University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

The Observatory

(USC Thesis Other)

The Observatory

PDF

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content The Observatory Logan Ver Hoef March 27 th , 2014 Table of Contents An Introduction........................................................................................................................................... 1. The Initial Pitch...................................................................................................................................... 2. Early Revisions....................................................................................................................................... 3. Kishōtenketsu......................................................................................................................................... 4. The Halloween Show.............................................................................................................................. 5. The Winter Show..................................................................................................................................... 6. Cutting Down to Environmental Narrative............................................................................................ 7. The New Flight System.......................................................................................................................... 8. The New Listening System.................................................................................................................... 9. Playtests.................................................................................................................................................. 10. Advisor Feedback................................................................................................................................ Conclusions............................................................................................................................................... Bibliography and Works Cited.................................................................................................................. 1 2 4 5 6 7 8 8 9 9 11 12 13 Ver Hoef 1 An Introduction Off the coast of Nagasaki lies a sleeping giant. For almost a hundred years, Hashima Island (more colloquially known as Gunkanjima, or Battleship Island) hosted a coal mining facility and thousands of people. It is a tiny island for a population of that size, a rectangle built up with buttress and seawall only fifteen acres in size. Apartments, schools, theaters, and shops all wedged themselves into the space, providing for the residents. People lived entire lives there: loving, laughing, laboring, cooking, cleaning, shopping, making, learning, and sharing. When the bottom fell out of the coal industry in Japan in the 1960s, the facility on Hashima Island was hit hard, closing in 1974. With the need for new jobs and the mainland so laborious a trip, the residents of the island had no choice but to move away. In its heyday, Hashima Island boasted a population of over five thousand, making it one of the most densely populated places in known history. In a few short months after the collapse, the island’s population had dropped to zero (Gunkel). Over the next few decades, Hashima Island started to crumble and become reclaimed by nature. Today, trees grow out of buildings and birds fly through apartments. It is an example of a post-human environment – people missing, but the spaces and stories of them left behind. Visiting the island today is a strange and wonderful experience. It feels calm; peaceful; at rest. Closer attention starts to reveal details about the people who lived there and what their lives were like. Left tableware, toys, and furniture hint at how they lived, what they valued, and what relationships they had. The Observatory aims to reveal people, place, and history through exploration. Hashima Island, as a place and experience, played a large part in the inspiration of this project. Ver Hoef 2 1. The Initial Pitch The following is the original pitch and objective statement for this thesis project. Overview The Observatory is a game about exploration. The players will enter hidden and altered environments to discover the familiar and unfamiliar, uncovering parts of a story delivered through the environment. Players take on the role of a boy, half bird and half human, living on and exploring a post-human island. The world is inspired by the forests and urban spaces of Nagasaki and Hashima Island. The player takes to the skies around the island, experiencing a deep flight system evoking the freedom and euphoria of winged flight. On the ground, ruins of an absent culture are explorable, and contain stories of the people who live there, the world, and the relationships between them. Three experiences lie at the core of this thesis, each being a result of player exploration and environmental narrative. The first is archeology; players explore abandoned spaces and find artifacts left behind by the former inhabitants. These artifacts, although contemporary in nature, reveal details about the people who lived in the world. Players will discover how these individuals lived, what they loved, what they feared, secrets they held, relationships they had, and what their lives were like. The second is mystery; players will discover cryptic messages left in the world. These lead the player to uncover connections between locations and structures on the island, and in the process reveal the story of the island itself. Players will discover what this island is, why all of its former inhabitants seemingly spontaneously left, and what the player character's role is in this world. Ver Hoef 3 The third is serendipity; players will encounter spaces and setpieces that respond in unique ways under different conditions. It is not enough to simply locate and interact with these things; it must be done at the right time. Players will encounter a number of setpieces through the world, but only a few of them will be found under the right conditions to reveal previously unnoticed aspects and unrealized behaviors. The theme of duality runs through the experience of The Observatory. It is expressed through the visuals and systems of the character, through the environments and spaces of the world, and through the stories found in the world. It is a game about things coexisting, pushing against each other, consuming one another, and existing in and out of balance. Gameplay A focus of this thesis is the environmental narrative found in hidden and abandoned spaces. As such, a majority of gameplay will be based around traversal, navigation, and observation of these environments. Special work will be put into a third person camera to allow for closer, more intimate exploration and navigation of enclosed spaces. At any time the player may hold a button to close their character’s eyes, blacking out the game’s visuals. During this time, they will hear the environments as they once were. Streets, schoolyards, cafes, beaches, and the mountainside will teem with life and activity, evoking a memory of these places when they were alive. Flight is another major gameplay element of The Observatory. At any time the player may choose to take flight, soaring through the sky, swooping between buildings, or diving through tree canopies. In addition to making traversal of the island faster and more engaging, flight allows the player to survey the area they wish to explore and exposes features and connections not visible from the ground. Ver Hoef 4 A prior work of mine, Deep Blue Sky, focuses on this flight experience. The flight system from Deep Blue Sky will be transferred over to The Observatory, with some additional work on the transitions between ground and aerial traversal. Objective Worlds in games have always played a very large part in what I enjoy and what I want to create. As such, a major goal of this thesis is to create a rich world that fosters exploration and a perpetuating sense of discovery. Furthermore, after having several very negative experiences developing games, a secondary goal is that I make something for myself, and enjoy doing so. 2. Early Revisions At the start of work on this thesis project, I was aware that the entire scope of The Observatory as described in the pitch spanned beyond this year of work. I also knew there were three possible avenues I was interested in exploring: the aforementioned aspects of archeology, mystery, and serendipity. Early on, a plan was formed to create a handful of examples of each, which would then be present in the build for the Winter Show. Post-Winter Show, we would review player experiences and determine which of the three aspects gave the best return for the effort involved, discard the weaker two, and head in its direction. Additionally, early on I made the decision to try to design by feel. Prior to this thesis, a majority of my projects were cerebral and deliberate in nature. I felt that approach would neither be appropriate for The Observatory nor was it what I was interested in exploring. As such, the decision was made to make decisions based on what “felt right” for at least the pre-production phase of the project. Ver Hoef 5 3. Kishōtenketsu When discussing the types of stories and narratives I wanted to create in The Observatory, I was routinely asked the same question: where is the conflict? Talking with project advisors, faculty, and other students, I was told that without my narratives building to some sort of conflict, they would not be engaging, satisfying, or interesting. Based on my prior experiences, I felt this to be untrue. More importantly, I felt that the stories of characters in The Observatory were not necessarily conflict- focused. As designing by feel was one of my objectives, I wanted to find a way to tell the stories I felt were right. After much discussion, I discovered the Kishōtenketsu narrative structure, which seemed an ideal fit for The Observatory. Kishōtenketsu is a type of structure common in Chinese and Japanese narratives. Whereas the Dramatic Arc, rooted in classical Greek drama, most often turns on a conflict-based climax, Kishōtenketsu follows a different course that does not necessitate conflict at all (Diermyer). Kishōtenketsu has four major stages: Ki (Introduction), Shō (Development), Ten (Twist), and Ketsu (Conclusion). The Introduction serves a very similar purpose to its parallel seen in the Dramatic Arc; it establishes characters, settings, and other important information for the story. Development continues from the introduction, but avoids major changes while leading to the next stage. The Twist is often an abrupt change in topic to something unfamiliar to the person following the narrative; this is the closest parallel to the climax of the story seen in the Dramatic Arc. Finally, the Conclusion reveals the connection of the Twist to the prior story, recontextualizing every stage to reveal new meaning and often bringing the narrative to a conclusion, although it is not uncommon to leave major narrative threads without closure. This form of narrative structure fit very well with the stories of The Observatory, and often fits very naturally with other pieces of the experience. Our major environmental narrative arc follows the Kishōtenketsu structure as such: Ver Hoef 6 1. Introduction: The player is introduced to the world. 2. Development: The player explores the world and discovers various spaces and characters. They come to an understanding of the characters, learning about their lives and their states of being. 3. Twist: The player pieces enough narrative together to realize the twist linking all of the characters together – a typhoon made landfall on the island, forcing everyone to evacuate, destroying everything on the island, and wiping clean all of their prior lives there. 4. Conclusion: The twist changes the player's ideas of what each character's future would be, for better or worse. This type of narrative structure works exceedingly well with the discovered aspect of environmental narrative, as it is focused on the revealing of new information to recontextualize prior information. Kishōtenketsu also describes the moment-to-moment experience of discovering environmental narrative, as well. As each piece of narrative is encountered, experienced, and understood, players go through the four stages: 1. Introduction: “Oh, this place is...” The player enters a space, usually one understood and recognizable. 2. Development: “That looks interesting...” The player recognizes something as relevant to the narrative, and engages or interacts with it. 3. Twist: “What is this?” New information is delivered to the player through the object, sometimes out of order and often without preface as to how it relates to prior narrative. 4. Conclusion: “Ah, this is...” The player places the individual piece of information into the greater narrative using context in the presentation and environment. These new pieces can often change or deepen the understanding of the greater narrative. Ver Hoef 7 4. The Halloween Show The mid-semester show on Halloween was particularly useful as a practice presentation for The Observatory. We experimented with having an extra monitor dedicated to a slideshow of concept art, work in progress, and mood boards. This engaged and informed people who were unable to play at the time, and conveyed where we wanted to go with the project in the future. This was something we used again quite handily at the Winter Show. 5. The Winter Show The scope of all three of The Observatory's focuses combined (archeology, mystery, and serendipity) was too large for a thesis project, so a plan was formed early on to use the Winter Show to choose which to pursue. We would make small handfuls of content focusing on each, watch how strongly people reacted to each at the show, and decide which gave us the best return for our effort. Ultimately, the strongest reactions and interest came from the environmental narrative we created for the show. Our moments of serendipity proved too difficult to find at the right times, and even when found were often not recognized as particularly special. While players were initially drawn into aspects of the mystery of the world, finding narrative about characters in the world quickly diverted their attention. Winter Show also verified a concern we had with the original flight system brought over from Deep Blue Sky. While the flight system was deep, interesting, and engaging, it was challenging enough that people spent a majority of their time interacting with it rather than exploring the ground. This underlined the need to revamp the movement system, prioritizing ease of traversal and exploration over detail of flight. Not everything we observed was expected, however. The system for listening in The Ver Hoef 8 Observatory proved much more compelling and powerful than we anticipated. We would often notice players closing their eyes to listen to the memory audio for a full two or three minutes, until they suspected it was looping. Immediately, players would want to head somewhere else physically distinct in the world and try to listen there, in the hopes that it would sound substantially different. Because we only did a rough pass on the memory audio in the world, however, it would usually sound the same, and players were visibly and audibly disappointed. However, from then on, they would continually check to see if a new space had new audio, and the cycle of engagement with the sound would begin again whenever they found a new memory audio space. This convinced us to revise our memory audio listening system to add variance, layering, filters, and spatial audio so that moving even a small distance in the same memory space would be noticeably different. 6. Cutting Down to Environmental Narrative The biggest decision to come out of the Winter Show was to cut down the project's focus to primarily environmental narrative. This was an anticipated choice, and of the three available routes was the most interesting to us. The choice significantly cut down scope and provided grounded experience goals for the team to approach. While the mystery of the world and serendipitous moments are still pieces of the experience, they are no longer at the forefront, granting us room and focus. 7. The New Flight System Over the winter break, the original flight and camera system were re-written from scratch. The original system prioritized realistic simulation, fidelity of movement and control, and depth of the system. While appropriate for the prior project, Deep Blue Sky, it was not the right system for The Ver Hoef 9 Observatory. A new system was designed that prioritized ease of traversal and the ability to survey the landscape from above without sacrificing the feeling of winged flight. The redesign was very successful. The original flight system had problems with usability and intuitiveness, and drew attention away from exploration of the ground in favor of playing with the system in the air. The new flight system addressed all of these problems by simplifying the flight model and camera control, resulting in an experience much more focused on surveying the world from above and then landing in a chosen location. 8. The New Listening System With such a strong and positive response to our simple, content-sparse memory audio listening system, the decision was made to re-design the system to stretch content further. This meant creating a system that could use the same handful of audio clips to create notably different sound spaces. The old listening system was based on simple zones, with hand-picked clips played depending on which zone the player had most recently entered, whereas the new one places audio regions with falloff, positional audio sources, and audio filter zones (which add variable amount of reverberation, echo, and low-pass). This creates noticeably different audio when in different parts of the world, rewarding the player for listening in different spaces and allowing them to track specific audio back to its source in the world. 9. Playtests In the second semester, we started running regular formal and semi-formal playtests. Playtests were usually conducted in the Usability Testing Rooms in the Game Innovation Laboratory, with the aid of a playtest conductor. Our playtest conductor was external to the development team, and while Ver Hoef 10 the developers were present at the playtests, they were concealed behind a one-way mirror and usually avoided interaction with the testers that might bias them. Standard playtesting procedures were followed: entrance and exit surveys, post-test interviews, limited intervention, and so forth. Early tests in the second semester focused on the revamp of the movement system and camera. The only information players were given was that they could “pull both triggers at once to flap.” While discovering all the functionality and transitions between states took some time, once understood, players traversed and explored the world with ease and intentionality, and reported that it generally felt intuitive. While less well-played testers often took longer to become comfortable, when given a controls reference sheet they were often up to a very satisfactory level of competence in ten or so minutes. This proved the revamp successful, and underlined the need for a strong starting tutorial. Later playtests focused on the discovery of environmental narratives and spaces in the world. Testers were let loose upon the world without prompting that there were spaces to find. Players would often find particular places first, and had difficulty recognizing other places from the air. Once the tester had found one enterable space, it would invariably result in them actively looking for others. Good information about discoverability was gathered from these playtests, and the narrative showed compelling enough to drive player action. Playtests in the final half of the semester focused on narrative understanding and interpretation. As players could find pieces of environmental narrative out of order (or not at all), it was important that their interpretation was at least interesting, if not accurate. Tests have thus far been positive, with players quickly creating an understanding of characters, and further developing those later on by actively linking pieces of content to each other. Most changes have been tweaks in the way particular pieces are presented, such as changing proximity (as players would perceive content located next to each other as strongly linked) and wording. Ver Hoef 11 10. Advisor Feedback Meetings were held with thesis committee members several times a semester for each member. Topics of conversation were broad, including acting as a director, story structures, and game feel. Early meetings with Maureen McHugh focused mostly on the intent and ideas behind the project. We discussed themes, references, and feel, and these discussions helped nail down what The Observatory was, and what it was not. In particular, in our first discussion, she pushed that I had to have an answer to the question of conflict in the game. This led me to discover the narrative structure of Kishōtenketsu, which provided a clear direction for both Maureen McHugh and myself in future discussions and design. In my initial meeting about The Observatory with Jenova Chen, he stressed that it was important to find a message I was trying to convey. As such, the dominant themes of The Observatory have changed and evolved frequently over the course of development. Originally, the theme of duality in the world, characters, and interactions was a focus. Later, with the switch solely to environmental narrative, the theme was re-targeted as recognizing every individual in a large community, such as the city present on the island, as an individual. Such perspective can be difficult to achieve and difficult to hold. The plan with this theme is to explore a small handful of people on the island in-depth, then in the conclusion suggest that every inhabitant of this island lived a life as detailed and important as the earlier handful. This decision has provided clear direction in other areas such as character and space design. Meetings with Tracy Fullerton and Jenova Chen also focused on feel, both of individual pieces and overall. Various tweaks and changes emerged from these conversations, such as different timing on the listening system, additional animations, and slower flight. Ver Hoef 12 Conclusions The Importance of a Producer One of the most important takeaways from this project is the importance of a good producer. When setting out to assemble a team, a priority was taking on people who would not need to be micro- managed. This worked well, but the lack of a dedicated producer still showed in organization and communication. Although it would have been possible to find someone to stand in as one on short notice, a good producer needs to know both the project and how a person works, and a bad producer would only magnify obstacles, not remove them. A Focus on Environmental Narrative Environmental storytelling has always been incredibly engaging and fascinating for me. This project has been my first deep foray into crafting environmental narrative myself. In addition to gaining new appreciation for the craft of it, I have bolstered my interest in using it in the future, as well as refining my approach. Played Landscapes Finally, a realization I have come to over the course of this project is that landscapes are a consistent theme of things I want to make. Landscapes have been a regular fixture in the list of games that are important and dear to me, and often when conceptualizing games that I want to make, landscapes play a significant role. I have some inherent desire to share experiences I have had in places through games, and The Observatory is an attempt at the realization of that. As an artist, craftsman, and designer, working on this thesis has helped me recognize a major element of the things I want to create. Ver Hoef 13 Bibliography and Works Cited Gunkel, Cristoph. “Vergessene Orte.” SPIEGEL ONLINE. SPIEGEL ONLINE, 27 November 2009. Web. 25 March 2014. <http://www.spiegel.de/einestages/vergessene-orte-a-948617.html>. Diermyer, Cheryl, Susan Simmons, Chris Blakesley. “Kishōtenketsu - Narrative Structures.” Using Narrative Structures. University of Wisconsin – Madison, n.d. Web. 25 March 2014. <http://narrativestructures.wisc.edu/home/kishotenketsu>.

Abstract (if available)

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Conceptually similar

PDF

A second summer

PDF

a•part•ment

PDF

Lost together

PDF

My friend and me

PDF

The moonlighters: a narrative listening approach to videogame storytelling

PDF

How to be Indian: a Tumblr experiment

PDF

Getogether

PDF

Last broadcast: making meaning out of the mundane

PDF

Beautiful corner

PDF

The voice in the garden: an experiment in combining narrative and voice input for interaction design

PDF

Come with Me: a cooperative game focusing on player emotion

PDF

Berättande

PDF

Morana: explore healing potential of virtual reality storytelling

PDF

Psynchrony: finding the way forward

PDF

The make of The Surveillant: a thesis project ""postpartum""

PDF

Resurrection/Insurrection

PDF

Coping with negative emotions through breath control

PDF

Bottles

PDF

The future of games and health: towards responsible interaction design

PDF

Reality ends here: environmental game design and participatory spectacle

Asset Metadata

Creator Ver Hoef, Logan (author)

Core Title The Observatory

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Master of Fine Arts

Degree Program Interactive Media

Publication Date 04/29/2014

Defense Date 04/28/2014

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag environmental narrative,game,Gunkanjima,Hashima Island,interactive,Kishotenketsu,listening,Nagasaki,OAI-PMH Harvest,observatory

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Fullerton, Tracy (committee chair), Chen, Jenova (committee member), McHugh, Maureen (committee member)

Creator Email logan.verhoef@gmail.com,verhoef@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-405295

Unique identifier UC11296511

Identifier etd-VerHoefLog-2449.pdf (filename),usctheses-c3-405295 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-VerHoefLog-2449.pdf

Dmrecord 405295

Document Type Thesis

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Ver Hoef, Logan

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA