After presenting our pitch we realised we need to refine some aspects of our project. Upon reflection we decided that the idea of an escape room might be too hard to create from scratch in such little time so instead we opted for an interactive game. Whilst researching into interactive games and storytelling we came upon this quote;
“While story is still king, creating an experience where people need to discover and undercover the evidence of a story and then actually tell the story to each other as a community is hugely powerful, immersive, and effective. When done right, there’s nothing as addictive as a good real-time immersive experience.” (Garcia 2017)
This solidified our idea of changing as the game will still has the same concept of the murder mystery and aspects of an escape such as following clues and solving riddles but without the added pressure of escaping. This meant we had to alter our research question as well. We were already planning on editing this as our initial question was very long, wordy and had many questions built into one. We condensed out new question to be:
“How do the conventions of a traditional murder mystery translate into a transmedia form of storytelling, through the use of an interactive game. How easily are we able to develop a coherent narrative without sacrificing the engagement and immersion of participants?”
We also thought about the logistics of an audio piece being played throughout the game, this would mean it would either have to be timed to give out the clues at certain timestamps or we would have to be observing and pressing play at each clue point. We thought this would be tricky to manage and coordinate so we decided on having everything printed instead.
Referencs
Garcia A (2017) ‘Transmedia: Redefining Where and How Stories Are Told’, Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 60(6):715–717, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26630695.