Photo credits: Sean Brenner/UCLA Humanities
Courtesy of Nicolette Bond (4)
Article Written By: Piper Bailey | May 12, 2025
A new video game developed by a UCLA senior explores the concepts of grief, diaspora, intergenerational conflict and unconditional love — all from the perspective of a young girl’s emotional support animal.
The game, called Your Lola, was created by Nicolette Bond, who in June will graduate with a degree in English and a minor in digital humanities. From the perspective of a cat named Lola, players move through a family’s apartment, collecting new “smells” such as a dusty Doris Day album, old clothes and adobo. Each new smell helps the player piece together a narrative.
As the story progresses, players hear conversations between a girl named Sofia and her mother, who are grieving the loss of Sofia’s grandmother. Creating Your Lola took on special meaning for Bond because it allowed her to delve into her upbringing as a second-generation Filipino American.
“I had to write out these characters and understand the diaspora from my white side versus my Filipino side,” Bond said. “Through listening to and interacting with phone calls and arguments, the player learns that Sofia’s white grandmother expresses care differently from her Filipino mother — even though they both hold immense love for Sofia. Both sides of my family are incorporated into the story, as well as the generational and cultural divide. Primarily the game is about grief, but it is also about family — mixed family.”
The premise also gave Bond a chance to highlight another subject that’s important to her: the benefits that feline companions can have on their humans’ mental health. The inspiration for Lola was Bond’s own cat, Temmie, a white and gray rescue she adopted in September. Bond said Temmie has been a comforting presence throughout her final year at UCLA, as she prepares for the next chapter of her life.
Bond has been working on Your Lola since January, alongside her senior capstone project: a space-themed video game called The Force that Binds Us, which takes players through outer space as they interact with other games that Bond developed or co-developed over the past few years. Although the linked games deal with different subject matter and environments, they generally incorporate themes like personal exploration and nostalgia. (More than a dozen games Bond has developed or worked on are accessible on her website.)
Bond’s advisor for the capstone project is English professor Danny Snelson. Bond has taken three of Snelson’s courses: one on algorithmic literature, one on experimental games and another on speculative games — those dealing with supernatural, sci fi and other fantasy genres. She said the classes collectively pushed her to think critically about “how games can represent diverse experiences and what we want out of games” and encouraged her to craft narratives that resist Eurocentric, patriarchal trends in fiction.
Snelson said Bond’s work demonstrates an extraordinary ability to weave together meaningful themes in games that inspire hope.
“Nicolette not only opens new passages into the future of games, humanities and the arts, but more urgently into how another future might emerge within the arts of the present,” he said. “Her extraordinarily collaborative and innovative games emphasize care, equity and other justice-oriented politics to activate a world-building imaginary for the playful discovery of how we might build the world otherwise.”
Bond grew up mostly in Concord and Walnut Creek, California, and she transferred to UCLA in 2023 from Irvine City College. She was attracted to UCLA in part because of ACM Studio, a student-run organization in which members teach one another computer science and video game development skills.
“Since the club welcomes members with diverse skill sets, it fostered a space for me to gamify stories collaboratively,” Bond said.
“Students like Nicolette give me hope for a future better than the present in which we find ourselves,” said her capstone project advisor, Danny Snelson.
The club was also instrumental in helping Bond prepare to co-teach an undergraduate course this quarter at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering under the supervision of Professor Jacob Schmidt. Twelve students are enrolled in the class, which offers an introduction to Unity, a video game development platform.
Not surprisingly given her academic major, Bond said she develops her games from the foundation of a strong plot. So while most game developers focus on game mechanics before they delve into the other elements, Bond begins by creating a narrative and designing a script before turning her attention to art and coding elements.
Bond already has a post-graduation internship lined up at Lucasfilm Games, which develops titles that promote the “Star Wars” franchise. When she was interviewing for the internship, Bond spoke about how well UCLA English courses had prepared her for the gig.
“I had the chance to talk about how ‘Star Wars’ was taught in one of my science fiction courses as a lens to discuss indigenous history and the franchise’s portrayal of colonization,” Bond said. “And both my English and game-specific courses gave me the space to engage in critical discussions of ‘Star Wars’ and games, which ultimately helped me land the position.”
During her internship, Bond plans to finish work on her passion project, Your Lola. Her faculty advisor sees great promise in that game and the others Bond has already created.
“In an uncertain time marked by technological accelerations and political upheavals, students like Nicolette give me hope for a future better than the present in which we find ourselves,” Snelson said. “In this way, following Nicolette’s practice, we might just discover how activist media like video games could indeed save us after all.”
Discover the story and more at https://humanities.ucla.edu/news/nicolette-bond-video-games-digital-humanities/