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