Alicia Monreal Ortega

Wintersemester 2019

Multimedia|VR Design

2030: the Apocalypse

Burg Giebichenstein

Kunsthochschule

Prof. Jonas Hansen

Tristan Schulze

1

indexindex

finding the idea

concept

story, characters

design

interactions

sound and animation

ending

further details

sources

1

2

4

6

7

9

10

11

11

12

3

finding the ideaall the kids that didn’t saw the light

This project started a bit before the classes started, in the Hurra hurra festival, where I attended a workshop without knowing what it was going to be about, who were going to speak, or how was it going to affect the next four months of my life.

The workshop was about creating a new un/learning system of education based on what the people who were there -designers, artists, teachers, but also people whose jobs had nothing to do with the topic discussed- feared and craved for. And to my surprise, there was a common apprehension about the future, about not knowing enough or not having the tools required to stop the disaster. I could see that there were lots of people putting their efforts into the World, so my question was -and remains still- why was the problem not solved yet? I wrote everything I Iearnt that day in a poster (fig.1) and hanged it on my door: I was convinced I had been given the key to change the future, and now I just had to put the words together so the idea could be born. Maybe a mixture between technology and human that would lead to a society based on love -for so long I thought that to change the world we just had to give enough love to those who hadn’t enough- and vulnerability.

There was plenty of information that I needed to understand before starting to work, though. I read studies about Environmental Psychology, as Green Ways – Perspectives of Environmental Psychology Research, by Gerhard Reese, Anne-Kristin Römpke, Andreas W. Mues and Kathrin Bockmühl. I tried to understand how human behaviour could be changed, and after reading more texts -in my case, Christian A. Klöckner was specially useful-, I got to believe that to change our conduct, humans need a really long process. First, we ought to realise that there is a behaviour to be changed, then decide to change it, and finally stabilise a new conduct so we don’t go back to our origins. Then I learnt

that games can modify the perception of reality by providing sets of rules that we don’t usually consider in our everyday life -Jane McGonigal, Gaming can make a better world, and Madeleine Genzsch, Empowering sustainable behaviour-. I was also bombarded by new inventions that already existed and which could change the tissue of society: printable cells from Hannah Bürckstümmer, piezoelectricity by Akshat Kothari, new ways of energy storage by Danielle Fong. A new world appeared in my mind, where all these new inventions could be used (fig.2), and for some time I thought about making some kind of physical game where the player could live in that future society, and then notify them somehow that the options they had chosen during the game were actual options they could choose in real life. I played with that concept for a while, as well as with the idea of creating a small post-apocalyptical-virtual world where the populations was drastically affected by the decisions you made in your real life -so you could literally play the hero-. Another ideas were building a small archaeological installation were the fossil was a human from our period of time, or powering something similar to a Christmast tree with the energy saved with the people from a comunity. The concept of Apocalypse was very present in many of the concepts, as it felt like a good way of decontextualizing the present, and making ourselves confront our decisions.

fig.1: the poster I made with ideas from the Hurra Hurra festivalfig.2: early concepts about a postapocalyptic future in a sustainable society

5

conceptsaving the future from destruction

The two principles that never abandoned the original ideas were the concept of the player as a hero -ability that would allow them to make decisions they wouldn’t make in their everyday life- and the Apocalypse -where I could play with the idea of that feared future, but without getting parallised by it-.

The idea started to settle around making a story where the player could choose the path that would prevent the Great Disaster from happening. Still some other concepts were on my mind: leaving the game in the street so everyone could find it and share it that way, or an app that would get more complex as more people were participating. But then and again I would learn new concepts

fig.4: tree structure using Twine

about gamification and how through games kids could discover how real things have real consecuences -The art of Gamification; Teaching Sustainability and System Thinking by Pervasive Game Development by researchers in Hedmark University College-, and get more convinced that I wanted to make a game (fig.3).

I started developping a story where the player could make decisions that would affect the future, in a tree structure (fig.4). It was discussed how many decisions the player would be able to make, and how much time would they have to make them, and we ended up deciding that it would be a really short game where fast decisions would happen, and you would end up feeling lost and confused, as in life, so you would attempt to make better decisions in real life.

The main problem I see in the idea is that it produces in the player the same kind of pressure as the system in which we’re

living right now -the one we’re attempting to change-. And that means the player is not going to change at all, if anything, they are going to get anxiety. And there is where Kathia introduced the concept of seriousness through absurdity.

Thanks to that concept, I could aproach a very serious story -where there are refugees coming to the country, acid rain, poisoned crops, famines, terrorism, social tension, climate disasters, the North Pole melting, weapon trade, black markets, genetically modified food, and some other concepts- with a detached view. I was going to create some characters that would be affected by the decisions the player would make, and they wouldn’t exactly be humans, so real humans could see how nonsense the decisions the characters were making were.

With Kathia also came some very interesting ideas: a crisis as a way of finding new focuses, games as activating city environments, or as a set of rules that create a different world, ethical design, the idea that everything that is designed would be better as a game, how playing can scare away the fear, how every action is political, and how every human is capable of creating anwers -and therefore games-. After that day, I really wanted to create a game that would be located in the university, and whose end you could change. It didn’t end up being like that, but I think it’s important to remember that idea because it would be fascinating to get back to it at some point. The concept of the player being able to change the game remained, but I didn’t explore it further.

fig.3: notes about ideas and gamification

7

story, charactersplot and non-human people

fig.5: character silhouettes

As for the story, in it the player can follow 4 main different paths where they can be: a political authority, a renowned scientific, an activist, or a regular everyday human being. In the end, all of them are facing the same problems -the ones described in the previous section-, but from different perspectives and with different ways of approaching them -as they have more or less power-. However, in the end, they are all reaching the final point: death. There are 23 different ways of dying in the game, depending on the decisions that you have made to reach them.

Speaking about the characters, they were developped starting from silhouettes, so they could be easily recognised (fig.5). Then they were given personalities through lines (fig.6). In the end, they would end up again being just colour blocks, when I realised lines added too much information for this kind of game, so only the player’s character -which is the less complex and more neutral of all the designs- remains with the details that were given to it in the beginning.

fig.6: character development

designfinding a diary

The design of the interface came at the same time as the characters. At first, when the story wasn’t developped around absurdity, the background related to a glitched postapocalypse, centered in technology (fig.7). When the main concept changed, it made sense that the image where the characters stood changed too, so I finally got to the idea of a diary that someone would find somewhere, taken from that future when everything collapsed (fig.8). It is thought to give a feeling of closeness, because everyone can feel identified with written words over paper, as it is something they have experienced. It can also be mentioned that, as well as the text and the images, the main design includes

fig.7: first ideas about the design

fig.8: early stages of the “diary style” design

9

interactionsswiping as tinder

At first, the interactions that had been chosen for the game were based on clicks and on the Spotify layout. However, being Tinder the most effective way of making decisions so far, we ended up with swiping interactions: there would be a small text in the upper part of the screen, and by swiping the image left or right, you would get one or other option. I thought this was very esay to understand, but after trying it with some people, I decided it was necessary to put a small tutorial (fig.10) so people would know what to do -as they weren’t getting the idea of choosing by moving the image slowly-.

fig.4: examples of images done for the game fig.10: tutorial after the animation

a calendar where the player can feel how the time is passing by, and a coloured background that changes as well with the amounth of decisions made.

More decisions that had to be made were the typography, colours, and images. I decided to keep it simple, as it already took a long time for people to make choices when there were no visuals at all: there ended up being two colours and a texture; red being always used to drive the attention of the player to a to the topic of the image (fig.9).

#e25956 #595550

The typography chosen was Lucida Console, as it is a monospaced and web-safe font. It also fits in the diary design.

Lucida Console aA bB cC dD eE fF gG hH iI jJ kK lL mM nN oO

pP qQ rR sS tT uU vV wW xX yY zZ

11

sound and animationframe to frame

fig.11: some of the frames needed for the animation

To complete the game, an introduction was added, where the main idea was presented, as well as the main character. The animations were made using the frame to frame method in Photoshop (fig.11), and overlayed in After Effects (fig.12). I recorded the sounds from the everyday environment: workshop sounds and some drums -so there would be no copyright problems-. In the end, there was no music that would guide the player through the whole game, but I think that it would have been a good idea.

fig.12: overlay

endingand about what happens after

As stated previously, all endings in this game lead you to a death based on the decisions that you have made. After that, you’re given the option of playing again, and if you do, and get to the end once more, you will receive a different message. Next to “the game is over”, you will read “the game is not over if you change it”, or else if you get to the “do you want another life?”, next to “yes”, you’ll read “i actually want to change the game”. Those alternative options take you to a passage that can’t be accessed from any other place, in which you’ll get another small animation and “then change the source code, change the system”. That animation burns the layout and gives you a link to a folder where you can get the code and some other information about the game.

Idealistically, this wouldn’t just be a folder, but a place where the players could get more information about how to change the system, and could share their ideas with other people. Because the whole point of the game is that this system/this game has been designed for you to lose, so if you want a decent outcome, you’ll have to change it yourself. This idea comes from the concept that humans learn better by creating themsleves.

further detailshosting site and coding

Finally, it’s interesting to mention that the game is hosted in the platform itch.io, where any designer can post their games freely. The language used for the interaction’s coding process is Javascript, through p5, a library based on Processing. However, the story was written in Twine, an open source tool that can be used to create text-decision based stories, and then exported to Json with a plugin by lazerwalker called Twison. Finally, Tristan Schulze created a class constructor that accessed that json library that had been created, so the Javascript coding could interpret it.

This project’s objective was to change the world through a story, but I think it gets nowhere close to that, because changing the world is really hard and no lone human is meant to change it by themself. However, I learnt some programming and some stuff about human behaviour, and I believe that there we can find a huge field of investigation.

sourcesamong others

Green Ways – Perspectives of Environmental Psychology Research, by Gerhard Reese, Anne-Kristin Römpke, Andreas W. Mues and Kathrin Bockmühl (Eds.) Summary for Policymakers about Global Warming of 1.5ºC by ipcc Will politicians take action and try to save the planet from climate change? by theconversation.com How video games hanged popular music by Hua Hsu on newyorker.com developer.mozilla.org twinery.org w3schools.com p5js.org The Coding Train, a channel in Youtube that teaches how to program A new chapter in energy storage by Danielle Fong The Future of Renewable Energy: Piezoelectricity by Akshat Kothari Coffe to go Revolution by Florian Pachaly A printable, flexible, organic sollar cell by Hannah Bürckstümmer Could a video game help us solve climate change? by Grist Tree by New Reality Company Eco by StrangeLoopGames Empowering sustainable behaviour by Maeleine Genzsch The art of Gamification; Teaching Sustainability and System Thinking by Pervasive Game Development by Hedmark Univerity College