Course

Here is an IF project that I did for World Building last week. Please, try it out and send me comments!

A couple notes for anyone who would be interested in playtesting: This is not a complete game, in the sense that it doesn't have an end state, a goal, or even a player character. I just wanted to explore Emily Short's approach to storytelling through environment and conversation. (See Floatpoint and Alabaster for examples.) So, you won't get much context about who you are or why the two characters are willing to talk to you, but (hopefully) you will start to get a sense of the world that they inhabit through the conversations. All that said, I'd love to get feedback from people. This is the first time I've done something quite like this, and I'm interested in building it out further.

Play Black Swan online!

The Museum did not hold up so well upon a second visit. That is, I missed the thrill of confusion that I'd first experienced in that space, and felt a nostalgia for the unhinging of certain categorizations of truth and falsehood which had marked my first encounter with the space. Now I was in on the joke, having had time to reflect upon and research the experience, and I found myself in the role of the tour guide, showing my friend around on her first walk through the wonders of Jurassic Technology.

The IKEA company just issued this unusually recondite solicitation for counter-intelligence agents to document potential weaknesses and points of resistance in their pursuit of world domination of the home furnishings market. IMD students - especially those enrolled in CTIN 532: Interactive Experience and World Design - may want to take this opportunity to analyze an IKEA retail outlet in terms of its deployment of world-building strategies and its production of scripted spaces. What really is the difference between an IKEA store and a theme park?

This Thursday in CTIN 532: Interactive Experience and World Design, Casey Alt and Patrick Jagoda of Duke University will be Skyping in for a guest presentation on their project (created with Tim Lenoir) Emergence. Still in the alpha stages, Emergence is a MMOG that invites players to rebuild a post-apocalyptic, BSG-esque world along axes of diplomatic, economic and social dynamics. All are welcome to join us for the remote presentation, Thursday 9/29 roughly 12:00-1:00 in the ZML.

CTIN 532: Interactive Experience and World Design
Fall 2009 Thursdays 11:00AM-1:00PM
Zemeckis Media Lab (RZC 201)
Instructors: Steve Anderson and Peter Brinson
Lab instructor: David Turpin
sfanders@usc.edu
213-743-1933

A new kind of society cannot be designed on paper. That is, you cannot plan out a new form of society in advance, then set it up and expect it to function as it was designed to.
-Unabomber Manifesto (104)

Prospectus
This course proceeds from the belief that the act of imagining, designing and developing fully conceived and articulated worlds represents an important step toward taking advantage of the full potentials offered by interactive media. In designing “worlds” and/or transmedial narrative environments, we imagine a palette of possibilities that extends far beyond character or story development and even the design of game mechanics or user experiences. World building allows us to imagine interlocking systems of value, action and imagination in which each element of the world we create may be redefined, reshaped or reconceived at the most basic level.
We will begin by analyzing the form and functioning of several artificially constructed “story worlds,” ranging from literature and comic books to television and video games, followed by consideration of some “real world” environments that may be considered “scripted spaces;” finally, we will consider instances of hybrid physical/virtual environments and the strategies by which they engage real world issues of history, environment, economy, ideology and/or social behavior.

The potential social impact of worlds that describe utopian or dystopian visions is vast. And while there are many genres of world design, this class encourages you to consider imagining work that is engaged in issues of relevance to the political or social world. Hence, the lab component of the course is structured around a design challenge that is at once broad and specific: Design a story world that bears a consequential relationship with the world we inhabit by taking advantage of the possibilities offered by environmental or transmedial storytelling.

We will begin by working with the 3D game engine Unity. Any platform that we might select for this design challenge would offer both strengths and drawbacks – it is up to us to figure out how it may be used most effectively and, while we will do our best to provide technical support and guidance, the primary responsibility for learning the software lies with students. For the second and third lab assignments, students will have the option of continuing to work with Unity, investigating the potential integration of Unity with other software platforms or devices (including Max/MSP and iPhones) or selecting another application altogether. Our primary goal is to broaden the range of design potentials rather than to fetishize any particular technology.

Weekly breakdown continues below...