Audrey Chung Is Building Games That Embrace Uncertainty
Chung’s research interest is currently in the intersection between cultural memory, de-colonialism and game design methodologies.
When Audrey Chung arrived at Georgia Tech as an undergraduate in 2021, they found themselves studying during a moment of collective disruption. It was the height of the COVID era, and Chung was navigating not only a global pause, but an academic identity.
Blending Disciplines
They enrolled in Computational Media, a joint program between Georgia Tech’s liberal arts and computer science colleges that blends film, computer graphics, and software development. “I was good at STEM, but I wanted to dive into the arts as well,” Chung recalls. Computational Media felt like a fitting compromise. In their words, it “tricked artists into doing computer science,” offering a back door into technical rigor through storytelling, visuals, and design.
Early on, Chung gravitated toward film production. They worked as both a producer and developer, learning how teams coordinate, how stories are structured, and how tools shape creative outcomes. But the more they worked across disciplines, the more they became interested in how people engage in media beyond simply watching it.
That shift accelerated through her involvement in Georgia Tech’s Vertically Integrated Projects program. There, Chung contributed to Empathy Bytes, a project that explored life around campus using interviews, virtual reality, and 3D modeling. The work reframed media as something participatory. Viewers were no longer passive observers. They became active participants inside a constructed experience. “Coming from online communities that often participate in transformative works, often without authorial intent, I was surprised to learn that game design frameworks involves actively involving the players as a co-author in the creation of the narrative; a sort of procedural authorship,” Chung explained.
From Film to Interactive Storytelling
Chung went on to pursue a master’s degree in digital media, a move that felt less like a pivot and more like a deepening of the questions she was already asking. Now based in the Technology Square Research Building (TSRB), they work under Dr. Ryan Scheiding, exploring how design, technology, and narrative converge in interactive systems.
Through the program, Chung became immersed in product development and game design, fields they had little formal experience in as an undergraduate. The shift challenged them to think beyond cinematic storytelling and toward player dynamics, choice structures, and testing. Games, they realized, carry their own form of authorship. “While films don’t always have a fixed narrative, especially once you start thinking about experimental and horror genres, I do think that games have the possibility to allow for multiple truths to exist at the same time,” Chung said.
Building New Worlds, Games, and Empathy
That tension between control and agency appears throughout Chung’s recent projects. One of their upcoming works, Space Stragglers, is a science fiction game set after the extinction of humanity. Players inhabit a lone robot drifting through space, learning how to survive and how to form community in a world left behind. The game draws inspiration from the Transformers series and indie titles like Éalú, but its emotional core centers on loneliness, adaptation, and connection.
Earlier projects explored similar themes through different mechanics. In Together, a group game rooted in folklore, players shared family histories and personal scenes through a kind of narrative potluck. Another project, Scenes, pushed even further into speculative territory. Chung was on a team that built a custom game engine where players click on sculptures to access stories from an imagined future in which human consciousness can be uploaded to the cloud. The experience raises a central question that continues to shape her research: how much privacy are people willing to sacrifice in exchange for empathy? “There’s a balancing act between privacy and authenticity when it comes to being in online spaces, and I think it’s really hard to do nowadays when that attention is so easily commercialized,” Chung concluded.
The Next Chapter
Today, Chung’s work sits squarely between art and system design. User testing is still ahead, but the throughline is clear. Whether working with film, VR, or games, they are drawn to experiences that ask players to reflect, choose, and feel responsibility for their role inside a world.
What began as a love for film has evolved into something more interactive and more uncertain. Uncertainty may be the point. Game design allows her not just to tell stories, but to build spaces where stories emerge through play.
“I hope that my games remind others that change is always possible.”