Cycle 1 – Unknown Creators

Posted: April 9, 2024 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment »

For my final project I knew I wanted to do a perspective piece sort of thing after my work from last project. After thinking about it for a while I decided that I would go back a social issue that occurs in the games industry and other media that require large teams of people. There is a phenomenon where the creation of a piece of art is attributed to one person, even we know that there are more people behind the scenes. One might refer to a movie as a Hitchcock or Tarantino film, or a play as something by Sondheim. These individuals that get referenced, mostly male, are often leads in some way: main writers, directors, etc., and they often get more screen time and interviews. The games industry is no different, and there are several big names that get thrown around: Hideo Kojima, Hidetaka Miyazaki, Shigeru Miyamoto, Warren Specter, the list goes on. In order to address and convey this issue to those that don’t know so much about games, I wanted to take an example of a revered creator and juxtapose that person with some others that are relatively unknown, people who did programming, mocap, animation, etc.

In my piece I wanted to focus on a studio that I know quite well, Bethesda, and it’s lead designer Todd Howard. I found a short interview from GameInformer about his life and how he got into the industry, linked here: How Skyrim’s Director Todd Howard Got Into The Industry (youtube.com). For the people who were lesser known, I am pulling footage from some documentaries made by ex-employees at Bethesda: How Bethesda built the worlds of Skyrim and Fallout (youtube.com), and A SKYRIM DOCUMENTARY | You’re Finally Awake: Nine Developers Recount the Making of Skyrim (youtube.com). In terms of set up, my idea looked a little like this:

Essentially I wanted to have some tall boxes set up in the center of a space (ideally the motion lab). On one side of these boxes, there would be a large projection of Todd Howard, the footage would be stretched over all the boxes so that when looked at as a whole, the image would become clear. On the other side of the boxes, individuals that worked at Bethesda would be projected. Each person would be projected onto one box. The Isadora part is fairly simple, just a bunch of projection mapping and some videos, the setup and space would really be the big issues.

One of the first things I did was go into the motion lab and establish what sorts of resources I would be using, as well as try and get some projection mapping stuff working just to get familiar with the process and environment; Michael Hesmond was very helpful in this regard. I was going to need to use the Mac Studio, that way I could use two projectors at once. We decided to try two different kind of projectors, a short-throw and long-throw, just to see if one would be better than the other. After getting everything set up and using the grid I got something that kind of looked like this:

I was technically projecting on the side instead of across from each other, but this was okay, I really just needed a proof of concept and I wanted to also see how pixel smearing would look. After doing all this, I determined that I would need these resources:

  • 2x Power Cables for the projectors
  • 2x Extension cables that would plug into the wall
  • 2x HDMI cables
  • 2x Short-throw Ben-Q projectors, both projector types worked fine but I wanted to use the short throws because their color was better, and the space was relatively small
  • The motion lab switcher, this was important for getting both of the projectors working; we had to do a little debugging to make sure the projections were going to the correct outputs

The only resources I wasn’t sure about were the boxes. There weren’t a lot of them, and I wanted more uniform shapes, so this would have to be reworked. When I came back, I did a bit more work thinking about the setup and resources with Nico and Michael, and I got another setup going:

This time, the setup was moved diagonally. I wanted to do this to give myself more space to work with and because when audio would be incorporated, I needed speakers that I could project audio from in different locations. Instead of boxes, Nico had a great suggestion of using some draped sheets, so we took them and folded them over some movable coat racks. I also played with getting audio to play out of different speakers. I only wanted sound to come out of the back left and the front right speaker. Isadora had a little bit of trouble, the snd out parameter for my movies had to be set to e1-2 for the front speakers and e3-4 for the back speakers, then the panning needed to be adjusted so that audio would only play out of a specific speaker. After that was figured out though, we saved my audio settings to the sound board so that it could be loaded up quickly later.

For the cycle 1 presentation, I took a quick video:

I got a lot of great feedback about peoples’ thoughts and feelings on this project:

  • Jiara felt that there was a resonance between the tone of the voice and the quality of the fabric, or perhaps the wrinkly appearance of the fabric. It seemed that for one coat rack the fabric was more pristine and ironed, while on another the fabric was more crumpled, which could connect to the quality of audio or perhaps the autobiographical nature of the footage
  • There was some confusion about the meaning of the piece, for many the relationship between the people and footage wasn’t clear. Was it connected? Was there a back and forth? It almost seemed like one side of the footage was the interviewer and the other side was the interviewee
  • People liked spatial aspect of what was going on. Alex noted that the sound could be disorienting because there are multiple sources faced towards each other, which is a very good thing to note. Michael and I had talked about this briefly and this issue could potentially be solved by having the speakers be under the coat racks and having them project in the opposite direction, rather than projecting towards each other. But one thing that was good about this audio setup was that there were dedicated viewing positions that we created since the audio would be less distracting in the corners where the perspective was best framed. Moreover, finding spots where both footage can be viewed and heard was fun
  • The biggest thing is that the messaging isn’t clear for those that don’t have context about these people. In general, there needs to be some conveyance of information about these people’s backgrounds, positions, roles, etc. and there could be more done to imply that one person is more well-known than the others. For example, maybe there is more ornate framing around Todd, maybe there is something about the volume of the space that could be played with, maybe the footage of the normal developers is jumbled and fragmented
  • Someone suggested having the racks move, which would be really interesting though I don’t know how that would work haha

Pressure Project 2 – Escape Otherworld

Posted: February 8, 2024 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment »

I’ve been to Otherworld some years ago so I was excited to go back. It’s a really strange space, but that’s what’s interesting about it, especially when I was able to find patterns or “figure out” a room. There were a few rooms that drew my attention at first. One was the mush-room (really funny joke). What I found interesting in it was the cow room, which had a very Legend of Zelda puzzle in it. Basically, there are six colored levers attached to a machine that itself is attached to the cow’s utters, and there is an order in which you need to pull the levers in order to get some effect. It was interesting to see how people would solve this puzzle, if they did at all (and a lot didn’t, mostly because they didn’t stay in the room long enough to realize that anything was afoot), but there were two notable instances. Sometimes what would happen is someone would be pulling random levers and then they would pull the correct one and something different would happen. In a few cases, people just started pulling levers to see if anything would happen, which lead to finding out that if you pull the levers in a certain order they don’t make the cow angry. Through trial and error they figured out the combination and the cow did fun things.

An image of the cow doing fun things!

However, some people also noticed this panel on the back wall with lights of different colors that would come on in a certain pattern. Someone then put together that the color of the lights was the same as the color of the levers and from there they found out that the light pattern was the order of the levers, which is not something I noticed at all but was really neat.

The interesting hint light panel that I didn’t notice because I’m not a true gamer

The room I actually want to talk about though because I can’t stop thinking about it is one of the first ones that people encounter. It’s right in the beginning and it’s this plainly sci-fi looking room with a bunch of panels and buttons.

This is the panel room, I stole this image because I didn’t have any good photos of this room and I didn’t expect to be talking about it but here we are: https://www.citybeat.com/cincinnati/inside-columbus-otherworld-an-immersive-choose-your-own-adventure-sci-fi-art-installation/Slideshow/12234210

At first, I wasn’t really interested in this room. For starters, the first button I pressed made all the screens display a rick roll, and I almost cried. In general, most of the panels weren’t related from what I could tell. Some of them had small games, like one had a game where you have to time pressing a button to cause a system overload. Some had videos that showed a scientist talking about Otherworld itself, which are interesting from a lore perspective but weren’t super interesting from the experience side (most people just watched them, which isn’t very interesting to describe haha). There was one panel that I saw a kid playing with that had a camera view of another room, specifically the mouth cave room, and when the button was pressed a sound effect would play like a burp. That I thought was very interesting. I tried playing with the panel myself, apparently you can change the sound effect played by turning this knob. What I wanted to know is if those sounds were being played to people inside the mouth room. Anytime one of the sound effects was played I stared intently at the panel to see if anyone would react. Unfortunately, basically no one had any sort of interesting reaction, so I couldn’t really tell if the sounds were going through. I went to the mouth cave room myself to see if I could hear anything (I probably sat in that room for like 10 minutes too), but I didn’t hear any noises. I don’t know if this was because no one was playing sounds or because the sounds aren’t being projected, but I’m like 90% certain that the sounds matter. Even if it doesn’t, people that I saw using the panel had sort of a devious way of playing, like they were messing with others in the experience.

The original room, and a little about how it works. Not super complicated all things considered.

Regardless, I started to think about this room as a sort of control room, for the whole experience really. I didn’t see any other panels in this control room that linked to other rooms, but I started to think about what it would be like if this room was connected to all the other ones and in a reverse Five Nights at Freddy’s or regular Hunger Games sort of way, if you could make different things happen in other rooms. As I was just exploring on my own, I started to see places where the room could definitely have jump-scared me in a haunted house sort of way. As I was looking through drawers in this room, I felt like this guy could have jumped out and grabbed me.

Similarly, while I was in this gothic/lovecraftian spider room, I had a chilling moment where I thought I remembered this bloke being an animatronic that moves around, but it was still. Then, when I turned around to focus on a different part of the room, I heard it move, and just as a turned around I could just barely see it move before it stopped again and never moved the entire time I was there. What if people could mess with others in these really minute ways? It would be kind of horrible, but it would be fun

it looks like a Bloodborne boss ngl, this thing scared me

The devious room where you play nasty pranks on people

I also started thinking about some of the puzzles I saw and some of the ways I saw couples collaborating in these rooms, and then a different idea came into my head. It happened while I was trying to explain what Otherworld was and one of my friends said: “It’s like an escape room except the goal isn’t to escape.” What would Otherworld function like as an escape room of some sort? The person in the control room is almost like the game master. I also remembered this strange moment where in the aforementioned spider room, the antique phone started ringing, some random guy came in, answered it (as if he knew this phone would ring), and then left. Aside from the fact that it was weird, it could be interesting to have connections between the rooms; maybe the phone is connected to the room with the bats, and you have to speak into one of their ears to communicate with the spider room phone? What if Otherworld was this Toolmaker’s paradigm fever dream where each person was put in a different room, and they had to figure out how to communicate with each other? It would be interesting to see a place like Otherworld or Meow Wolf with this alien aesthetic, but the goal is the solve some greater puzzle instead of the puzzle being an optional thing or the room interactions being disconnected.

Pressure Project 1 – Generative Dark Patterns

Posted: January 30, 2024 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment »

I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do for this project at first. We were tasked with creating something self-generating and almost unpredictable, which was daunting to me in a new software. I figured the best way to create something was to just begin though.

HOUR 1

Within my first hour I started playing around with some of the different actors in Isadora. I wanted to see what would happen if I plugged the wave generator into various parts of the shapes actor. I noticed that when I put a sine wave into both the horizontal and vertical positions my default square kind of bounced around the screen, but not in a way that I felt was interesting. When I changed the wave type to a triangle though I noticed that the square started to bounce in a very familiar way, almost like an old screensaver (I was specifically reminded of the screensaver on my old family Gateway computer, both the bouncing logo and the pipes). Moreover, if I added multiple shapes on top of each other and messed with the phase there was a nice additive effect when shapes crossed that I liked.

HOUR 2

I wanted to randomize the different shapes going around my space. After looking through a few tutorials and posts I happened across this post talking about using a counter being used to select different timecodes: https://community.troikatronix.com/topic/6399/answered-using-a-list-of-timecodes-to-trigger-events-in-this-case-lights-through-midi. This was interesting to me, and I figured I could do something similar to create a loop that would activate different shapes at once. After trying for a little bit, I couldn’t get my loop to work, however I got very close. My logic kept short-circuiting.

I figured I would give up on this and just manually make my randomized entrances. I still had no clue what I wanted to do though, and I was getting a bit worried. Had I squandered all this time? Was I going in the right direction?

EPIPHONY

I started musing on the part of this project about grabbing people’s attention. What was it about Conway’s Game of Life or bouncing screen savers that had people staring at them for hours? For Game of Life surely there are emerging patterns and self-generating complexity, something obviously compelling to me, but why was a bouncing logo just as enthralling? I remembered that I used to try and predict when that logo would get caught perfectly in a corner of the screen. It never would, but it got so close so many times, and that’s why I kept watching. There’s something about being so close to perfection that is strangely alluring.

While we were discussing the second reading by Hari and Thanassis, I had a thought. We got on the topic of dark patterns, specifically within games like Candy Crush, and I was reminded of those horrible mobile ads that I would get occasionally. The idea is that they would set up what looked like really easy gameplay but whoever was playing would purposefully play badly and fail to get you to download the game. It’s a very sneaky tactic that acts as a gateway into games with even more dark patterns. I was also reminded of several trends a year ago on TikTok and YouTube where content creators started putting gameplay from popular games into the bottom or corner of their videos (Subway Surfers particularly became a huge meme). The idea was that to keep people from scrolling off of an otherwise dull video, more lively footage was added to retain peoples’ attention, which would in turn increase revenue since watch time was inflating.

These emerging patterns intrigued me, as they were real evolving trends built on the foundation of retaining attention. They were just as unpredictable to me as Conway’s Game of Life, just as captivating, and just like one of those tiles, the trend disappeared, as do many. I wanted to make something that was a commentary on this, tying it all together with the earliest and simplest attention grabber I remembered, that being the bouncing screen saver.

HOUR 3

I spent the next hour collating and integrating several different clips of gameplay from various titles I saw used in the trends I talked about earlier, and I will link those sources below:

I took each video and trimmed them down to 1 minute in Adobe Premiere (for the footage of different mobile game ads, I selected a few ads that I felt were most emblematic of my own experiences). After that I created separate scenes for each clip that I would load in below my screen saver squares using Activate Scene and Deactivate Scene.

I also figured out that you have to multiply any randomized values by 1000 before inserting them into time-based inputs because of the way Isadora treats seconds versus normal floats.

HOUR 4

I created a user actor for each of my little bouncing shapes and for the instantiation of those shapes, as well as adding more randomized elements like the phase (which would affect where the shapes bounced), the color, and the timing at which they appeared.

HOUR 5

In the final hour I took time to polish and organize. I created some quick logic that would look at the vertical and horizontal positions of several shapes, compare them, and load/unload gameplay footage based on those values. I also took the time to add a piece of music that I felt captured the feel of my experience. The piece is called Cascades by Disasterpiece and it’s from one of my favorite games, Hyper Light Drifter: https://youtu.be/bKkl9iRB9-c?si=jy81Xwh1ZtegPbJJ.

SHOWTIME

People reacted differently from what I expected but I’m really glad they did. Everyone caught onto the fact that the experience was probably some critique or was representative of some trend, which I thought was great. Nathan immediately recognized the DVD screensaver-like bouncing of the shapes which I also appreciated, and Orlando said that the footage has YouTube tutorial vibes, which wasn’t a connection I drew at first but is incredibly apt. Nick made a comment about a moment where it appeared that the shapes filled in this black section of the screen and footage came up all around, which I thought was cool and pretty close to getting at how the footage is activated. There was a lot of talk about how the piece reflects on me as an artist which was great and people noted that music seemed like it wasn’t looping, which helped build anticipation because it made the cut harder to distinguish. There was also a question as to whether the music was diegetic or not, which is not something I considered at all, but I can’t stop thinking about it now.

Overall, I’m glad to have heard people’s reactions and what meanings they drew, as well as emotions. I’m also happy with what I got done in the amount of time I had. I was worried at first but once I figured out some intent behind what I wanted to do things went smoothly.

Bump: How to Make an Imaginary Friend

Posted: January 23, 2024 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment »

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