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/