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Exit

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EXIT
By
Xiaoliang Shen
Master of Fine Arts
Interactive Media & Games Division
School of Cinematic Arts
University of Southern California
May 11, 2018

1
Table of Contents
Abstract 2
Keywords 3
Project Introduction 3
Razor Statement 3
Platform 3
Target Audience 3
Thesis Motif 4
Cultural Exile 4
Relationships among people vs Being alone 6
Format Exploration 7
Interactivity to convey “play as a beholder” rather than “being a beholder” 8
Design Process 9
Experience Goals 9
Prior Arts 10
Narrative 12
Mechanics & Levels 14
Art Style & Character Design 18
Music Choice 19
Playtest 20
Conclusion 23
Work Cited 25

2
Abstract
A hundred years ago, the French avant-garde poet Blaise Cendrars suggested a poem is a
kind of game (“jeu”), a form of play. The use of word games, constraints, chance
methods, generative processes, performative projects, collaborative writing, hoaxes, and
other project-based or playful compositional practices have become central tools for a
wide range of avant-garde writers and artists. For many, poems are purely represented by
text. However, the “play” form remains still unexplored by artists (Eburne and Epstein 1).
In part, this may be a result of the difficulty of transferring the abstractions and
non-fictional aspects of poems into visual languages in this digital era. Compared to
poems, fiction is a more popular literature genre that has been integrated with film
technology and theatrical arts through its storytelling and narrative. However, though
poems are written in a more concise language, the emotion and narrative aspect are worth
exploring and transferring to new languages to reach potential audiences. The thesis
project Exit is an attempt in digitally to convey poems’ complexity in an interactive way
and to present this highly concise language visually. This project is a combination of
poems, narrative and 2D animations. Further, Exit tends to explicate the form of play in
poems by using a generative process of verse so that players can form their own poems
based on their interactions. Ultimately, this thesis introduces the interactive-poem project
---- Exit from different perspectives including motifs, inspirations and design process.

3
The project concludes with a 2D interactive mobile app and this thesis as an
“annotation”.

Keywords
Interactive Animation, Visual Poem, Mobile Game, Coming-of-age,
Stream-of-consciousness

Project Introduction
Razor Statement
EXIT is a 2D mobile interactive stream-of-consciousness visual poem about friendship,
love, nostalgia, past and future. Players enter 6 doors that a suicidal hotel owner presents
to them. The player can tap and drag different objects in the doors and rearrange doors to
affect the world inside of each door. The audiences can meet people inside of the hotel’s
6 doors and interact with their worlds. At the end, the audiences will get to know the
hotel-owner through the stories contained inside of the doors.
Figure 1: “Exit” game main hub.

4
Platform
iOS 10 and up

Target Audience
People who like digital literature, animation, poems or casual games.
Theme Motif
Exit is mainly a synthesis of my experience, most notable of which are three questions
that I keep asking myself; I hope that through this thesis production process I can answer
some of them while also conveying my own thoughts. In the meantime, the thesis
explores the possibility of “playing” the poems in an interactive way.

Cultural Exile
The first question is about how to deal with the concept of “cultural exile”. I left my
hometown when I was twelve years old. At that time, my parents decided, despite my
strong objections, to send me to a boarding school in another city. And then six years
later, I left my country to attend university in Canada. After graduation, I left Canada for
Los Angeles to pursue postgraduate studies. I have been gone from home for thirteen
years. When I was first sent away to another city, I harboured suspicions about the
parents' motivation for their action. Now, I am well aware that what they did was not to
punish me; rather, it was an optimal life plan that they chose for me in their then present
circumstances. Nevertheless, I still distinctly felt that I had been banished by my family

5
and that it has caused a rift between my family and me and even between my ethnic
culture and me. When we talk about exile, we often refer to a person who has been sent
away to a remote place for doing something wrong, so I cannot call my experience a
so-called exile but it is still a cultural exile for me. Once I started the journey, I was
pushed away from my culture and the longer I travelled the more I felt that I couldn't go
back to the place I came from. I hope that this sense of cultural banishment can be
conveyed in my work.
Because of this rift and my inability to assimilate, I feel aimless; and because of this
aimlessness, I have lost meaning in life and feel bewildered—bewildered about my
present and my future. The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish wrote the powerful
verses:
When you are in your home, you don’t glorify home: you don’t feel its
importance and its intimacy, but when deprived of home, it turns into a need and
a lust, as if it is the ultimate aim of the whole journey.
However, is my ultimate goal my family, and can I return home after journeying through
so many circles? What is the meaning of being banished and going to a distant place?
Where is the next step? Should I go forward or go backward? If I go forward, what is in
front of me? If I go backward, is it even possible to go back to where I was? In "On the
Road", Jack Kerouac writes:
Dean, my biggest wish is that one day, our families and we can live on the same
street and become old neighbours.

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This sentence shocked me tremendously. I thought to myself: I have to go back too, but
back to where? Confucius said “when one's parents are alive, one must not travel afar; if
one must travel afar, one must have a rightful direction.” (Kongzi and Huang) The first
half of this sentence is no longer applicable in this day and age. However, the second half
of the sentence is a question that I have been pondering for a long time. What is my
rightful direction? I vaguely know that my direction is what people call "success" and
having a "good life". But as I continue to move forward on this path, I feel that a thick
fog covers my forward direction. I feel very confused about it all. What is success? What
is a good life? When you are deep in the fog, it isn't even possible to tell which way is
forward, in which case, should I keep moving? What is the point of anything that I do?
Nevertheless, can I go back? As I carry my parents' expectations, carry the anxiety of
being criticized and gossiped about by my relatives and friends, carry the feeling that the
world is watching me and waiting to see me take a wrong step, “I gaped into the
bleakness of my own days. I had an awful long way to go too. ”(Kerouac) Thus, I hope
my work can convey this sense of bewilderment, meaninglessness and lack of purpose.

Relationships among people vs Being alone
Secondly, the question concerns my burgeoning doubt about the relationships between
people after so many years of coming and going. After experiencing the departure of
family and friends and lovers one after another, I have started to feel that I am an
emotional traitor. Even though I genuinely wanted to stay with everyone, I have always

7
been the first person to depart. So I have stopped wanting to begin any new relationships,
and in my view, the people I meet have turned into fleeting events and objects. Since
everyone will have to separate eventually, why do we even begin new relationships?
Isn't it better not to begin at all? At least it would spare any need for taking responsibility
or any guilt on separation.
This is why when players enter Exit they will find that there is only one person in each
room (see fig 2). They encounter different things and see many fantastic types of scenery.
However, these things can only be maintained for a short period of time and there is no
one around for them to share them with. Real loneliness does not always mean being
physically alone. It is when we are with a crowd but are never able to communicate.
Every day, many people pass by each other, smiling vaguely at each other, but are
unable to go deeper within. We float around each other, like atoms, like islands, like two
magnets, each of the same kind but never able to move closer.
Figure 2: “Exit” rose room’s screenshots, sample of room with only one character inside.

8
Format Exploration
Exit is a combination of poetry, narrative and animation; the main goal is to present
poems visually, not visual poems, but to use the language of the camera with poetry.
The reason for choosing this format is that many poems, when readers are reading them,
do not need to explain much context or tell authors’ personal history. As the emotions
and relationships covered in the poems are complex, and this complexity offers
imaginary scenes in readers’ minds with every sentence in the poems. Then the readers’
experiences and feelings become the context of the poems. The majority of poetry is rich
in imagery, so I was hoping to express my experiences in an abstract way, and reveal
them bit by bit through interactivity. I wanted to try a type of interactive poetry and use
the language of an animated lens to present visual effects in order to see if the original
effect of poetry can be achieved or enhanced.
Exit is an attempt at digitally conveying this complexity in an interactive and visual way.
New art forms rise from new technologies, and the digital game is one of the new art
forms. However, instead of offering excitement or relaxation to the players like many
games do, this project intends to find new ways to use tools/technologies. Exit is a
medium that trying to serve as a “beholder” to let players relate their own feelings with
the game context instead of giving the feelings to them.

Interactivity to convey “play as a beholder” rather than “being a beholder”

9
When people watch a movie, they know clearly that they are watching it in a spectator's
perspective. Interaction gives the audiences an immersive experience, which is the reason
that so many people like playing video games. Games interactivity renders the audiences
no longer a spectator but a co-creator/protagonist. I want to try to make the audience play
the role of interactive spectator. Unlike in a movie or a television, players can still be
involved in the entire process. They can explore the connections between the doors. Yet,
unlike in a video game, there aren't many things that they can change. They can only play
the role of observer. Therefore, most of the time they feel powerless: no matter what
happens they can't change much or that many things change even when they do very little.
Powerlessness is how we often feel in life when we are in a spectator role. Even in our
own lives, it is as if we are still only spectators. It isn't so much that we do nothing; rather,
it is more the case that anything we do is useless. This is what I want to convey via the
interactivity.

Design Process
Experience Goals
1. Convey the feeling of getting lost, disorientation (you don’t know what you are
going for so you feel powerless) and being alone through abstract stories and
scenes.

10
2. A slow-paced game; players are willing to stop at some moments to listen to the
environmental sound or to look at certain scenes.
3. Players play through the whole experience in one-sit, and trigger the narrative
points in the project.
4. Players can relate their own personal experiences to the project.

Prior Art
Strange Rain by Erik Loyer
http://erikloyer.com/index.php/projects/detail/strange_rain/
Strange Rain is interactive digital literature that “ looks into a skylight on a rainy day.
Raindrops fall and splatter on your screen. This process turns your iPad, iPhone, or iPod
into a shifting perspective as you tilt your device. You can touch the screen and guide the
path of the raindrops, stepping through the notes of an eerie melody as you go... The
more you touch, however, the stranger the rain becomes: layered skies, visual anomalies
and shifts in speed and colour, even the occasional cataclysm if you’re not careful... In
"story" mode, every touch triggers a thought as text on screen. These thoughts tell the
story of a man in the midst of a family crisis who has wandered into the rain to collect his
thoughts. His world, too, has gone from familiar to strange, even as his beliefs are
following the opposite course. Your interaction helps determine when and how he
decides to come in from the rain.” (Loyer)

11
Figure 3: “Strange Rain” app screenshot.

All the components in the App including the way that the texts appear on the screen, the
writing composition and the art style allow Strange Rain to tell this story in a poetic way.
This App expresses feelings and tells stories in an abstract way, and I also face the
challenge of how to convey feelings through abstract objects rather than tell a linear
story.
Another aspect that makes this App inspirational is that the art style and music create an
immersive experience that slows players down and makes them stop at some moments in
the game to enjoy the rainy environment.

What Can I Hold You With by Jorge Luis Borges
http://www-ccs.cs.umass.edu/cris/texts/two-english-poems.html

12
What Can I Hold You With is a part of Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges’ Two English
Poems. The emotions and relationships covered in this poem are complex; it is a piece
that can be dedicated to parents, friends, lovers or your country. And this complexity is
also something that I want to convey in EXIT. With every sentence in this poem, I can
imagine a scene in my mind and relate to my own experience without knowing the
author’s personal story. This reading experience is similar to the player experience I am
designing for.

Tekkonkinkreet (2006)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0831888/
Tekkonkinkreet is a 2D animated feature film directed by Michael Arias in 2006. It is a
film about 2 brothers, Black and White, who are two orphans who roam the streets of
Treasure Town, beating down any thug or yakuza who gets in their way. When
mysterious foreign entrepreneurs appear with the intention of tearing down Treasure
Town and replacing it with an amusement park, Black and White face their greatest
adversaries yet. It is up to the destructive Black to save the fate of the city and up to the
gentle White to save Black from his own dark nature.

The way the director tells this story is something I always want to achieve in my design
work. I am trying to tell stories in an “observer” point of view that tries to resonate with
audiences in an objective way. I tried to reduce the “game designer’s” influences to the

13
players in this project and let them (not a character they play as, but players themselves)
become the protagonist in my story. The audiences are watching the character’s story,
they might feel what the characters feel but they will not see themselves as the character.
Think about themselves instead of thinking for the character, and Tekkonkinkreet did this
pretty well.
Figure 4: “Tekkonkinkreet” screenshot.

Narrative
The overall narrative was inspired by Jack Kerouac’s book On the Road, in the novel he
wrote:
I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life,
the strangest moment of all, when I didn’t know who I was - I was far away
from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I’d never seen,
hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and
footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high
ceiling and really didn’t know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I
wasn’t scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a
haunted life, the life of a ghost.

14
Exit’s background is set in a small hotel; at the beginning, the players will be introduced
to this hotel owner who tells you he does not want live anymore but he could not find a
good way to die either so he decides to tell you more about this hotel before he finds a
way to die. Then the players will see a hallway with 6 doors that they can interact with
and the stories happen in the hotel will be presented piece by piece. At the end, based
on the interactions players do in the game, they will get different endings about the
hotel owner and learn that for us, who can do nothing but kill, constantly feel pain as
we're not dead yet. But we continue living to this day, because of what people call the
joys of living, because this indefinite, but warm thing continues to pester us.
Figure 5: The hotel lobby scene in “Exit”.

Mechanics and Levels
When players start the game, they can see 6 doors. These doors look similar to each other
but there are different patterns carved on each door. You can open the doors and there is a

15
character and his/her world behind every door. Some of the doors only lead you to empty
worlds.
Interact with that character and his/her world, tap, drag and release objects to affect the
world and to see what happens to the character or to the world. For example, when you
drag and release a rose from one place to another place, you will trigger one animation of
a rose tree growing up in the place you just released the rose. Players can light up the
patterns carved on the doors based on the things they do behind that door. (see fig 6) A
long press on each lit pattern on doors, allows players to see one sentence appear on the
screen for 5 seconds.
You can rearrange the doors and then find that the order influences those worlds a bit.
After opening 4 or more doors and lighting up enough patterns, the hotelier’s story will
be revealed. Who is this person, why did this person open this hotel. After the ending is
revealed, the last door will appear. When the players tap on that door, they will see an
upload icon where they can upload one image they want (just like they are sharing their
stories with me). And when the players reopen this door, there will be a chance they can
see their images be placed behind the “daily rent” door, showing that the players share
their stories/memories with me.

16
Figure 6: Doors with patterns carved on.

There are 6 doors will be presented to the players:
- 1
st
door leads to a world about a person who is always squatting on the street
and dyeing roses
- 2
nd
door leads to a world that is always raining (Environment Door)
- 3
rd
door leads to a world about a person who is sitting inside of airport’s
security machine to check other people’s belongings
- 4
th
door leads to a world that is a night sky full of stars (Environment Door)
- 5
th
door leads to a world about a person who is crying all day and catching his
own teardrops by kegs

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- 6
th
door leads to the daily rental room that shows different images every time
when someone opens the door and the images only last for 5 seconds. And this
door is not available for rearrangement.
Figure 7: “Exit” game flow chart.

18
Art Style and Character Design
Mix of black & white hand-drawn style 2D animation and dreamy paper cut stop motion
animation. Highlight the contrast between the past (inside of the hotel rooms) that is
colourful and the present (hotel owner’s life) that is dull.
Figure 8: Screenshots of the hotel owner’s life.

Figure 9: Screenshots of room scenes.

19
Figure 10: “Exit” character design.

Music Choice
To achieve the player experience of being alone and playing as beholder, I chose
Post-Rock as the music genre because of its dreamy aspect and non-climax feature. One
of the reasons I chose Post-Rock was because of its instrumental and also wanted to take
the repetitiveness of this genre, however, I found when being used as background music
the repetitiveness becomes a problem. As the players might notice the repeated melody
easily, then the melody can stick inside of their brain and becomes disrupted. Therefore, I
used a technique called “Tone Rows” to make the background music less memorable. In
order to ensure overall consistency and future project sustainability, I used tracks with the
same backbone drum beat in the corridor and in each room, then superimposed a different
instrument on top of those tracks in each area; that way, each room had a track of its own
while at the same time maintaining the same tempo, which makes the addition of any
rooms in the future much simpler in terms of music design.

20
Also in order to make players to stop at some moments to listen to the environmental
sound or to look at certain scenes, I chose to use 3D environmental sound (rain sound or
space sound) to make the experience more relaxing and to create the effects that is similar
as ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response) does.

Playtest
This project was first officially being critiqued in Oct.26th 2017 workshop by 2018
IMGD MFA fellows along with Jane Pinckard and Jeff Watson. The version being tested
was a near-vertical slice, and most of the critics played the project on Mac/PC which is
different from the target platform - iOS.
Despite of the problems raised by incomplete content and technical issues, there were two
main issues caught my attention: the disconnection between opening and main interactive
part, and the misunderstanding of the theme pages or neglect of the theme pages.
Users felt they couldn't focus in the opening, one said “only hearing this woman talk it is
hard for me to tell what parts of what she is saying is important or not since she says most
of it in a similar tone, and the visuals are not taken advantage of as a way to illustrate or
highlight what she mentions.” So the pace of the opening is unbalanced, as a creator, I
have to choose either give users more interactions/time to learn about the details, or cut
the unimportant part and make the opening shorter.

21
In the opening, the narrator tells the users that he is going to tell them some stories,
however, when moved into the main interactive part the scenes inside of each door are
too abstract to be called as “stories”. Therefore, the users didn't feel they got what they
were promised. After entering the main interactive part, the narration stops and that
makes the users feel lost and causes confusion.
There are puzzle elements inside of each door, so the poems on the theme page gave
users an illusion that serve as hint/clue to help them solve the puzzles. A potential
solution I got from the critique is to change the poems into a summary of each door
instead of showing them when users first open doors.
And the poems on theme page change based on the door order, however, most users did
not notice this part as the background image stayed the same so they clicked on the page
to close it when they saw something they had already seen. A potential solution will be
giving every poem narration. (see fig 11 & 12)
Figure 11 & 12: Revised theme pages, every poem has correspond illustrations.

22
There were two major design changes I made after this playtest, contents inside of the
environment doors and adding poem narrations. The contents inside of the environmental
doors are not the same each time when you enter the rooms, because even while
communicating emotions the player must feel some degree of novelty. So when the order
of the doors in the corridor is changed, there are a few subtle changes that can be seen
after re-entering the environment door, even if it's only one cloud or only a few raindrops.
Figure 13 & 14: Screenshots of entering the rainy room at different times.

Figure 15 & 16: Screenshots of entering the star room at different times.

23
Under such circumstances, there is still nobody in the environment door and the overall
environment itself will never change (the door indicating rain will always contain a
rain-related environment, and the door indicating stars will always be associated with the
sky). Therefore, players will understand that no matter the order, the environment doors
themselves will always be the same, but at the same time every time they enter the door
they still have a sense of novelty and have something to look forward to.
As for the narration, before the playtest, all the poems that appear on theme screen did
not have any kind of narration read over it. However, the poems are read in Cantonese (a
Chinese dialect) now to attract the players to stay on the theme screen and read the poems.
The reason for using Cantonese instead of English is to show the concept of mixing
Chinese and western culture together. Because the opening sequence has already used
English narrations, mixing the two languages also serves as a representation of showing
me be in the middle of the two cultures.

Conclusion
Exit will have 6 rooms and 3 endings done in May and launch to Apple Store in June.
And based on the iOS platform performance, the game might be shipped to Android
tablets within a year.
With regard to this project, I hope I can link my memories to the establishment of my
self-identity, while at the same time finding self-identity through reflection on the past

24
and hoping that I can find some guidance on the way forward. Each memory will become
a room, and each action, whether intentional or subconscious, will ripple and become
engraved on the door as a poem. So I decided that the hotel would continue to operate
until I completely found the answers to the three questions. From now on, until I find the
answers, I will incorporate every new development as a new room in the hotel. Also, as
the game target platform is mobile, A simple social network system might be
implemented into the project in future development. In that system, every time when
players enter the “daily rental room” they can randomly see the contents (images and
poems) that other players anonymously upload. I think this system can build some weak
connections between players in Exit’s lonely game world and also offer a platform for
them to share their poems and read others’ poems.

25
Work Cited
Jonathan P. Eburne and Andrew Epstein; Comparative Literature Studies;
Vol. 51, No. 1, Special Issue: Poetry Games (2014), pp. 1-17.

Darwish, Mahmoud. “POETRY AND EXILE - Google Arts & Culture.” Google, Google,
artsandculture.google.com/exhibit/poetry-and-exile/3AJCclZDRvt-Kg.

Kerouac, Jack. On the road ; The Dharma bums ; The subterraneans. Quality Paperback
Book Club, 1993.

“POETRY AND EXILE - Google Arts & Culture.” Google, Google,
www.google.com/culturalinstitute/beta/exhibit/poetry-and-exile/.

Kongzi, and Chichung Huang. The Analects of Confucius: (Lun Yu). Oxford Univ. Press,
1997.

Loyer, Erik. “Strange Rain for IPad, IPhone & IPod Touch.” Opertoon RSS,
opertoon.com/2010/11/strange-rain-for-ipad-iphone-ipod-touch/.

Wikipedia contributors. "Tekkonkinkreet." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia,
The Free Encyclopedia, 23 Mar. 2018. Web. 26 Mar. 2018.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Shen, Xiaoliang (author)

Core Title Exit

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Master of Fine Arts

Degree Program Interactive Media

Publication Date 04/11/2018

Defense Date 04/12/2018

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

Tag coming‐of‐age,interactive animation,Interactive Media,iOS game,mobile game,OAI-PMH Harvest,stream‐of‐consciousness,visual poem

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Lemarchand, Richard (committee chair), Watson, Jeff (committee member), Wixon, Dennis (committee member)

Creator Email sxlcomputer1@126.com,xiaolias@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-10956

Unique identifier UC11669407

Identifier etd-ShenXiaoli-6211.pdf (filename),usctheses-c89-10956 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-ShenXiaoli-6211-0.pdf

Dmrecord 10956

Document Type Thesis

Rights Shen, Xiaoliang

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