I am in the initial stages of coming up with a concept for my thesis.
Domains: games, informal education, illustration, animation,and the environment
Design Questions: - How can I create a simple interactive experience to explore the topic of maintaining virgin lands?
- How can I use a fictional narrative to investigate the issues of land preservation?
- How can I incorporate a "choose your own adventure" theme into a simple narrative?
Concept: My current concept is to create a flash point and click game in which the user is asked to help a character navigate through a fictional world using Rube Goldberg type logic. Initially the world is full of lush lands filled with an assortment of creatures, however as the player navigates through the world, based on their choices it becomes increasingly more industrialized and so the story becomes a quest to save the virgin land from extinction. The industrialized world boxes the player in and ultimately gives them less choices to make in terms of using the natural resources and the land.
Questions:
1. How do I create a complex multi-leveled narrative?
2. How do I make this game dynamic?
3. Should I try to make this multi-player?
4. Should I try to incorporate real time data?
5. Do I stick to creating a multi-tiered narrative?
6. I don't even want to think about the action scripting involved.
Precedents:
- The Polyphonic Spree: Quest for the Rest
- Myst
- Interactive Fiction
- Tree Fiction (choose your own adventure)
-Dystopia: 1984, Farenheit 451, Brave New World
- Memento
- Zirk I
Resources to Investigate:
-Complexity in Narrative (Stephen Johnson)
-Cave of Time (Edward Packard)
-The Throne of Zeus
-The 39 Clues
-House of Leaves
-Rashoman
-The Game
-Paris, Je T'aime
