Designing A Room

Following up on my meeting with Lynn, I had a few ideas kicking about regarding which character I wanted to design a room for, and due to being a fan of Joss Whedon and having recently watched his Dollhouse series on Netflix, I decided to design a room for the character Topher Brink

So I mapped out the key elements that make up his personality, then I overlaid that with some items/props/characters that could be incorporated into his room design to properly depict an idea of his character.

While I found this useful, it was a bit too wordy to keep referring to and wasn't really the best way to convey his personality visually, so I put together a mood board full of visual representations of certain aspects of his personality.

Meeting with Lynn

Had a meeting with Lynn and after having a big chat about what I was interested in, she suggested I look into "mis en scene" since it incorporates a lot of the theories and practices I want to explore during this project.

What is Mise-en-scene?

Okay, So I'm embarrassed to admit that I didn't actually know anything about this when Lynn brought it up with me. so I was pretty much in the dark. However, after some hunting around I found a nifty slideshow which pretty much summed up what Mise-en-Scene was all about, although from what I've read it pretty much derives from Cinematography. It's essentially everything that makes up a scene, from lighting to props and decor.

Case Studies

We also decided it would be a good idea to do an in depth study of "the finger scene" in QuanticDream's Heavy Rain. Using the methods I've learned from looking into narrative theory and mise-en-scene I plan to deconstruct the scene and look at how the game shows you what choices are available. I'd also like to ask a few other people to play through the same scene and take notes on which choices they make, what leads them to it, and why.

I've also been advised to play through the first Bioshock since I never have, mainly cause it looked too scary but I guess I'll have to man up and try it!

Tests

Came up with the idea of designing a room around a specific pre-existing character (that way I wouldn't have to spend time writing a completely new character and go into depth about their back story and motivation). The room would essentially "tell the story" of the character's personality, and give me a starting point for looking further into how a scene or environment can tell a story. The room would then be put to test by other people and have them attempt to answer questions like;

Who lives here? 
What kind of person are they? 
Why do you think that?
What are some words that describe the character?

Jellyfish

During our tutorial in week 2, we came up with the idea of a "Jellyfish of Questions", essentially the jellyfish would start out broadly stretched out across a number of domains and areas of interest, and be gradually reduced in terms of scope, but increased in depth of research into the remaining topics.

This was what I ended up with. To make it a bit clearer for myself, I circled the key words which kept cropping up and colour coded them...

This was in the hopes that with a narrower focus on the key elements I had jotted down, I could go away and do some more research

Aims and Objectives

Trying to catch up with myself and translate all the work I've been doing in various notepads over to my blog to keep it all in one place...

Aim;

My generalised research/project aim will go something like this;

To investigate to what extent a virtual environment can impact upon or create a narrative.

or maybe something like this;

To investigate how narrative theory can be applied to a game environment in order to tell a story.

Obviously that will evolve over the course of the project but I felt the need to get it down in order to keep my brain in check with what I'm actually doing..

Objectives;

General objectives will be something like this;

1) Examine and discuss Narrative Theory in relation to game environments and explore mis-en-scene.

2) Compare and contrast the use of narrative environments within games and conduct case studies to provide more insight.

3) Produce media tests designed to tell a specific story or depict a certain personality.

4) Design a 3D narrative environment and document the process.

Themes

Some of the books and journals I've been reading made reference to the current themes surrounding environmental narrative within the games industry, so I decided to explore some of these. They mainly revolved around the increasing demand for games with Emergent Narratives within Sandbox-style environments, so games like Grand Theft Auto 4, the Fallout series and Skyrim immediately sprang to mind;

 another theme was that of the increasing demand for games with more detailed storytelling elements and that of Branching Narratives, which I thought QuanticDream's Heavy Rain and Fahrenheit were the best example of.

While Emergent Narratives in sandbox style environments and Branching Narratives both offer plenty of opportunities, one of the main concerns expressed is that they are both prohibitively expensive and complex to incorporate.

Constraints

On the topic of concerns, many have been raised about the amount of constraints that must be applied to such a game to be able to keep control of a complex interactive narrative.

Ruth Aylett, one of the authors of "Computer Games, Text, Narrative and Play", said that there are "Fundamental conflicts of interest when creating games with a rich narrative; this is the contradiction between a pre-scripted sequence of events and the freedom of interactivity that is afforded to the player in a videogame."

So I guess it would be useful to look at these contradictions and juxtapositions between games with emergent narratives within a pre-scripted series of events that will undoubtedly unfold no matter what, and compare them with the games which utilize branching narratives to provide the player with the illusion that they are responsible for a particular path of gameplay unfolding, rather than traversing along a pre-destined and solid path. I'll do some research into Narratology and Ludology in the hopes that it will shed some light on the underlying principles behind narrative study and game studies, then hopefully find a way to amalgamate the two together...

Researching Domains and Topics

Okay, so after Robin's lecture about domains I went away and had a think about the key areas that I'm interested in and narrowed them down to three, Games, Storytelling and 3D Art and Design.

Then I made a mind map of stuff I think is related to environmental narrative, to give myself an idea of what I could look further into.

 I started researching Narrative theory and applying that to environmental/visual storytelling. Spent some time looking into the process involved behind the design/construction of virtual environments; what goes into the design of a scene or environment and what the meaning behind it is, and what message it is trying to convery through things like props, lighting, colour etc/ While doing this I tried to keep in mind how interactivity would be incorporated in a game world to drive the narrative without being too direct, making the player feel like they themselves are responsible for a particular story path, rather than just blindly following an obviously set out directive.

All Talk....

After identifying the domains, and researching some of the theory behind narrative techniques and environment design, I decided to have a look at some of the recent trends within domains and I found out that one of the recent trends in game design demonstrates that there is an increasing demand for games which incorporate elements of interactive story - so games like Heavy Rain.

Although, after reading an article by Barry Lowndes from Sheffield University, I discovered that one of the issues with environmental narrative is that while there has been considerable research into narrative techniques currently used in film and literature, these techniques do not nessesarily translate well over to the genre of video games. (Barry Lowndes - "Creating a Narrative Environment, Chioce and Consequence." Sheffield Hallum University) So it's clear I'll have to do some hunting around for more research on that, or do some tests of my own to determine the best way to convey a narrative through the environment of a game...



Belated Introduction

Hello and welcome. You've stumbled accross my 4th year Honours project blog.

There has been a severe delay in my posting anything on this, largey due to me being too precious with how I wanted my first post to be, and also not having access to a computer at home anymore.

Onwards to what I've been doing.

Narrative Environments.

This year I want to focus more on how a 3D virtual environment can be utilized as a narrative device. The idea that the environment around you contributes to and shapes how a story is told, rather than just being a pretty backdrop on which events unfold.

First post hurdle over, more to follow in it's wake..