University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Resurrection/Insurrection

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Resurrection/Insurrection

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Content Syam

1

Avimaan Syam
25 March 2014

Original Abstract
Resurrection/Insurrection (R/I) is a single-player digital experience that explores
interactive empathy & projective identity by having users affect a storyworld as
multiple characters on different sides of a conflict. R/I investigate how players
choose to empathize with the multiple characters they embody across a fictional
world, and—if those characters are put into conflict with each other—how players
make meaningful choices based off previous game events, current emotional
status, and future game states.
R/I will disrupt the way players traditionally identify with characters, narrative, and
system in a game by presenting the player with conflicting goals, difficult choices,
and opposing systemic and narrative desires. Will players continue to identify
with characters they embody in a game world? How much can we disrupt the
player’s sense of self in that world? R/I starts with the premise that we can foster
empathy & understanding in its players by making them experience the game
world from multiple perspectives.
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1. Original Project Details
1.1 Synopsis
Set during a cholera epidemic in 1885 Chicago that has caused riots in the
streets and graves to be robbed in the name of a scientific cure,
Resurrection/Insurrection challenges players’ concept of story, character, and
identity by continually shifting the embodied character, interactive system, and
environment to make players continually recontextualize how they make
decisions.
Despite the expansive world & potential drama, R/I is designed for the intimate,
not the epic: the overarching narrative allows for a constellation of smaller
systems & moments to take place, so the player can fully empathize with a
certain character or group.
1.2 Goals
! Storytelling through Interactivity: By utilizing character-based system
design for multiple modes of gameplay, we allow players to understand
characters via interactivity instead of just narrative.
! Juxtaposing Different Perspectives via Gameplay: By creating multiple
systems and the requisite narrative context, we can make players
understand those systems and their actions in those systems in relation to
one another and consider how actions in one system might affect the
world and other systems.
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! Internal Player Conflict: Ultimately the aim of R/I is to inspire internal
conflict in our players. This is done in two ways:
o Ludic & Narrative Adversity: By creating a game system where the
ludic goal creates potentially unwanted narrative consequences, we
put the player in conflict between narrative & ludic goals.
o Cross-System Adversity: By having the players control and
understand the goals of multiple characters in conflict with each
other, we can create internal player conflict about which system
and set of characters to succeed if one or the other must be
chosen.
1.3 User Experience
Progression
R/I will have the feeling of linear progression between episodes of gameplay
though player choices will change the sequence of some episodes. It is important
that players feel that their actions in the world have some sort of trajectory and
the possibility space of divergences is well planned out in advance.
Systems
R/I will have a number of smaller systems that players will experience during
gameplay. Several of these have already been prototyped (See Prototypes).
! Graverobbing: a stealth-based mechanic where characters must get in
and out of a graveyard with a fresh corpse without getting caught
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! Riot Starting/Protesting: the player must create enough anger & panic in
the crowd while evading opponents trying to prevent the riot. The player
must constantly balance their action to find the rhythm of what will cause
NPCs to join the riot: continuously changing actions appropriately to
escalate the chaos.
! Immigrant Mother: a mechanic where the player controls both sides of an
argument between a mother and her anarchist son. This mechanic is
intended to feel multiple perspectives inside of one mechanic.
! Gravedigging: a ritualistic process of digging a hole and placing a body
that acts as the Greek chorus to introduce us to each act and provide
context to the world at large.
! Stockyard Baron: a high level look at running a stockyard. A small
resource management simulation.
It is my hope that by continually recontextualizing and tinkering with these
systems, we can expand the amount of representational and narrative space we
create. By keeping fidelity low, R/I will be able to focus on content creation and a
broader design scope. It’s important to note for any whom view the Advanced
Game proposal linked below that the complexity and length of the systems
described therein are being scoped down to their essence for the thesis.
1.4 Narrative Overview
Chicago, 1885: with the Great Fire of 1871 behind it and the promise of the
World’s Fair of 1893 on its horizon, Chicago was a massive, booming trade hub
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that brought out the best and worst of this country. Promise and fortune attracted
countless immigrants, and countless immigrants were exploited and exposed to
brutal working conditions as captured by Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle.

On the cusp of modern medicine, as the Industrial Revolution begins to shake its
monstrous head, Chicago is besieged by a citywide cholera epidemic. As the
death toll spirals out of control, the beleaguered poor demand better working
conditions and the city’s alderman call for quarantines to protect themselves
against the disease.

A prominent businessman decides to take his grief and the problem into his own
hands by enlisting a local surgeon to find a cure for the disease by any means
necessary. In search of clues, the surgeon needs the bodies of those recently
deceased…he needs to rob graves. He needs the Resurrectionists.
But the bodies most readily available belong to the immigrant poor, and the
graverobbing on top of their torturous working conditions lead them into the
streets in rebellion.
Both groups wants the end of the epidemic, yet inherently oppose each other.

2. Prior Art (Most Relevant from Original Proposal)

2.1 What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning & Literacy
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James Paul Gee’s treatise on games and identities helps from the theoretical
framework that I hope to explore with R/I. Gee establishes three simultaneous
identities that develop between the player and the player character during
gameplay:
! Virtual Identity: Player as Character. My identity as the virtual character
acting in the virtual world. In the game, what Shepherd can and cannot do
is dependent both on the game limitations and situations as well as my
successes and failures at playing the game. Shepherd is a human and a
space marine, which I cannot control, but I can choose if Shepherd’s
gender, race, base skill set, first name, and historical background. Gee
likens our identity here as part-parental and part-self, as we feel
represented by the virtual character and are yet must find a way that the
character can achieve all its established goals.
! Real-World Identity: Player as Commander haracter. This is Avimaan in
the reality playing the game. Avimaan’s half-Indian/half-German identity
persists throughout gameplay.
! Projective Identity: Player as Character. This is the crux of the matter. Gee
elaborates on this with a reference to his playing of the roleplaying game
Arcanum:
"In my projective identity I worry about what sort of “person” I want her to
be, what type of history I want her to have had by the time I am done
playing the game. I want this person and history to reflect my values,
though I have to think reflectively and critically about them, since I have
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never had to project a Half-Elf onto the world before. But this person and
history also reflect what I have learned from playing the game and being
Bead Bead in the land of Arcanum. A good role-playing video game
makes me think new thoughts about what I value and what I do not" (Gee
56).
The projective identity is what I’m interesting in complicating with R/I by
expanding the projective identity to include multiple characters with differing
perspectives (see quote at beginning of the proposal), and this is what R/I will
tackle head-on: how willing are players to have their virtual identities changed so
they project and empathize with multiple characters? Are projective identities
unique to each virtual character a player embodies, or, rather, as James
Newman suggests, do players project themselves into the game’s systems
instead of its characters (Newman)?
It is my belief that we can make our players learn about themselves and their
worlds by challenging them to creative projective identities in multiple characters
with differing viewpoints.
2.2 The Jungle/Chicago History Books
Through my research I chose Chicago as the setting for R/I for the following
reasons:
a. The cusp of the Industrial Revolution/Immigrant Exploitation: In 1870,
over half of Chicago’s population was foreign-born (Miller 255). That
number stayed constant throughout the rest of the century as immigrant
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continued to pour in from Germany, Ireland, Bohemia, Scandinavia, and
Eastern Europe. This abundance of immigrants meant that the stockyards
and steel mills that bloomed in the 1880s had the upper hand in labor due
to the abundance of needy workers (and a notoriously corrupt police
force). Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle famously depicted this exploitation.
b. The Cholera Epidemic Myth of 1885: Chicago suffered from cholera
epidemics several times in the 19
th
Century do to sanitation issues,
substandard working conditions, and a lack of knowledge of the disease.
As Miller pointed out in City of the Century, “Coffined corpses were tossed
into lime pits on the edge of the stricken city. The indigent were simply
buried in the bedding which they expired” (Miller 123). While this seemed
like a ripe incorporation into the resurrectionist plot, the bizarre historical
blip of the mythical epidemic of 1995, where 90,000 people were reported
dead from the disease for over a century despite no records indicating
that to be the case. That seemed to be the perfect time to set my
historical fiction.
c. Haymarket Riot: Chicago was also the hub of the anarchist movement in
America, mainly fueled by dissident immigrants who found their
countrymen oppressed. Between 1883 & 1886, the number of anarchists
rose from several hundred to several thousand in the city, with around
20,000 sympathetic supporters (Miller 407). The majority of these
anarchists was German, and routinely published instructions for making
bombs in their dissident newspapers. There is some debate as to who
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threw the bomb which killed at least eleven at the end of a peaceful
anarchist protest, but the riot fueled the flames of the native/immigrant &
poor/privileged divides.
2.3 The Walking Dead
The Walking Dead is a wonderful example of interactive fiction that forces the
player to make meaningful choices. Moreover, these choices are often about
siding with different characters of the protagonist’s ragtag ensemble of survivors,
which directly affects the player’s future relationships, choices, and actions. The
Walking Dead nails the big and small in meaningful choice, but it does it all from
the lens of Lee, the protagonist. R/I will take that same aim of meaningful choice
and direct it through multiple characters so players can fully understand that
conflict.
2.4 Heavy Rain
If there was ever a game that missed the interactive empathy boat, it is definitely
Heavy Rain. The game is a testament to the potential of interactive cinema and
has players embody four different characters who are all searching for clues to
solve the case of a lost boy and a serial killer. Despite this idealized setting for
creating empathy through multiple protagonists, the sexist, racist, hackneyed
writing really precludes the chance to empathize with the various player
characters, as emotional investment is only given to one central character.
While the player does embody multiple characters, the perspectives they offer
are either (a) underdeveloped, and/or (b) too similar to one another.
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2.5 The Wire
The Wire is an amazing example of portraying how difficult it is to be anyone on
either side of a conflict. No good guys, no bad guys—it’s a struggle no matter
where any character is in a system. And, amazingly, the show continued to
expand its cast of characters and narrative focus every season, proving that
empathy did not have to lie in learning more about characters in depth but
breadth as well.

3. Production
3.1 Changes to Goals, System, & User Experience
Going into the production process of the thesis, my producer, Sunil Kalwani, and
I were very upfront that we would sacrifice fidelity if we could produce more
content. We wanted to stay true to our goals and initial system ideas as much as
possible, and I’m proud to say that we are doing what we set out to do. Our goals
and user experience overview are identical to our initial pitch, and the only thing
that’s changed from the systems standpoint is the removal of the Immigrant
Mother system and a focus on the four main systems and characters.
This decision was made very early on in the process, when it was clear that a lot
of secondary wishes and goals for the project would be eschewed to cut to the
heart of the matter: creating internal conflict in the player by having her identify
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with multiple characters with opposing goals. The development of the structure
can be seen in the screenshots below:

Initial Breakdown of Scenes

Final Breakdown of the Scenes and How They Affect Each Other
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Two separate backbones were created in case our development cycle moved too
slowly: one in which we had our four systems (Gravedigging, Stockyard Baron,
Graverobbing, & Riot Starting), and one with only three systems (minus
Graverobbing). But our project has stayed on a strong production schedule
allowing us to keep those four systems. In summation, Resurrection/Insurrection
is still about the player understanding different characters’ perspectives as they
conflict through individually crafted modes of gameplay set during a cholera
plague in 1885 Chicago.
3.2 Team Growth
One of the most difficult processes of thesis production is assembling a team.
Every single member of the R/I team is working pro-bono, yet due to the amount
of content we wanted to create, we knew we wanted a larger team.
I ended up pitching to multiple student groups, list serves, and classes. There
were a few hiccups along the way: an engineer who thought he was going to be
paid hourly for his commitment; an animator who flaked and flaked and fell away.
But Sunil & I always pitched this as a labor of love, and the project and the team
appealed to quite a few people. This is our final team list:
Creative Director/Writer/Lead Designer: Avimaan Syam
Producer: Sunil Kalwani (MFA Candidate)
Art Director: Alexa Bona Kim (MFA Candidate)
Tech Director: Evan Stern (MFA Candidate)
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Audio Director: Dan Bui (Berklee)
Designers: Andrea Benavides (MFA Candidate), Scott Stephan, (MFA
Candidate), Ascot Smith (MFA Candidate)
Engineers: Brandon Barber (Undergraduate)
Artists: Jing Wang (Undergraduate), Jiedi Chien (Undergraduate), Makar Ma
(Undergraduate), Jayson Tsen (Art Center)
Voice Actors: Kimi Buser, Michelle Flanagan, David Boss, Curtis Luciani, Jericho
Thorp, Sam Roberts, Miles Luna, Rotimi Agbabiaka, Shannon McCormick
Having such a large team has definitely been a boon in terms of asset and
content production, however the amount of overhead has definitely slowed down
the amount of work I can do in a given week due to the amount of meetings we
have as a team. During a given work week, the R/I team has the following
scheduled:
• Engineering Work Session (3 hours)
• Engineering Meeting (2 Hours)
• Leads Meeting (1 Hour)
• Art Team Meeting & Work Session (2 Hours)
• Art Director/Creative Director Meeting (1 Hour)
• Design Team Meeting (2 Hours, Less Regular in 2
nd
Semester)
• Narrative Design Meeting (1 Hour, Less Regular in 2
nd
Semester)
3.3 Our Playtesting/Feedback Process
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Our feedback process has evolved throughout the production timeline. During the
fall, while our systems were being prototyped then developed by the Engineering
team, the design team played new prototypes weekly. We did this to make sure
we believed in the underpinning of the system.
With such an aesthetic- and context-dependent piece, it’s been difficult to get
steady feedback until we have final art and voice recording. This means most of
our testing has been internal leading up to shows. The Winter Show was a
learning experience in terms of getting into it into as many hands as possible, but
a lot of what we learned and was recommended to us at that show had already
been compiled and noted by internal playtests before and after the Winter Show.
My producer playtests every two weeks, and I meet with my advisors every three
weeks, during which I’ll show them any new development and we’ll discuss the
process and any potential changes.
As we reach post-Alpha, we will begin doing weekly playtests.
3.4 Development & Feedback
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As a writer and narrative designer, it was very difficult for me to not create all the
narrative first, but rather focus on each system one at a time before making sure
we were in a production process stable enough to insure all four systems working
successfully.
The first system we created was Gravedigging, which was perhaps odd
considering it was representationally more of a Greek Chorus in relation to the
other systems.
One of the continual issues we’ve faced with every single system has been that
final art assets are delivered much later than the rest of the system is put
together. The above animation from the Winter Show build was only delivered
the day before the presentation. The animation for this system, incidentally, was
three seconds long despite our request for it to be one-and-a-half seconds long.
This wasn’t wrong so much as a big change to the feel of the experience.
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From the Winter Show we immediately learned that we wanted to speed up the
system whenever possible, since players generally focused on the narrative then
had to push through tedious block-breaking after they were done. Additionally we
saw quite a few artistic adjustments we wanted to make in terms of placement
and lighting.

With the Stockyard Baron system, players had an immediate recognition of what
made the system infectious to play: the buy high/sell low addictiveness of playing
the market. What players did not get—and what they wanted in abundance—was
the sense that the choices they made in the report mode somehow affected the
way gameplay changed. This was a valuable lesson for me throughout the
playtests—if you set up the expectation of change in the players, they’re going to
want it sooner rather than later. This knowledge caused us to revise our narrative
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design and game design so that the player could affect both the system they
were playing and the systems around them as soon as possible.

The Riot Starting system is currently in the refinement phase as the team looks
to add art and make both design and engineering tweaks. One of the biggest
issues with this system compared to the two pervious is how much more nuance
and complexity there is to the system—there’s quite a bit going on under the
hood in terms of the way NPCs react to what they see, in a way that we can’t
easily communicate to the player in the same way we could with Stockyard
Baron and Gravedigging. This has been an ongoing issue with this system, as
well as the previously discussed issue that the art assets are lagging way behind
the rest of the teams’ efforts.
The other valuable lesson learned during this process was how paramount it was
to represent all functionality of the system before expecting final art. By not
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implementing the expectation of animation stubs into the engineering completion,
I frequently set myself up with extra work because the engineering team felt they
had completed their work.

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Graverobbing is currently engineering complete and awaiting art assets. I
definitely learned my lesson from Riot Starting and began asking the engineering
team to implement animation stubs so the system was fully functional, if not
representational, by engineering completion. That is where the system currently
is as this paper is being submitted.

In addition to our game development process, I have concurrently been writing
the interactive narrative script for the game, which is currently over 50 pages. We
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have recording sessions lined up in Los Angeles, Austin, and San Francisco to
record high fidelity audio.
3.5 Next Steps
We hope to reach Alpha at the end of this month, which means all the systems
are feature complete. Hopefully a month after that we’ll be able to implement all
the voice over recording to have a sterling progression through all the scenes.
From there we need to bring in all the art assets and refine all the systems.
3.6 Conclusion
It has been terrifying to stick to my guns during a long production process where
the true meaning of the thesis experience is the juxtaposition of systems against
each other. It can be hard for the team and playtesters to see the forest for the
trees when they’re playing one system, because the larger context is not in place
yet. But our team remains strong and I believe we will preserve to do make an
amazing project.

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Works Cited

Azuma, Hiroki. Otaku: Japan's Database Animals. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota, 2009. Print.

Bogost, Ian. "Persuasive Games: Plumbing the Depths." Persuasive Games:
Plumbing the Depths. Gamasutra, 30 June 2010. Web. 15 Apr. 2013.

"Chicago 1885 Cholera Epidemic Myth." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 29
Mar. 2013. Web. 20 Apr. 2013.

Friedman, T. (1999) "Civilization and its discontents: Simulation, Subjectivity and
Space" in Discovering Discs: Transforming Space and Genre on CD-ROM,
edited by Greg Smith (New York University Press).

Gee, James Paul. What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and
Literacy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Print.

Gordon, R. Michael. The Infamous Burke and Hare: Serial Killers and
Resurrectionists of Nineteenth Century Edinburgh. Jefferson, NC: McFarland &,
2009. Print.
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"Haymarket Affair." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 19 Apr. 2013. Web. 20
Apr. 2013.

Juul, Jesper. "Games Telling Stories?" Games Studies. N.p., July 2001. Web. 15
Apr. 2013.

Jesper Juul: "The Game, the Player, the World: Looking for a Heart of
Gameness". In Level Up: Digital Games Research Conference Proceedings,
edited by Marinka Copier and Joost Raessens, 30-45. Utrecht: Utrecht
University, 2003.

King, Christa Knellwolf., and Jane R. Goodall. Frankenstein's Science:
Experimentation and Discovery in Romantic Culture, 1780-1830. Aldershot,
England: Ashgate, 2008. Print.

Lederer, Susan E., Elizabeth Fee, and Patricia Tuohy. Frankenstein: Penetrating
the Secrets of Nature : An Exhibition by the National Library of Medicine. New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2002. Print.

Marshall, Tim. Murdering to Dissect: Grave-robbing, Frankenstein and the
Anatomy Literature. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1995. Print.
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Miller, Donald L. City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of
America. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. Print.

Newman, Jason. "The Myth of the Ergodic Videogame." The Myth of the Ergodic
Videogame. By James Newman. Game Studies, July 2002. Web. 15 Apr. 2013.

Rudlin, John. Commedia Dell'Arte in the 20th Century: Handbook. N.p.:
Routledge, 1994. Print.

Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. New York [etc.: Bantam, 1981. Print.

Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft., and Leonard Wolf. The Annotated Frankenstein:
Art by Marcia Huyette. New York: Potter, 1977. Print.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Syam, Avimaan Vivek (author)

Core Title Resurrection/Insurrection

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Master of Fine Arts

Degree Program Interactive Media

Publication Date 04/29/2014

Defense Date 04/17/2014

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

Tag Games,identity,independent games,interactive narrative,interactive storytelling,multiple perspectives,narrative games,OAI-PMH Harvest,projective identity

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Lemarchand, Richard (committee chair), Cogburn, Robert (committee member), McDowell, Alex (committee member)

Creator Email asyam@usc.edu,avimaansyam@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-405337

Unique identifier UC11296113

Identifier etd-SyamAvimaa-2444.pdf (filename),usctheses-c3-405337 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-SyamAvimaa-2444.pdf

Dmrecord 405337

Document Type Thesis

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Syam, Avimaan Vivek

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

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