In class we went over Palimpsest, to write over or rewrite. We're revisiting the maps to change our 5 words, adding depth/expansion/exploration. By the end we don't need to have 5 words but can have as many words that make the journey and understanding, it can even be 1 word as long as it covers everything you need. These words can create an emotive experience and can be thoughtful but should stray from the standard use of the literal meaning. For the exercise, we had to form groups and talk about our words what we had chosen as our main 5 keywords (which for me were Tether, Instability, Scent, Taint, and Mirror) and discussed what we found we focused on or words that shared the meaning but in a way that worked better for what we had. The words I found matched best were Wayfinding and Uncertainty.
For Wayfinding, I found it resonated with my starter words Tether, Scent, and Taint. All three use a connection to get to a place, it was in the way I used them to a final destination. It loosely related to Mirror as well, but in the sense of Mirror blanking out an area and this caused wayfinding.
For Uncertainty, it used Instability, Taint, and Mirror in that all three together create a dark area that can make the player feel insecure (in the area as it is dark or in that it doesn't feel structurally sound). There is also a part of my project that has no floor, with this it really drives home the sense of uncertainty, would the player really want to go there?
The Holistic Statement is the reflective statement of our journey with our 5 words and what we've learned.
Holistic Statement Draft:
Over the course of this class, my journey with my project has changed and grown. What started with gamifying an art gallery changed into an experiential journey in a space. My words evolved from Tether, Instability, Scent, Taint, and Mirror into Wayfinding and Uncertainty. In this change, I found that multiple words could fit inside of others and that generated the project I have now.
The shift from the first set of keywords came in the form of creation and mind-mapping. The mind-mapping helped to shape what words are associated with the main five, then also to how some of them connected to others from the matrix. Through expansion, I could find more ways to approach the words and the appearances of them in my project. Now, with the two current words, there is a level of evocation within them that speaks more to the project than the original five but ties them all together nicely.
As evocation is my main topic, alongside interaction with the space, immersion then becomes something I need to focus on. With this, it means the space, scale, interactables, and audio need to make the player feel as though they are properly "inside" the game. Anything that can break the immersion can interfere with the evocation and experience of the player, and, in essence, the game feel. So, in this sense, I had to create a multisensory experience with limited base senses (sight, sound, and touch as smell and taste are lost in a virtual environment like virtual reality). In this it means that the player will then rely on their tacit knowledge of feeling, using proprioception and interoception(^1).
Through this all I have used new systems, such as particle effects (Niagara) and a new Head-Mounted Display (HMD) which is the HTC Vive Pro. These are not new products but my use of them is as I have used older versions similar to them. The use of Niagara in my project is near-essential for a form of Wayfinding as it produces a moving piece that players can see (and mildly interact with). Meanwhile, the HMD changes what I was previously able to use and the limitations I had with older versions. There was also an update with SteamVR (a plugin for Unreal Engine 4) where the keybindings no longer automatically use the wrong HMD/controllers.
My final words, Wayfinding and Uncertainty, have come about from looking at what words came together in further exploration and gaining feedback from peers. Wayfinding uses three of the main five keywords and other words I found while expanding them (words such as movement, water, and fluidity). Uncertainty covers three words as well, albeit slightly different from Wayfinding's, in that it deals with the negative impacts that some of the areas can pose.
Funky Words (words that appear in the statement that most likely need explaining):
Immersion: Deep mental involvement in something.
Head-Mounted Display (HMD): the headset for Virtual Reality, features stereoscopic lenses to create the false (virtual) 3D space.
Plugin: A software or module that adds extra features to a system.
Unreal Engine 4: Game-making engine/platform to create games (and etc.)
Keybindings: Actions/Movements connected to button press or trigger pull, i.e. "press and hold trigger button to grab"
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