Course

Ethan found this paper on the University of Technology Sydney's Imaginary Worlds Symposium
I recommend this paper by Bernadette Flynn, "Imaging Gameplay - The Design and Construction of Spatial Worlds." Please read it along with Jenkin's "Art of Contested Spaces."

Download file

For next week:
1. Please read THE ART OF CONTESTED SPACES, it was posted 9/8!

2. Post your Atlas Table of Contents/Schedule and commit to your schedule!

3. Research the aesthetic/atmospheric design of your world: if you don't create your own artwork at this time, browse artwork and collect images, textures and styles for different regions of your world. Post your collection, labeled with the region and your intentions.

It looks like the bulk of my work on Altepehua in the next 2-3 weeks will be entirely research. There's a lot out there to look into, so I'll mostly be reading as much as I can get my hands on. Ideally, I want to have a solid idea of the cultural and political climate of North America between 1300 and 1500, to get a better sense of who the major players would have been in any future development. So far, it's looking like the Aztecs, the Sioux Nation, the Apache, the Iroquois (they had a constitution!) and the Inuits, but that is HIGHLY tentative and likely to change as I get deeper into who was where doing what. Hit the link to get links to some of the subjects (though definitely not all the sources) I'm looking into.

My work for this week has centered around continuing to define the history of the world that resulted in the tower, including researching possible cataclysmic events. A rough schematic image will be uploaded later. Iteration on previous assignments has been ongoing, and changes are included in this post.

Nowhere: an unknown, remote, or nonexistent place or region.*

A secret place so secluded no one even knows it exists. It isn't on any maps and doesn't have a zip code. It stands at the intersection of three counties and therefore isn't in any government records and doesn't receive mail. The address is next to the llama farm, at the end of the overgrown dirt road, on top of the hill.

Nowhere is the world I will build in this class.

It is also the fictional location of a children's book I am writing.

*Random House Unabridged Dictionary

As requested, here is a schedule for this atlas, Monkey Middle School.

Microsoft Excel format atlas_schedule.xls

Most of my progress is going on in my 'medical atlas,' but here are links to some of the research that i have been doing.

The following is the essay i wrote as an outline for the presentation for 532.

Atlas format: physical object, a journal written by an English traveler upon his first visit to Altepehua

Atlas style: text and images, drawings (not photographs, for obvious reasons)

Table of Contents

• Rough maps (continent, individual nations)


• Nations of Altepehua (a section on each of the Three Nations, with notes on their culture, religion, political structure, and economy)


• Brief history of Altepehua (focusing on relations between the three major nations)


• Species of Altepehua (focusing on animals and plants that are cultivated and hunted by the major nations)


• Possibilities for relationship between the Three Nations and England/Europe

Maps: Where is it
Directions: How do I get there
Pictures: What does it look like
Dioramas: What does it feel like to be there
Physics: How do things move, work?
Ecology: What lives there? What sustains them?
Economy: What do they do?, How do they survive?
Language: how do they communicate
Arts: How do they express themselves
War: How do they settle conflicts?
Faith/Religion/Superstitions: What do they believe?
Libraries/Books: How do they store knowledge?
Stories/Science: How do they explain their world?


Static world (24 hours a day, you know what to expect --perpetual fight)
Exceptions: gibs, sprays, explosions which fade away after a time
View image
View image


Economy/Ecology
How does it perpetuate? The spawn room (a leap of faith)
http://secrets.tfccentral.org/graphics/large/well/well0001.jpg
http://youtube.com/watch?v=vgFS3Q1ZFng
medkits and munitions
http://www.planetfortress.com/fort/tfc_reform/medkit.gif
http://www.thewall.de/content/media/half-life/tutorials/panzerung_granaten_und_ammopaks/tfc_items01.jpg
The possible utopia (replicator technology) This guy can cure everything:
http://pnmedia.gamespy.com/screenshots/phl/18510258.jpg
Currency? http://www.veteranqc.com/matches/ez69-160401r1.jpg
***Scripts http://www.forum.teamfortress.eu/scripts-vt34.html


Geography/mapping
http://tfc-overviews.net.ms/
Components:outdoor--->indoor
no man's land http://data2.collectionscanada.ca/ap/a/a001020.jpg
the back door http://www.planetfortress.com/fort/misc/well_wo_fog.JPG
the rampart http://www.ancient.co.jp/~ayano/tfc/maps/2fort.jpg
the flag room http://secrets.tfccentral.org/graphics/large/well/well0005.jpg
The mirror image
***badlands = everything else


Language: how do they communicate
"Medic!!"
About 5 kinds of "ouch"

Faith/Religion/Superstitions: Grenade presents on Dec 25th...
The Holy Grail --http://secrets.tfccentral.org/graphics/large/well/well0007.jpg

Boundaries - Cartoon War, red vs blue, become ideologies
http://youtube.com/watch?v=KsTB6N8RuxI&mode=related&search=
http://teamfortresstwo.com/czarnews/uploads/tftwo-2fort-comparison-test.jpg

A quick table of contents and preliminary boundaries for the tentatively named Tower City.

here are some preliminary design elements and first stab at the atlas table of contents:

Here is an outline of the Atlas for Monkey Middle School.

In Peggy Weil's class (CTIN 532), John Underkoffler's presentation on designing the world of Minority Report was inspiring. After seeing the polish in John's bible, I now have a target to aim at.

But a glimpse at a few pages from one sample, even an excellent sample, is difficult to generalize an education from. So I went fishing on the inter-tube. Here's what I found, minus the overflow of Christian literature. What have YOU found? I'd really like to hear.

Programming Games with DirectX's mention of story-bible is only a casual introduction:

http://books.google.com/books?id=2Rp8-ynM_sUC&pg=PT66&lpg=PT66&dq=%22story+bible%22+-god+-christian+%22the+bible%22+-christ&source=web&ots=395Yhm2ZBg&sig=0lrA4v3A1lgFGWl5zZE3M4g5Jvs#PPT68,M1

Game Design: Theory & Practice is also cursory:
http://www.paranoidproductions.com/gamedesign/about.html

Half-Life's writer warns against relying on documentation during production:
http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20030808/carless_pfv.htm
"""

As for the sometimes-cherished, often-maligned "story bible", Marc suggests that, well, it only works up to a point.

"The story bible is just a way of communicating a vision of the game to the rest of the team. For us, sometimes the bible is effective, sometimes it's not very useful at all. Early in the design process it is very useful, and in the end, when you want to pin down exactly what you've done (for the benefit of posterity, sequels and third party developers), it's useful again. But for a long middle section, you have to rely on something more like telepathy to keep the team in sync. Did I say 'telepathy'? I meant 'lots of meetings'."

This "pinning down" of a document about the Half-Life world helped when the Half-Life expansions started appearing and they, naturally, needed to feel like they were in the same game world.

You've declared your world, named it. For this week:
1. Map the exterior (What is outside of your world? Address access as well as location)
2. Begin to map the interior. For now, divide it into broad zones in order to address issues of access, movement, activity that is determined geographically.)
3. Begin to design the format of your atlas. It should be "of" the world you are creating, i.e. the style and form should be consistent with the world (or your plans for viewers) itself.
4. Set up your Atlas's Table of Contents (or equivalent in your format). This will serve as your design schedule for the rest of the term. Here are some questions you will want to address: (These are general issues, you need to determine the categories relevant to your world, essentially you will be responsible for a coherent set of RULES that govern any story that might arise in this environment.)
Maps: Where is it
Directions: How do I get there
Pictures: What does it look like
Dioramas: What does it feel like to be there
Physics: How do things move, work?
Ecology: What lives there? What sustains them?
Economy: What do they do?, How do they survive?
Language: how do they communicate
Arts: How do they express themselves
War: How do they settle conflicts?
Faith/Religion/Superstitions: What do they believe?
Libraries/Books: How do they store knowledge?
Stories/Science: How do they explain their world?

"All that remains now of humanity sleeps safely within the Tower."

1. Name it:
Samsara

The world of Samsara is a planet, like earth, whose ecological well-being is directly affected by the actions of its inhabitants. It has an ecosystem and atmosphere, and inhabitants who reside on the planet, each of which is responsible for a portion of the land. Each inhabitant’s portion of land makes up the whole of the planet, except for those areas covered by water.

This virtual land will be directly affected by its inhabitant’s actions in the real world.

Monkey Middle is a school for gifted students, each of whom is capable of casting magical spells. The magical alphabet is called Hangul and the ancient language of magic is known as Hanguka. Students practice magic, play team sports, games, and sometimes duel each other. Magic enables a student to transform into a mythical creature (such as a turtle, tiger, phoenix, or dragon), enchant a ball during a sport, or summon a mundane or magical creature for service.

Monkey Middle is part of a collocated facility of Elephant Elementary School and Tiger High School, collectively known as Red Dragon Campus. The faculty teach magic and prepare the students to save the world from mythical monsters who are destroying the planet and enslaving the humans through black magic. The aliens also know Hanguka and are using it to transform teachers, pets, and friends into monsters. Students have to battle their former allies in order to save them.

Monkey Middle includes classrooms for vocabulary, grammar, and phrases. At the sports field or in the gymnasium, students play Mahjong, ping pong, soccer, or Taekwondo. When tempers get lost students also duel. On the grounds is also a cafeteria, a library, a trophy case, a wooded grove, a boiler room in the basement, and an administrative and nursing office. Just off the grounds is a caf?, a clothing store, a sporting goods store, and each child’s home and their own room in suburbia.
Monkey Middle is within a suburb of Red Lake City. The school system is magically cloaked to appear as a section of the center of the lake. Students have been selected to attend Monkey Middle based on their aptitude to learn the language of magic, Hanguka. Outside of school, magic is kept secret from mundane humans.

The only language that can be displayed is the magical language, Hanguka (which is real-world Korean). All communication to or from the user must be in this language.

The target users for this edutainment software are Korean-American children living in the United States, ages 8 to 12. These children play for fun. Yet their parents encourage them because while they play, they are practicing basic conversation and fundamentals of academic writing in the Korean language, at the Middle School level.



RED DRAGON CAMPUS
COMMONS: Meeting of the paths to each school. The commons is open and clean. Students of all grades mingle and chat here.
ELEPHANT ELEMENTARY SCHOOL: The largest building for the largest segment of students, in grades 1 through 5.
ELEPHANT PLAYGROUND: A collection of fantastic jungle gyms, slides, ladders, and obstacle courses.
MONKEY MIDDLE SCHOOL: The second largest building for students in grades 6, 7 and 8.
MONKEY SPORTS FIELD: A modest sports field for soccer and other events.
MONKEY WOODS: Forbidden to students, these woods surround the sports field. It is rumored that monsters lurk in them.
TIGER HIGH SCHOOL: The most prestigious building for students in grades 9 through 12.
TIGER SPORTS FIELD: Exclusive for intramural sports. Elite Monkey Middle School games are played here.
TIGER WOODS: Forbidden woods, in which high school students swear that monsters live.

OFF CAMPUS
BRIDGE: A magical bridge extends to Red Dragon Campus. Only those who can cast the spell of sight can see it. Students use the bridge while keeping the school secret from mundanes.
TURTLE CAFE: A light snack and drink, and a place for chatting when off the school grounds.
PHOENIX CLOTHING: Fashion for boys and girls, both mundane and magical.
STUDIOUS SUPPLIES: School supplies, including magical ingredients and tools.
HOME: Each student has a home and a personal room which they can decorate with anything they have bought, traded, or earned.



MONKEY MIDDLE SCHOOL BUILDING
BASIC VOCABULARY: Classroom for the practice of basic magical words, such as colors and spatial relationships.
ADVANCED VOCABULARY: Classroom for practice of advanced magical words, which refine the basic terms.
GRAMMAR: Classroom for the practice of analysis and construction of short spells from magical words.
COMPOSITION: Classroom for the practice of long spells composed from short spells.
CONVERSATION: Classroom for the practice of magical discourse, which may be used to persuade monsters.
LIBRARY: Collection of works in the magical language, Hanguka.
TROPHY CASE: Display of school and student awards and rankings.
ARENA: Ping pong, taekwondo, and other competitions are played and watched here. Administration encourages students to hone their skills through competitive and cooperative sports.
CAFETERIA: School food and socialization. There is a view of the arena from the seats.
BOYS’ BATHROOM: Where the boys gossip semi-privately.
GIRLS’ BATHROOM: Where the girls gossip semi-privately.
NURSE: To attend to injured and/or transmuted students.
ADMINISTRATION: Overseeing operations and making changes to the student records.

MONKEY MIDDLE SCHOOL BASEMENT
Stairs by the bathrooms lead down to the basement.
LOCKS: Some doors are locked. The student must deduce the password from a magical puzzle on the face of the lock. Opening a lock enrages the administration.
DETENTION: Where naughty students are forced to practice spells.
TAXIDERMY: Stuffed specimens of monsters.
BANNED BOOKS: Books deemed too vile and powerful for students.
CLEANING SUPPLIES: Mops, brooms, wax, and enchanted self-cleaning articles.
PLUMBING: Tubes that carry the sound from all over the school. These can be used to eavesdrop on teachers and discover plots.
BOILER ROOM: Energy source for the school. The boiler emits blue flames and is fed by magical energy. Students are sometimes assigned boiler duty, where they feed the boiler new spells to keep the energy emanating. Behind boiler is door that leads to the temple area.
SEWAGE: Hidden view of the temple through a sewage grate.
TEMPLE: Site of secret magical rituals performed by the teachers and some intrepid students. Magical battles against summoned monsters sometimes occur here.
DRAIN: Hole leading to a subterranean caverns beneath Red Lake.

The lost station Eliza floats through space, drifting ever closer to Earth, its erstwhile home. In the abandoned corridors nothing makes a sound any longer; the only survivors are the static, flickering dispassionately on cracked monitors, and, shut away within a solitary room, the cursor.

Presiding over the void, the cursor blinks, regular as a pendulum, green and black, at the end of a sentence. The cursor blinks, green and black; it waits, in infinite patience, as it has waited these last three months.

Welcome to the Cache: Press Enter.

What would the world be like if Europeans had not traveled to the Americas until the late 19th century? How would the native civilizations have grown, advanced, and combined, given an extra 300-400 years to do so? Enter Altepehua, the uncolonized North American continent.

15 years after the "white blindness" epidemic spread, the city of Prova has been quarantined by the federal government. Prova, now known as the "Blind City", is populated by a few thousand people. 90% of this population has contracted the "white blindness" disease and has since taken control over the city over the past years. The other 10% live in fear of contracting the disease and have been forced to live in internment camps or as labor slaves to the blind masses.

This is being reposted because Peggy requested we cross-post it to our class blog. And no, I'm not carrying around this much money anymore.

The first assignment for the class was to generate an inventory of everything I was carrying at a specific moment in time and to analyze what that inventory said about the environment in which I live.

World Brainstorming:

1 garden of eden
2 conscious earth, conforms to man
3 conscious man, conform to earth
4 No more women/men
5 Land of chosen people presided over by an active God
6 Wile E coyote...gods of acme intervene on predator prey
7 underworld
8 the ark (afloat forever)
9 island of broken toys
10 creation protype ( place for all the iterations of animals)
11 doomsday device
12 deluge

1+2+3+5+8+12

A progress allegory--
The Ark: Vessel that progresses from maternal guide to vigilant God, intervening on the generations in its hold.

People Begin to question and threaten the Journey, and the Ark eliminates this dissonance by carefully reverting its cargo to a primeval horde ( social Engineering, social progress).

This is a solitary experience. You are one of the few rational minds who had a hand in developing the Ark. Consequently, when the Ark purges what it considers the bad seeds and embarks upon its social re-engineering in deep space, you are isolated but spared. Your character sleeps through the ages, and is revived at various milestones in the Ark's agenda, for a time-lost discourse (centuries are passing).

You have access to the various surveillance feeds inside the ark - you get to watch. (social womb)

The calendar and date have been lost to the ages. Humanity is on the decline as the genome begins to unravel. Genetic engineering has been combined with cyborg technologies to produce individuals that essentially immortal, but dependant on and addicted to a cocktail of drugs and hallucingens to reset the DNA life-clock.

Here's a list of everything I had on my person on August 30th at 2 p.m., just in case you were wondering. Financial/identifying info has been left out to prevent strangers from anonymously depositing money into my accounts. I don't need your charity. [ed. note: yes I do]

An article about the role of space in game design by Kurt Squire and Henry Jenkins.
The Art of Contested Spaces

Thanks to everyone for sharing their inventories and analysis. Stay alert to the clues of culture in your everyday life and pockets.

For next week:
Declare your world:
1. Name it.
Provide a brief description.

2. Place it:
Describe (and sketch) the external boundaries.
Describe (annotate) its context.
(What is outside those boundaries?) Where does your world reside?

3. Define your audience.
Are you designing for a solitary or group experience?
Are you offering a first, second or third person experience?
Will your reader/viewer/player/audience have agency within your world?

9/20
1. Jack
2. Diana
3. Mike
4. John

9/27
1. Jen Stein
2. Andre
3. Maya
4. Jamie

Oct 4th
1. Ethan
2. RJ
3. Andrea
4. Al

Oct 11th
1. Jen – Mental Maps Kevin Lynch
2. Mike - Mythologies: Wrestling
3. Jack – Negative Space
4. John - The Idea of a Town

Oct 25th
1. Maya
2. R.J.
3. Ethan - Memory Palaces
4.Andre - Aural Architecture

Nov 8th
1. Al - Space within Play in Virtual Worlds
2. Jamie - Buckminster Fuller
3. Diana - Metaphors in Language
4. Andrea - Choreographer's Space

Please read this excerpt from Guns, Germs, and Steal: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond for a class discussion next week.

Worldbuilding is good, but the official name is Interactive Experience Design.
Course Syllabus

Space Bibliography

MacBookPro with power brick
iPhone
digital camera
Mimobot 1 gig usb stick
iPod shuffle
Shure headphones
The Production of Space by Henri Lefebvre
Trail Mix
Big bottle of water
Mac lip gloss
Carmex lip balm
Eyeglasses w/ case
Backpack

I always suspected, but I was never sure until now. Thank you, Boris! You've saved 532!

For celebration/good measure, here is one of Kirby's finer collaborations. A nickel to anyone who can actually watch the whole thing!

Like so many of my blog posts recently, this is only a test.

Powerpoint Presentation

Good lord, I carry a lot of crap around with me:

A list of the items I had on me August 30, 2007 and an analysis of what all of that stuff really means...

Following Mike's lead, here my inventory for 11 a.m., August 30, 2007.

Being at Burning Man, my inventory is atypical. 11 a.m. on Thursday, August 30, 20007, I had just arrived at Camp Love Potion, whose address is 8:30 and Boreal, Black Rock City, Nevada. Although I camped at Contact Camp, I distinctly remember my possessions at this date and time because I had just walked to Camp Love Potion to search for my ride back to Los Angeles.

There were six articles in my possession:

• Robe: White cotton Moustafa Egyptian Tau robe. This design is a simple robe: Long sleeved and ankle-length.
  
• Sandals: Chocolate brown leather Teva sandals with velcro straps.
  
• Turban: Sienna stretchable silk fabric scrap (7' x 2') wrappped as a turban around my head. The tail of the turban is left long to be wrapped around my face as a dust mask due to frequent dust storms.
  
• Glasses: Brass round-frame Lanvin glasses, with clear polymer prescription (20/400) lenses.
  
• Water bottle: Transparent Arrowhead sports disposable plastic water bottle (20 oz), label removed, fliptop cover. The bottle has some distilled water.
  
• Love potion: Approximately 1/4 fl oz. glass vial of cinnamon liquer blended with dozens of herbs selected for their associations with love in European herbal folklore. This is worn around the neck by a thin blue elastic string acting as a necklace.
  

Personal Inventory for 532:

Our blog
Completely untouched
A white screen, like newfallen snow
Until some guy posted this.