SENIOR PROJECT IN DESIGN
The play In Love and Warcraft, is a romantic comedy written by Madhuri Shekar, set in. In a 2015 interview with the website Geek & Sundry, Shekar summarizes In Love and Warcraft as such:
“In Love and Warcraft is a play about a college senior called Evie, who’s
very smart, sensible, controlled—she’s figured out a way to make money
on campus by writing love letters for guys and girls (mostly guys) who’ve
screwed up their relationships. She’s also a very avid, very committed
Warcraft player, and that takes up most of her time. She sees love and
gaming in similar ways, applying strategies she’s learned from Warcraft
to her relationship counseling. [To her], Relationships are like a game.”
Most of the show takes place "present day," at a college in Southern California, with the climax taking place in the World of Warcraft universe itself. As someone who attending a college in Southern California in the present day at the time, I related very much to the environment Shekar creates, and had the advantage observing the dress of real-life SoCal college students like an anthropologist.
Aesthetically, I imagined the world of the play to walk a line between desolate—“basic,” in the contemporary, colloquial sense—and candy-colored. It is a world that can be beautiful in its self, in its own, unique, simplicity. But it is also a world that provides certain people with a reason to want to leave, where reality may be understandably insufficient and substandard to some. In these ways, it is actually much like our world.
The visual world was also filtered somewhat through Evie’s perspective: her given state of mind, how she classifies each person. Since Evie is language oriented and understands the
world in terms of gameplay, the costumes will follow a similar visual syntax as those of WoW characters. Actual iconography and motifs from or inspired by the game appear throughout, wherever an avid gamer’s subconscious might start seeing them in the real world, after an extended period of play.
To read more about my design, analysis, and execution--as well as some pretty entertaining stories--you can read my full senior thesis here:
