If you want to see how a video game is made, you don’t have too many options. You could visit a studio and watch the mundane magic happen as developers type out lines of code or model characters on computer screens, but that’s about it. Despite being interactive works of art that play with your sense of touch, games are born from intangible places. You can’t live in a game. You can’t hold its UI in your hands. It’s a distant dream world.
Consume Me is an exception to that rule. The slice-of-life indie game, which won the Seamus McNally Grand Prize at this year’s Independent Game Fest, is a proud work of autobiography that loosely adapts the story of co-creator Jenny Jiao Hsia’s teenage years and her struggles with diet culture. It’s a story that unfolded in real space across New York City, contained in real scrapbooks and dusty storage boxes overflowing with memories. Consume Me exists just as much in the real world as it does on a PC screen.
That’s how I found myself sitting cross-legged in the real apartment the game is set in, holding Hsia’s high school yearbook in my hands, touching the bite marks in its spine from a deceased dog that I felt like I knew.
Ahead of Consume Me’s release, I asked Hsia (who I will refer to by her last name here, while I use Jenny to identify the fictional version of her) and longtime co-collaborator AP Thomson if they’d be willing to show me the real-world spaces that inspired the game. Hsia not only agreed, but was eager to offer me a city-spanning itinerary that instantly revealed just how true to life the eccentric life sim is. An afternoon spent eating cheesecake and taming yapping pomeranians showcased why Consume Me feels so authentic as a proudly messy autobiography.
The day starts when I arrive at the New York City apartment where Hsia grew up, which her parents still live in. I’m greeted by Hsia, Thomson, and Jie En Lee, Consume Me’s background artist. (Despite being tasked with adapting the space, it’s Lee’s first time actually visiting the apartment.) The exact layout of the 2D game space isn’t a 1:1 match with the real thing, but the visual language is shared. Like the fictional version, there are surprising pops of color on the living room’s walls and a healthy amount of clutter built from decades of amassing memories. A yellowing Nintendo Wii on the TV stand, alongside multiple fitness games, transports me back to an era of Wii Fit mania.
“My parents always had difficulty throwing things away, and I think it’s genetic and I have that problem too,” Hsia says.
Clutter is key to understanding the origins of Consume Me. When we all squeeze into Hsia’s old bedroom, she starts pulling out boxes filled to the brim with scraps from her past. One box is full of can headphones, each with its own distinct personality — and some seemingly swiped from events where Hsia and Thomson showcased their games. Another is full of notebooks, which Hsia begins to flip through in embarrassed horror. They’re full of checklists. Pages and pages of checklists that look almost identical to Consume Me’s UI, which tells players what tasks they need to accomplish in a given week. That’s no accident.
“Jenny was showing me a lot of this stuff when she was first proposing the idea for Consume Me,” Thomson says. “And she’s like, ‘Look at all these checklists and things like this. Doesn’t this just look like a video game?’ And I was like (sarcastically), ‘Yes, that looks so much like a video game.’ And we designed this whole video game that’s based on this idea and then I think less than a year ago, you informed me that, ‘oh yeah. I never actually checked anything off.’”
“Yeah, I just love making lists!” Hsia laughs, defending the teenage slacker who wrote them.
I was trying to mask my eating disorder as a way to get into college and I became a vegetarian.
Listmaking is core to Consume Me. The fictional version of Hsia lives a life defined by lists. Everything she does is a goal to be checked off, something that eventually turns her obsession with being hot into an eating disorder. She is a character that has gamified her life, turning meal prep into a game of Tetris and imagining her calorie-counting (or “bites” as the game calls them) as a gauge to be maintained. In an abstracted way, Hsia’s real checklists read like design documents storyboarding out Consume Me’s RPG structure, more than a decade before its release.
With little floor space left to unpack the rest of the boxes, we move to the living room. Hsia pulls out her beat-up yearbook and starts flipping through it, pointing out the real teachers who inspired an in-game sequence about gathering college recommendations. I flip to the back and find a few pages of superlatives. There’s a fitting one right next to Hsia’s name: “Most likely to change the food industry.”
“I was trying to mask my eating disorder as a way to get into college and I became a vegetarian,” Hsia explains, bluntly. “This sounds so dark, but I became a vegetarian when I was 16, and then I was so obsessed with food and counting calories that I was like, ‘oh, I might as well make it my college major.’ And then I decided to learn more about how the food industry works and how messed up America makes their food. And I read a lot of Michael Pollan … I wanted to study food policy and was obsessed with going to farmer’s markets, but now I make video games!”
I never get the sense that Hsia is holding back the truth during the afternoon, just as she lays everything out bare in Consume Me. She’s more than happy to overshare, taking me through a box of scattered memories tied to the high-school boyfriend who plays a major role in the story. We look through photobooth pictures, flirty notes, menus from restaurants the two visited on dates. At one point, I find another checklist full of relationship goals, which has a checkmark next to “48-hour makeout session.”
Hsia is mortified through all of this as her fellow developers rib her over each memory, but it’s enlightening for everyone – including Hsia. At one point, she picks up a piece of paper that has a doodle of a hamster on it that she has named Oliver. She gasps; Oliver just happens to be the name she ended up giving to the fictional version of her boyfriend in the game. She didn’t make the connection until now, but it’s a go-to name that has stuck with her throughout her life.
“I actually think it’s really fun to do stuff like this, share it with people that weren’t there in that time period, and just be like, hey, this is a part of me. Do you see that in me now?” she says.
Treating our afternoon like a day in Consume Me, we decide to spend our next action point at another place that’s relevant to Hsia. We take a walk to The Hungarian Pastry Shop, a spot on the Upper West Side that Hsia frequented as a kid (and later turned into a regular meeting spot for her and Thomson when working on the game). We talk growing up in New York City for a bit — and the pressures that creates for an already overloaded teen — before stopping in to grab slices of cheesecake and settling down on a nearby park bench.
As we eat, the two start to break down how all these scattered memories turned into a video game. Hsia originally planned to be a doctor, but moved to game design as a Plan B after feeling “too stupid to do pre-med.” She took a Design 101 course (where she met Thomson) and quickly found inspiration in the works of Anna Anthropy, Nina Freeman, and Lucas Pope. She cites Papers, Please, Pope’s critically acclaimed puzzle game about a passport checker at a border crossing, as an experience that changed her idea of what a game had to be. She became fascinated with the idea of games as vignettes that can show lived experiences.
She started tinkering with the idea of games as autobiography when she took a prototyping course taught by Bennett Foddy (one of the brains behind the newly released Baby Steps) that required her to make one game a week. She began creating microgames with a unified visual style that detailed her daily routine, from doing yoga to putting on make-up in 10 seconds — a game that went “kind of viral” according to Hsia. Thomson says that Foddy dubbed them “self-portrait games.”
“I was just raised on YouTube vlogs,” Hsia says. “Do you remember YouTube in 2008 when there were no influencers? It was just Michelle Phan and a couple of people. I watched that all the time. Sharing your life happened on a much smaller scale, and that definitely had an impact on me. I think I also wanted to do that sort of thing, potentially share my life on YouTube, but instead it’s through a video game.”
The more minigames Hsia created, the more she wanted to find a way to share her life in a more unified project. It was a natural evolution for someone who grew up chronicling her days in painstaking detail. The challenge was bringing all of those disparate minigames together into a coherent story, a process that took years to get right. What began as a game about Hsia’s eating disorder experience, centered around a Tetris-inspired food minigame, soon ballooned into something more all-encompassing.
“Originally we wanted to have the game be more about dieting and that sort of thing. Eventually it became a game just about that time period … I do feel like dieting along with looking hot and getting into an Ivy League school, these are all things that are what society demands. In some way I’m glad that we added so much more to the game. That we made Jenny have to get into college. Because I feel like it’s hard to separate dieting and just have it be in its own vacuum. I don’t think it paints a true picture of what it’s all like to be 16.”
To tell a real story, there is a certain amount of messiness.
Throughout the afternoon, Hsia and Thomson keep coming back to their struggle to keep that picture truthful. As much as Consume Me is based on Hsia’s real life, the team still took liberties with the exact details. That process of turning real memories into fiction became especially complicated when Hsia and Thomson had to invent a clean ending that still felt honest.
“That took a very long time,” Hsia says. “I think that’s one of the reasons why we worked on the game for so long, because we had no idea how we were going to end the game. It’s based on real life. I don’t end my life. I am continuing to live.”
“We really didn’t want the ending to feel pat, like it was just sort of resolving everything magically,” Thomson says. “Jenny has some kind of revelation. It’s like, ah, yes, these toxic cultural pressures have led me astray! Time for me to reform my ways and live a happier life or whatever! That’s just not how it works in real life …. to tell a real story, there is a certain amount of messiness.”
As we dissect the ending, we use our final action point for the day. We head back to Hsia’s apartment, much smaller than her parents’ but still just as joyfully cluttered. We are greeted at the door by two pomeranians barking up a storm. (The noisier of the two looks exactly like Jenny’s dog in the game, even though he was adopted after the fact — an instance of fiction influencing Hsia’s reality.) It’s in this space, surrounded by accumulated memories, that I finally get a sense of Hsia is now rather than who she was growing up. Even if she’s still living in the same city, eating the same cheesecake, walking the same breed of dog, she has evolved alongside her experiences. The unorthodox ending of Consume Me (one that was inspired by webcomic Octopus Pie, says Thomson) drives that home, making it clear that life doesn’t change all at once in dramatic strokes, but gradually over time.
But one thing that hasn’t changed is Hsia’s love of journaling. At her apartment, she pulls out another stack of notebooks. These are even more intricate than the ones she made as a teen. Her usual checklists are joined by elaborate doodles that play out like a comic book. She explains that she writes in a Hobonichi, a specific brand of journal made in part by Earthbound creator Shigesato Itoi. In a Hobonichi journal, each day gets its own page. You are committed to writing in it every day so as not to leave a blank space, Hsia says. We flip through pages and pages of entries dating as far back as 2019, with doodles detailing her time at pivotal events like the Game Developers Conference. It’s the perfect activity for an avid documentarian like Hsia, but even that felt too dishonest at a point.
“I was like, maybe I should do this because I’m thinking about taking something from my past and presenting it,” Hsia says. “But something I realized about doing this sort of journaling is that it was very fake. I kept on thinking in the back of my mind, oh, maybe I’ll show it to someone. As you do that, you’re not honest with yourself. You’re almost journaling because you think that someone else is going to see it someday. What’s the point of that? And I think it took me a while to start being honest, and I think that also involved just not showing it to anyone.”
That’s Consume Me’s mission as a work of autobiography, and what sets it apart from other works like it. Hsia isn’t trying to turn her past into a perfect aesthetic package that gives a false sense of who she was and who she is. She is creating a work that’s as messy as the boxes in her old bedroom, full of memories with no regard for careful curation. (One box contained an old bag of Warheads that still had a melted candy inside of it.) The contents of the box are exactly as they were when they were packed away years ago. Hsia’s work captures that honest self-reflection, and her journaling has evolved to meet that idea too.
“The more you do it, the more you’re like, wait, I don’t have to be fake. Who am I showing this to? And it changes, it evolves,” Hsia says. “This is my notebook from today, and there’s barely any comics or anything. I don’t think it’s really pretty to show at all.”
