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