Experience Statement

    From the four staging posts, we now believe that individuals will be influenced by their cultural backgrounds to a great extent. Different people will possess different beliefs, worldviews, and actions due to their cultural differences. Therefore, some conflicts due to the cultural differences are unavoidable, and sometimes there are no ways to fix the cultural conflicts. Sometimes it is incorrect to judge and blame others’ thoughts and behaviors. It’s because they may grow up in an entirely different cultural background and hold an entirely opposite viewpoint, and sometimes there is no absolute right or wrong actions and beliefs towards the same event. Thus, it is important for us to try to respect and understand others’ behaviors and ideas although you disagree with them.

    Our understanding changes a lot from staging post 1 to staging post 4. When we just started our staging post 1, we knew little about how to present the project and our viewpoints. Thus, we just summarize the events and list some viewpoints for staging post 1. Additionally, our perspectives are limited and polarized. We only focused on the perspectives of Chinese people and American people, and considered them as totally opposite. After we received the feedback about staging post 1, we began to realize our problems and know that different people in the same party may also hold different perspectives. Thus, we chose one representative character from each party in the event and created four different stories for them in order to expand our perspectives. Compared with what we finished in staging post 1, we definitely improved a lot, but we were still asked a little bit deeper and added more complexity to our story. Also, our stories seemed to be a little bit one sided. Therefore, for staging post 3, we hope to dig deeper, so we held several long meetings in our group and with professors to discuss our thoughts. We tried to stand on different parties’ sides to understand their perspectives. Also, to add more complexity and depth to the story, we combined our previous four stories into a complete one but focused on a HK student’s story. It’s because we believed that narrating the whole story from the HK student’s perspective will be more objective and can show more perspectives from different parties since the nature of the event is about the independence of HK. In this main story, we hope to reflect more kinds of perspectives and our main theme through some major turning points. To further improve and refine our story, we decided to add more branches to our story in staging post 4 not only to make our story not too polarised but also to add more interactivity to our VR experiences.

    The project is a huge challenge for all of our team members. When we just started to work on staging post1, all the members in our group were not familiar with each other. Since all of us didn’t offer any creative ideas actively and just finished our work individually, our staging post1 gained a relatively low score. Also, it is common for a team to have some conflicts, but sometimes it’s hard to resolve these conflicts. Fortunately, as we became more familiar with each other, we learned about how to collaborate with each other and exchange our ideas so we are able to move forward with our project effectively. Additionally, sometimes our team feels troubled about exploring perspectives of individuals from other cultural backgrounds. Since all of us seldom had similar experiences before, we had to spend a lot of time on doing some research and try to understand others’ perspectives in their stances. To further improve our project, we still need to do more research and present more perspectives so that our story will not seem to be too one sided. These researches would be shown in our Github site, and we will try to present perspectives as much as possible and incorporate more interactivity in our VR experiences.