Narrative Project Begins

4th March, 2009

Over the weekend I made an effort to get as much of the body of my Narrative Project done. Essentially the concept will be a parody of traditional fantasy/fairytale like storytelling, and an opportunity to let off some steam from the formal writing required for my Dissertation.

To go with this, my story needed an image for use as background (or cover), so I seized the moment to do a quick sketch of my concept.

My ‘book’ will be based on rewritten code for my gallery, and made to look as tangible and booklike as possible through the use of styles and fonts.

Looking into Second Life

24th January, 2009

It seems a rather long time ago now, but before starting the final year I decided to look into the world of Second Life because I knew vaguely that I would be including it in my dissertation study and knew that I couldn’t possibly write about it without trying it first.

But as I say, that really does seem a long time ago so I had a small go again to familiarise myself with how it worked and how stupid my online avatar looked :)

Here I am exploring Lilly’s Irish Pub, one of the more refined and complete areas I discovered in my original visit.

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Music Biofeedback Experiment (Part 5)

17th January, 2009

I’ve made an attempt at displaying the results I’ve started to collect as a large visual graph, which you can see here:

View the large version here. Basically, it’s a case of spot the correlations!

Non-verbal Social Communication in Virtual Reality

9th January, 2009

While searching for writing on forms of communication and a perception of social liberation in virtual worlds, I came across the journals of Nick Yee, exactly the sort of stuff I’m looking for for my dissertation. Here are the relevant links:

http://www.bioedonline.org/news/news.cfm?art=2789

Nick Yee’s homepage

Biofeedback Graphing

16th December, 2008

Using an existing product, the Journey to Wild Divine biofeedback reading device, I have started to experiment to see what sort of responses I should expect from listening to music.

Here is the data compared against the actual waveform of Dire Straits’ Where Do You Think You’re Going?:

Finished Critique and Presentation

29th November, 2008

Friday saw possibly the first final deadline for a piece of work this year, the Design for Entertainment Systems game critique. Entitled ‘A Critique of Dungeon Keeper: The Subterranean World’ it explores the techniques behind the immersive world created by Bullfrog’s original Dungeon Keeper.

Introduction

Dungeon Keeper was released in 1997 by Peter Molyneux’s Bullfrog Productions and was quickly succeeded by a Deeper Dungeons expansion and more importantly a Gold Edition that featured all of the combined previous efforts and a map editor that with a little bit of work could be installed and used to build your own levels. For me it was one of the most engaging of the early PC games owing to a number of reasons, teaching me quite a few things about how to structure a successfully enthralling Real Time Strategy game, as well as having a few quirky concepts that I have yet to see repeated since. But most of all it showed me what I look for in a game that I truly enjoy and hence influenced my own ideas for designs.

This essay intends to discuss how the game created a unique and immersive game world which translated into many, many hours of play from what was really a rather limited tile set with unassuming objectives.

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The Game Theory

10th November, 2008

So imagine this situation:

Player One has already been blocked by Player Two and there is one route to the finish line remaining. Player Two is attempting to make it as difficult as possible for Player One to complete the level by playing competatively, so makes a dash to block off the remaining route. But in doing so, the world responds by changing both the player’s routes to allow passage to Player One and disadvantage Player 2.

In seeing the consequences of playing competatively will the players then develop more advanced strategies of playing, either by adapting their behaviour to act neutrally within the world or even come full circle and achieve levels by cooperative gameplay.

In fact what comes next is figuring out a way to make allowing the other player to win be mutually or even more beneficial for yourself.

Project – Galvanic Skin Response

2nd November, 2008

I downloaded the example Games Module critques and immediately realised that one of them was about a game that has been produced using an interface quite similar to what I want to produce as part of my final Project. The game in question is called Journey to the Wild Divine, and it turns out they use what they call a biofeedback device – which of course opens a new keyword for me to search for.

I’ve already been looking into Galvanic Skin Response and how to produce a PCB that will allow me to take continuous readings from a number of points and feed them into a computer, most likely via USB.

I have already been considering building some form of GSR mouse input device, because it has the advantage of being familiar and one of the most commonly used input devices that people use. On the other hand, the only time people are likely to sit with their hand on a mouse all the time is during a pretty mouse intensive activity, like a 3D first person game and not listening to music.

Links

Journey to the Wild Divine uses a ‘biofeedback device’ to measure how calm the user is:

http://openeeg.sourceforge.net/doc/links-biopsy.html