Inchcolm project

Inchcolm Project is part of an interdisciplinary research project which develops new ways of designing for the moving body across media, by combining aesthetics and design methods from contemporary performance practice and video games. As such, it brought a video game (Dear Esther, The Chinese Room, 2012) to life on a Scottish island (Inchcolm island in the Firth of Forth). During the two hour experience on Inchcolm the audience/players wander freely on the island encountering geo-tagged audio, live music, performers and installation spaces evocative of the game world, a playthrough of the game projected in the 12th century Inchcolm abbey, and an orchestral performance of the video game’s soundtrack (composed by Jessica Curry, arranged by Luci Holland and David Jamieson, performed by Mantra Collective)

I cried to dream again:discovery and meaning-making in walking simulators

This paper proposes a reclaiming of walking simulators as rich, self-contained, layered, and complex game worlds that pull their audiences in and engage them through experiential aesthetics and the mechanics of exploration. In order to do so, we will be focusing on the relationship between environment and narrative in two notable examples of the genre - Dear Esther (The Chinese Room, 2012) and Proteus (Ed Key and David Kanaga, 2013). We will argue that, similar to immersive, site-specific performance, the (island) setting enables story, constricts and conditions movement, generates atmosphere, and immerses the player in an experiential, self-contained world. Furthermore walking simulators engage their players in an immersive environment by allowing the fulfillment of the environment’s action potential (Di Benedetto, 2012). We will draw from literary, games and performance studies, namely Kincaid’s typologies of Islomania (“island as dream state, the object of desire, the ideal”) and Insularity (“the island as prison or fortress that holds us apart from the rest of the world”) (2007, 463), Di Benedetto’s argument for action potential in set design (2012), and Jenkin’s properties of environmental storytelling (2004). Dear Esther and Proteus are islands in that they are self-contained spaces with their own rules and regulations. They are also places on the fringe of mainstream gaming culture that elude the rules and norms of the ‘mainland’ and push the boundaries of what games can do. The peaceful, single player, first person, nonconflictual, non-competitive gameplay enabled by the island setting enhances affective, narrative, spatial, and kinaesthetic involvement (Calleja, 2011:38). The tension that arises from this duality – the island being highly desirable but at the same time inaccessible – is what has fueled the creative interest of generations of artists (Kincaid 2007). Placing the story on an island provides the designers with an easy solution to limiting the gameworld. It is also a good way of tapping into the player’s cultural references that will influence their experience and reception while also creating genre-specific expectations from the player. The world of the game is easier to accept because islands have particular units of space and time, the presence of any object on an island could be easily justified, and elements of magic or the supernatural could potentially exist there unbeknownst to the mainlanders. Islands have a different logic in that they are paradoxically both a safe space and a space that can be very hard to escape. The limited mechanics in terms of possible actions reinforces the game-as-dream-state interpretation in both games, but it is the combination of limited mechanics and individual aesthetic design choices for each particular game that positions Proteus as Islomania and Dear Esther as Insularity. This paper is a starting point for a bridging between walking simulators and immersive performance, in using the environment dramaturgically to generate meaning. Both art forms design a complex experience; they draw the participant into a self-contained, sensory and experiential world and cast her in a double role as both observer and performer. Walking and exploration are the essential mechanics for placing the body (be it physical or virtual) within the designed fictional world. The Island as limitation and, simultaneously, imaginative stimulus is a functional metaphor that illustrates both Machon’s notion of in-its-own-worldness (2013) and Calleja’s fluid, bi-directional concept of incorporation (2011)

Worlds at our fingertips:reading (in) <i>What Remains of Edith Finch</i>

Video games are works of written code which portray worlds and characters in action and facilitate an aesthetic and interpretive experience. Beyond this similarity to literary works, some video games deploy various design strategies which blend gameplay and literary elements to explicitly foreground a hybrid literary/ludic experience. We identify three such strategies: engaging with literary structures, forms and techniques; deploying text in an aesthetic rather than a functional way; and intertextuality. This paper aims to analyse how these design strategies are deployed in What Remains of Edith Finch (Giant Sparrow, 2017) to support a hybrid readerly/playerly experience. We argue that this type of design is particularly suited for walking simulators because they support interpretive play (Upton, 2015) through slowness, ambiguity (Muscat et al., 2016; Pinchbeck 2012), narrative and aesthetic aspirations (Carbo-Mascarell, 2016). Understanding walking sims as literary games (Ensslin, 2014) can shift the emphasis from their lack of ‘traditional’ gameplay complexity and focus instead on the opportunities that they afford for hybrid storytelling and for weaving literature and gameplay in innovative and playful ways

Storywalking as transnational method:from Juteopolis to Sugaropolis

This chapter sets out to formalise a design framework which emerged during the development of Generation ZX(X), which I argue could provide an exciting methodology for re-presenting transnational histories for new audiences. Generation ZX(X) was a hybrid multi-media event which explored how video games can engage with different types of historical data: oral herstories, lived experience, collective memory and audio-video archives. It explored the hidden figures of the video games industry: the women who assembled the ZX Spectrum computers in the Timex factory in Dundee, and the ramifications that this labour had for the city’s development as one of UK’s leading games development and education centres. This design framework is called storywalking and combines walking as an aesthetic, critical, and dramaturgical practice of reading and performing an environment, with designing complex, sensory and story-rich environments for a moving, meaning-making body. Storywalking invites a critical engagement with the site and its remembered and lived past, enlivening the archive and transforming oral histories, lived experience and collective memory into gameplay. The direct use of the framework in the context of charged sites and living memory gestures towards its potential applications in cultural heritage contexts, exploring heritage sites and their transnational stories. This potential is now being explored in ongoing research tracing memories of sugar and transnational histories in Greenock, which will be outlined in this chapter

A three person poncho and a set of maracas:designing Ola De La Vida, a co-located social play computer game

Events that bring people together to play video games as a social experience are growing in popularity across the western world. Amongst these events are ‘play parties,’ temporary social play environments which create unique shared play experiences for attendees unlike anything they could experience elsewhere. This paper explores co-located play experience design and proposes that social play games can lead to the formation of temporary play communities. These communities may last for a single gameplay session, for a whole event, or beyond the event. The paper analyses games designed or enhanced by social play contexts and evaluates a social play game, Ola de la Vida. The research findings suggest that social play games can foster community through the design of game play within the game itself, through curation which enhances their social potential, and through design for ‘semi-spectatorship’, which blurs the boundaries between player and spectator thus widening the game’s magic circle

Installations, disruption of technology, and performing play:a social play design portfolio

Installations, Disruption of Technology, &amp; Performing Play (IDTPP) is a portfolio of original play interventions created between 2014 and 2020 that sought to instigate connections between people through the shared experience of play. The portfolio comprises practice-based research projects, with outputs in digital and analogue forms that have been showcased internationally. Each contribution interrogates the application of social play design strategies within set design constraints. As a result, IDTPP presents a rigorous examination of design practices for play that aims to bring people together in the same space. IDTPP is informed by engagement with digital game design practices, pervasive games, street games, installation, video game curation, play theories, and user experience design. The portfolio is structured around specific design constraints such as: access (limited timeframes vs extended timeframes); permission (low level vs high levels of participation); setting (how play can be helped or hindered by its site); and social technology (easing or highlighting social interaction). The constraints for each project are sequential and interdependent, with the learning from one project feeding into the research questions of the next. Findings have been drawn from analysis of the work, drawing upon artist-as-researcher reflections, critical evaluation, and user feedback. IDTPP makes a significant contribution to knowledge by demonstrating that play, in its many forms, has social benefits, whilst also mapping out audience and site-specific design strategies that can be applied by other practitioners in the field. The significance of the design concepts within IDTPP has been recognised, through an invitation to showcase social play on BBC Click Live in 2019, the formation of a partnership with Cadbury Heroes in 2020 to promote the benefits of social play for creating connections and addressing isolation caused by the Covid-19 pandemic and the commission of a large-scale installation for socially distant play at V&amp;A Dundee

Ola de la Vida:a social play game

Ola de la Vida (ODLV) is a three-player cooperative game which was produced over the course of 48 hours within Global Game Jam in January 2017, at the Abertay University Jam Site.The Game is a playful intervention (an objects or events which seek to bring people together through play) that aims to invite players to form temporary relationships with their co-players through physical contact, collaboration and coaching during play in a co-located context (i.e. where all players are present in the same play space). The game also seeks to expand the play experience beyond the three players to the wider audience by inviting spectatorship through play as performance.The game was designed by Mona Bozdog, Lynn Parker, Danny Parker, and Alex Pass. Since its inception, it has undergone significant development to enhance its usability (through tutorials) and its features to enhance the development of a community of play, including the introduction of clear player scores and high scores for the game. Lynn Parker contributed to the design of physical interactions within the game, the enhancement of usability through tutorials and scores and the creation of digital art for the game in partnership with Alex Pass.Ola De La Vida as a practice as research work offers design insight into use of spectatorship to create a temporary community around a game and to enhance the facilitation of discussion between active players, previous players, spectators, and semi-spectators. The work builds on the varying levels of participation in play, proposing semi-spectatorship: where players are active in a game but have a critical distance afforded to them by the design of the game which offers them and their co-players (where appropriate) potential benefits in play

Play between worlds:Inchcolm Project

Inchcolm Project was a proof of concept that aimed to make apparent the connections between video games and performance, and to blur the lines between physical and virtual worlds and bodies. In designing the two-hour experience on Inchcolm Island in the Firth of Forth we drew on both theatre and game design methods and brought the world of a video game, Dear Esther (The Chinese Room, 2012), to life on Inchcolm. What resulted was an interplay between two islands, one real and one virtual, and three experiential worlds, the world of the performance (Dear Rachel), the world of the game (Dear Esther) and Inchcolm Island, as a world in and of itself, its physical presence in constant tension with the visiting worlds

Breaking out of the frame

A webcam-based, crowd-driven game developed for the Generation ZX(X) event held in Camperdown Park and the grounds of the JTC Furniture Company on May 4th 2018