"Embodying Narrative: Architectural Space and the Liminal Journey in Fumito Ueda’s ICO" is my undergraduate Art History thesis, awarded the J. Carson Webster Prize for Distinguished Honors Theses—the highest recognition in Northwestern’s Art History department. The project explores ICO (2001) as a work of architecture parlante in digital form: a game that communicates not through dialogue or exposition, but through navigable space and embodied movement. This project reflects a core thread across my work: treating structure itself—spatial, narrative, mechanical—as a way of making emotion felt and meaning lived.

By bridging art history, game studies, and architectural theory, the thesis positions ICO as both a landmark in game design and a contemporary continuation of symbolic spatial traditions—where meaning is not delivered through text, but emerges from how the audience moves, hesitates, and navigates space. Drawing from eighteenth-century aesthetic theory, the imagined prisons of Piranesi, and the metaphysical dreamscapes of de Chirico, I argued that ICO constructs an allegorical rite of passage through architectural form.