projected and performed. They provide a physical grounding for the ways young bodies are imagined, scrutinized, and shaped by society. Yet, they are also powerful tools for self-determination, storytelling, and imaginative exploration.
This project does not critique dolls themselves, but instead stages an inquiry into how these emblems of play can simultaneously embody delight and discipline. By asking players to assemble a Barbie-like figure from drawers of modular body parts, the experience makes visible the underlying mechanics of customization, selection, and aesthetic logic that often go unquestioned in childhood play.
Execution
This project was developed in Unity as a desktop experience, designed to evoke the eerie charm of vintage dollhouses and curiosity cabinets. The core interaction revolves around a custom drawer interface, where each drawer houses a category of body parts—eyes, faces, torsos—presented not as sterile UI elements but as curated artifacts. Players use raycasting and mouse input to select and inspect parts, which animate with organic hover states and drift slightly, as if suspended in fluid. Upon closing the drawer, the selected part animates to a central assembly zone using Bézier-based movement paths for a hand-crafted, uncanny feel.
The visual language draws heavily from Art Deco geometry, antique textures, and the unsettling whimsy of Coraline—think dark woods, gilded borders, creaking brass handles, and muted jewel tones punctuated by unnatural glows. The lighting design favors deep shadows and directional spotlights, guiding the player’s eye while evoking the theatricality of an old marionette stage. Custom shaders simulate age and wear on body parts, giving them a museum-like patina and reinforcing the artifact-like quality of the pieces.
Under the hood, the experience uses modular prefabs and scriptable objects to handle compatibility between parts, allowing for dynamic character construction with minimal performance overhead. Animation is driven by custom easing curves to create motion that feels both magical and mechanical—deliberate, weighted, and just slightly off. Subtle ambient sound design, layered with antique drawer slides and distant music-box tones, contributes to the immersive, tactile mood.
The final product merges a critically designed interaction flow with a richly stylized aesthetic universe, inviting players into a space that feels at once enchanting and disconcerting—a world where the joy of play collides with the quiet weight of expectation and assembly.
