{"id":4392,"date":"2016-05-10T13:34:44","date_gmt":"2016-05-10T13:34:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/astoryisnotatree.net\/?p=4392"},"modified":"2020-02-19T21:09:38","modified_gmt":"2020-02-19T21:09:38","slug":"project-proposal-a-silt-choreography","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/astoryisnotatree.net\/?p=4392","title":{"rendered":"Radical Games: A Silt Choreography \u2014 Project Proposal"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"photo-2\"<\/strong><\/p>\n

Early concept art for the game. This is an early sketch of how\u00a0the text of the poem “A Silt Choreography” might read visually at the representational level.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0MARCH 2016 CHECK-IN: post one for class\u00a0Radical Game Design.\u00a0<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Building in Process<\/strong><\/p>\n

I am still in an early stage of building this game, making sprites in Adobe, et cetera. Have found myself working slowly in Unity. So this is where I am: still filling the gap between what I know about the engine and being able to put this game together!<\/p>\n

Ethic<\/strong><\/h4>\n

If it can be, I want this game to be an experiment in choreography. I’ve been thinking about movement as a form of incitement; as a political act. I’ve been thinking about how we perceive our own flight as a political optics, and hopefully also a\u00a0haptic<\/i>. I was interested in developing a game that careens towards a different kind of sight, one that encourages and facilitates a soft gaze, one that\u00a0prioritizes \/ embodies\u00a0a different kind of perception, undergirded with the rewards of moving towards\u00a0something other than progress. I’m interested in eventually (and maybe not in this first attempt)\u00a0building a game interface based on\u00a0haptic (rather than representational\/optical) cues.<\/p>\n

Influences<\/h4>\n

This game is inspired by ideas in haptic visuality theory.<\/p>\n

This game posits a kind of movement (proprioceptic) which departs from something like a \u00a0formal gameplay style, which relies on the fixed subjectivity of the player (subject-object duality) to create flow. I want flow\u00a0to be\u00a0interrupted \/ disrupted in this game in order to break up the “given.”<\/p>\n

Influences right now are Apichatpong’s film\u00a0Cemetery of\u00a0Splendor\u00a0<\/em>(2016), in which Apitchatpong uses layering techniques of incongruous text and image\u00a0to say a lot about the violence of representation as crafted by colonialism, neoliberalism, capital and the Western eye.<\/p>\n

I’m also looking a the Heavy Industries project \/\u00a0Young-Hae Chang.\u00a0link to Heavy Industries<\/a>. Thinking about how text can drive a game.<\/p>\n

I’m\u00a0Mona Hatoum’s work Measures of Distance<\/a><\/em>\u00a0as an example of a film that employs this haptic rubbing. Also, Fred Moten’s recent body of work from his talk “The Blur and Breathe Books” which is making the rounds right now.\u00a0link to the talk at NYU this past February.<\/a>\u00a0A game designer who\u00a0already implements these\u00a0kinds of techniques within the video game medium is\u00a0Bill Viola, whose game ‘The Night Journey’ incorporates blurred vision and prioritizes slow movement\u00a0within the game space.<\/p>\n

Problem Space \/ Solution Space*<\/strong><\/h4>\n
*From Will Wright<\/em><\/h5>\n

It is impossible to visualize the kind of world that we can live in, that we would like to live in. Actually: It is so hard to dream into other temporalities. It is so hard to try. This is not about\u00a0making being seeming\u00a0<\/em>(Massumi) but about shifting away from the primacy of this imagining of what living should look like.<\/p>\n

Asset List<\/strong><\/h4>\n

This is what the playtest looked like: The animated asset list at this stage (left to right) runs 1) starfish \/ cowhand boot 2) bubble blower 3) diamond bubble portal 4) stars that turn into star trails\/bleeding stars, 5) radio dial\u00a06) series of screens 7) also *potentially* a dial to switch the screens like a channel remote (actually, this should probably be not in your control at all– in order to communicate a\u00a0roving disembodied affective spatiality). On the non-animated end, the additional assets that I need to build in Adobe Animate CC\/Unity are: worms, disco balls, power line, stars, the train, landscape, platform path, the water, shells, starfish.<\/p>\n

Notes from playtest:<\/h4>\n

Discovered\u00a0out that I’ll have to decide whether or not to build the game with poetry audio built in to Unity or whether I should build it with the music accompaniment. Both will end up in the game, but I think adding music with ProTools later might be a good idea. Discovered that the mechanics I had in mind are pretty simple: For example, a major part of the game involves a collision of bubbles with a diamond portal into another world. They are meant to disappear through the hole, and they will, because a collision will make them disappear. As an endless runner, it resembles pretty closely the game that we build in the tutorials. It will be different in the mechanic in that there will be a screen that is hooked up to the speed of the player. Still trying to figure out what building that connection will entail.<\/p>\n

\"photo-3\"
Paper game playtest. Signs read, left to right: “Representation\/visibility: Life as a disco, life as a rodeo”; “Screens” (the beginning of discontinuity between what we ‘see’ as a player and what we hear.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Early concept art for the game. This is an early sketch of how\u00a0the text of the poem “A Silt Choreography” might read visually at the representational level. \u00a0MARCH 2016 CHECK-IN: post one for class\u00a0Radical Game Design.\u00a0 Building in Process I…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":85,"featured_media":13140,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[215],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4392","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-radical-game-design","wpcat-215-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/astoryisnotatree.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4392","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/astoryisnotatree.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/astoryisnotatree.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/astoryisnotatree.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/85"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/astoryisnotatree.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4392"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/astoryisnotatree.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4392\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13138,"href":"https:\/\/astoryisnotatree.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4392\/revisions\/13138"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/astoryisnotatree.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/13140"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/astoryisnotatree.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4392"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/astoryisnotatree.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4392"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/astoryisnotatree.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4392"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}