Real World Media Studio

The Real World Media studio encouraged us to consider our own relationship to technology both in our work and lives. Throughout the studio we experimented with notions of craft, old/real world media and new media. This final exhibition being the accumulation of our learnings across the semester, through a narrative told across various media formats and primarily using real world elements.

I was lucky enough on exhibition day to experience “The Rise and Fall of the Codans”. An interactive museum experience that detailed the rise and fall of an ancient alien civilisation. Embracing the notions of craft from early on in the semester they created a range of pieces to tell their story- propaganda posters, drawings, clay sculptures (which turned out amazing). It was really impressive how they built a whole world and were able to develop a consistent narrative about this alien civilisation through their exhibition. The sandbox activity that they included in their exhibition increased audience immersion in the story and encouraged us to get involved- digging through the sandbox to collect clues and come to our own conclusion about what happened to the Codans.

Similar to The Rise and Fall of the Codans, “Alienation” explored the concept of aliens but from an entirely different perspective. Although I didn’t have the chance to properly interact with their exhibition the way it was intended (due to a lack of time on exhibition day), I loved their concept and idea from the Week 9 pitches. Using the story of an alien named Rae, they likened the experiences of international students studying in a different country to those of an alien arriving on a new planet. This was an incredibly well thought-out project and I am impressed at all of the different elements that they incorporated in their final exhibition- using both online and real-world elements. The additional alien origami activity was such a fun idea to add to their final exhibition showcase, and increased audience engagement.

Poetic Video Studio

While the Real-World Media studio pushed the boundaries of the media format by encouraging us to consider real-world forms of media, according to the studio description, Poetic Video pushed the boundaries of traditional forms of narrative, embracing alternative forms of narrative and new experimental forms of media. Although prior to the beginning of this semester, this studio was very low on my list, as I wouldn’t consider myself a particularly poetic person. The accumulation of their work at the end of the semester is incredibly impressive and I can appreciate all of the effort it took to produce their final exhibition.

I thought that “Surge” was an amazing form of experimental media. Rather than focusing on creating a consistent narrative, their piece was designed to showcase and elicit emotions. Fully immersing the audience in the emotions displayed on the screen. Heightened through their experimental editing techniques, the colour grading and the music that played throughout. Taking a break from the intense emotions of Surge, “Something In the Nothing”, explored the banality of everyday life. Presenting us with an assortment of clips of objects, activities, and landscapes in their natural environment. Pushing us to consider the beauty in all of the ordinary things that we take for granted in our lives.

Despite skipping the trial phase of our game, coming into the exhibition this week, I still felt confident. My group worked well as a team, and we had all put in a great deal of time and effort into creating this interactive murder mystery game. Managing the project by dividing up all the work up between group members and maintaining constant communicating with each other. I believe that this was reflected in how our final exhibition was presented. Seeing all our work come together, all the clues that we had created and the props that we ordered. I felt incredibly proud of what we had achieved. Transforming the corner of the studio room into the 1930’s office style that we visualised for our murder mystery game.

Reflecting upon the project overall, it’s critical to return to our on-going research regarding transmedia storytelling, narrative and the conventions of the murder mystery genre. Although a traditional murder mystery has numerous tropes that we included throughout our game (for example- suspicious death, suspects, a red herring etc…), research shows that at its core the most important aspect of the murder mystery genre is engagement from the audience (Eger 2020). Alongside genre, within transmedia “narrative is the universal factor … that underlies psychological immersion” (Rutledge 2019, p. 4). Therefore, engagement reflects that our story/narrative was successfully communicated through our transmedia piece.

At the heart of this research is engagement and immersion. Therefore, in order to measure our success, we need to ask the question- how effective was our murder mystery interactive game in engaging the audience? As engagement reflects that we reached a balance of genre, narrative and gameplay- creating a successful transmedia piece.

Through the exhibition, I believe that we achieved this- we had strong engagement from all the participants working through our murder mystery. Although we had a few hiccups along the way and had to give some clues to help them solve the murder. Ultimately, I hope that they had fun working through the narrative and playing detective!  If we had more time on the project, I would have liked to refine our game more (to avoid those hiccups). Despite this, I am happy with my groups final project and what we managed to achieve in the short timeframe we had.

 

References:

Eger, M. (2020) ‘Murder mysteries: the white whale of narrative generation?’, Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, 16(1):210-216. accessed 31 May 2023. https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AIIDE/article/download/7432/7298

Rutledge, P. (2019). ‘Transmedia Psychology: Creating Compelling and Immersive Experiences’, Routledge Companion to Transmedia Studies, 1:350-363, accessed 31 May 2023. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781351054904-39/transmedia-psychology-pamela-rutledge

 

In the final week for preparation before our exhibition my group still had a lot to put together before our project was complete.

On Tuesday’s class we had the opportunity to see the space that our final exhibition will be presented. We took advantage of the class time to create the setting and put the finishing touches on our final project. This was extremely helpful as it enabled us to fully visualise our interactive game and give it a walkthrough as a group. Picking up any errors and things that we could quickly fix.

In terms of transmedia storytelling, “setting… (is) the most important aspect of a story’s structure” (Roccanti & Garland 2015). We have taken this completely on board and want the participants to not only participate in the game, but to fully immerse themselves in the story. In order to achieve this, we have contacted the prop department of the university and have organised some office furniture for the exhibition day. Allowing us to centralise the participants in the setting and in the story. So, they feel as though they are detectives working on a murder case in an office from the 1930’s.

Unfortunately for the second half of the week, in which we planned to test-runs with those outside of our group, Lauren fell sick. Of course, we didn’t expect her to come into class in that condition.  However, as she was the group member holding onto the physical objects for the interactive game, we were unable to proceed with the test-runs and are having to go into the project without that information. Although we are feeling confident in our final project, if there are any issues, we won’t be aware of them until the day of the exhibition.

 

References:

Roccanti, R. and Garland, K. (2015) ‘21st century narratives: Using transmedia storytelling in the language arts classroom’, Signal Journal, 38(1):16-20, accessed 27 May 2023. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Chris-Goering/publication/311288511_SIGNAL_Journal_381/links/5840ad4408ae2d21755f3c2f/SIGNAL-Journal-381.pdf#page=16

 

 

This week my group worked on creating the interactive game, the format we have chosen to tell our murder mystery narrative.

Establishing our game in this week we returned to our research questions from week nine (revised for conciseness).

• How do the conventions of a traditional murder mystery translate into a transmedia form of storytelling, through an interactive game?
• How easily are we able to develop a coherent narrative without sacrificing the engagement and immersion of participants?

Conducting research in these parameters we discovered that within transmedia storytelling, “narrative is the universal factor … that underlies psychological immersion” (Rutledge 2019, p. 4). Although we have already developed our narrative, in order to ensure immersion from participants our goal is to coherently tell our story through our chosen medium. Essentially, to ensure our narrative doesn’t get lost in the game.

Performing this balancing act of narrative and gameplay would prove to be difficult, and we discovered that we needed to shift from our original plan. Ultimately, we decided that using a crossword puzzle (which we initially decided upon), could be too difficult and take away from the narrative and immersion of our final project. Instead, we decided on setting up a series of checkpoint puzzles for participants to solve. Dividing the work up between the group members.

Additionally, we also decided to adjust our narrative slightly and include a red herring- a technique used in the murder mystery genre which involves misdirecting the readers/participants. Not only does this serve to increase participant engagement in the narrative (Seago 2014), but it also helps us incorporate additional conventions of the murder mystery genre into our project.

Moving into the final week before our exhibition, we will collect all the items for our project and begin trial runs in preparation for week 13.

 

References:

Rutledge, P. (2019). ‘Transmedia Psychology: Creating Compelling and Immersive Experiences’, Routledge Companion to Transmedia Studies, 1:350-363, accessed 18 May 2023. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781351054904-39/transmedia-psychology-pamela-rutledge

Seago, K. (2014) ‘Red herrings and other misdirection in translation’, The voices of suspense and their translation in thrillers, 39:207-220, accessed 18 May 2023. https://openaccess.city.ac.uk/id/eprint/3852/1/

Taking the advice from the panel from our week nine pitch presentation, this week we worked on developing and fleshing out our narrative. Although the murder mystery genre has a pre-defined structure, as Eger (2020) proposes there is “room for variation” within this structure. Allowing us to have fun while developing the story; designing the murder story, victim, suspects, location, and of course the murderer.

After developing the narrative, we made the decision to change up our final project slightly- from an escape room design to an interactive game experience. Essentially, rather than try to escape the room, the aim of our interactive game experience will be to solve puzzles in order around the room in order to find out who killed the victim. The appeal of the murder mystery genre (through film and text) is that the audience has “equal opportunity with the detective for solving the mystery. All clues must be plainly stated and described.” (Eger 2020, p. 211). Adapting the format of our game we can use this to our advantage, allowing the audience to become the detective, by interacting with the clues and solving the mystery. Using a participatory narrative and the appeal of “playing detective” to increase the immersion and engagement of participants.

As I mentioned in my last post, we need to manage our timeline effectively in order to ensure we get the project complete for the exhibition. As a result, we also decided to get rid of the pre-recorded audio for our project because it would consume too much time and could potentially create further issues down the road.

Coming into the next few weeks we need to begin adapting our narrative into a playable game and testing it to ensure that it works for the final exhibition.

 

References:

Eger, M. (2020) ‘Murder mysteries: the white whale of narrative generation?’, Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, 16(1):210-216. accessed 10 May 2023. https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AIIDE/article/download/7432/7298

 

 

 

Coming into the final project of the studio, my group decided that the best way to tell a narrative across different elements was by creating some form of interactive game/escape room. This would allow us to explore elements of transmedia story-telling and participant engagement/immersion. Researching the different forms of interactive games, a murder mystery escape room seemed like the best option. As an established genre with various tropes and conventions it enabled an easy format to establish our narrative and provided us with the opportunity to consider how these genre tropes and conventions present in terms of transmedia storytelling.

 

This week was primarily spent focussing on conducting research and establishing our pitch presentation. Something stuck with me in my research into transmedia storytelling was a quote from film-maker George Lucas (Kelly & Parisi 1997, as quoted in Scolari 2013, p.2)-

“Movies are storytelling; you tell somebody a story. A game is interactive; you participate in some kind of an event with a lot of other people or with yourself, or with a machine. Those are two different things, and they’ve been around here forever. Games have been here since the Greeks, and so has storytelling.”

Ultimately, our goal is to prove George Lucas wrong, and demonstrate that you can merge story-telling and a game. By balancing the elements of narrative and interactive gameplay to create an overall immersive experience for participants.

Moving into the coming weeks, my group still have a lot to do in terms of developing both our narrative and game elements. So, we need to stick to our timeline and remain conscious of that aspect.

 

References:

Scolari, C. (2013) ‘Lostology: Transmedia storytelling and expansion/compression strategies’, Semiotica, 2013(195):45-68, accessed 02 May 2023. https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/sem-2013-0038/html