Peter Van Dyke

The experience goals of inhabitants of my world are pretty simple: they just live their life in and around events that consciously and unconsciously make them uncomfortable. Denial, ignorance and just complete apathy are the characteristics that allow them to do this, but not everyone simply ignores what is going on around them. It would be really interesting if this only happened for a period of days, like 7 days of disconcerted (I like that).

The overall end result of a Disconcerted event or in the Disconcerted world would be a general feeling of "That was weird, but I can't figure out why." Questions that people ask themselves, like "What's going on?" "Didn't I hear that already?" "When did that happen?" "Why is it so uncomfortable in here?" are the kinds of things I want people to be asking themselves, but only to the point where they're thinking it and not necessarily to the point where they're talking about it with other people while at the event. After the even is fine. If people are uncomfortable but can't put their fingers on why, then I have succeeded.

The atlas is a little different. I've thought a lot about how I want to start digging into providing insight into this world, and I've decided that I don't want to just rely on experiments. I would like to create a fiction around the world, and have that fiction be integrated into the presentation of the Atlas. Something along the lines of a memoir of someone who was paying attention when certain weird things started happening all over his town/city/area, and things just didn't seem right for a while. Maybe as a diary or a series of diaries.

Another idea is to have it be the memoir of the disconcerter, although I find it a little more interesting to be disconcerted than disconcerting. Another is to have a hyperlinked website that would have short stories and some related art and definitions to go along with it, and music or ambient noise. Maybe a wiki or something like that, but for this world. I'm really not sure how I want to go about presenting this concept, and even a live demonstration isn't entirely out of the picture - I should be pretty good at making people uncomfortable by the end of the semester.

One thing I'm worried about is that taking this concept interactive would make it very easy to tread back and forth on the line between afraid and uncomfortable.

The last idea I've been kicking around for the Atlas would be something along the lines of a case study of experiments and concepts (working and not working). This would include information and records of events of which disconcerted was a part. I'm not too hot on that one though.

Assets:
Book/Website/(wiki?)
- Fiction
- Events
- Soft/hard linking for the website
- some music (but I could find that pretty easily)

For the table of contents, if I were going to do a wiki:
- History
- Events
- People
- Reporting (events with a bias)
- Little easter eggs, internal references and definitions that would be linked to

Posted by Peter Van Dyke at 2:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click for big.

This is a little map of a space in which disconcerted is actually going to take place in a couple of weeks - I figured this would be a really good way to give an impression of what I'm thinking about in this project.

The concept works like this: users participating in Disconcerted do not know that they are participating. The information about the show is not related, and the events that take place are music/art events with no mention whatsoever of disconcerted. This is important for the setup, because Disconcerted is designed to make participants uncomfortable without their knowledge.

The space would be open for people to leave at any time, and the only thing separating it from the rest of the world is the door through which attendees enter. Any barriers to exit would have to be staged, with a pretense so that people do not know that they're being made to stay.

To the map: There are two types of objects on the map besides the layout: mics and speakers. The premise of this concept is to record conversations as they are happening and play them back several minutes afterwards from a different place in the room, just below ambient noise level.

There are several points of congregation that I mapped out based on the times I've been to the Unknown, specifically next to the bar, on the couches, and in the back areas of the stadium seating. The mics are placed to record localized conversation in the center of areas of congregation (or near to the centers). The speakers are placed to provide a relatively even ability to play back sounds of any kind - crickets or insects are another idea for this layout.

Conversations could be recorded at one place and played back from a different place to subtly confuse participants, or they could be played back in nearly the same place. Both would likely have a similar effect.

I think this is a pretty good example of what Disconcerted tries to be - for the world of disconcerted I'm thinking that the direction is going to be taking this world and having disconcerting events occurring over a period of time, unknown to its inhabitants.

Posted by Peter Van Dyke at 1:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When I mentioned in class on Wednesday that I had a little bit of inspiration, I wasn't kidding. I was perusing the internet one day and I happened upon a really interesting blog called Strange Maps. On it, I stumbled upon this (click for big, ~1.4mb):

It's called the Carte de Tendre (in french). Sadly, after thinking about this more I think I'm going to go with a world called "Disconcerted" instead.

There's also a 7mb version of this map here if you want to print it out and put it on the side of a building.

Posted by Peter Van Dyke at 9:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As seen truncated in the most recent Game Developer magazine, and interestingly related to our discussions on in seminar, Gama Sutra has published the full interview of Hirokazu Yasuhara of Namco Bandai Games America. He has done design on a wide variety of successful and well-received games, including Sonicand Jak & Daxter. In this interview he talks about exactly how he approaches game design, which isn't far from the types of experience design we were discussing on Wednesday evening. This is really a wide-reaching interview that is worth a gander if you're at all interested in this type of design. He has been and is currently working at Naughty Dog.

Good stuff to those who click

Posted by Peter Van Dyke at 10:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When I emptied my pockets, I found exactly 90 items. 90 things, on me while I was in class. This prompted me to think about how we think about stuff in terms of what we need and what we don't need, and how we use containers to increase the number of things we can carry without appearing to be pack rats.

Storage Containers were the first thing I noticed: bags, flash drives, computers, purses, wallets - we all have these on us, usually at least two or three of them.

The second thing was Security items - items that represent something important, but we hold onto them so we don't lose everything when we lose them. Things like debit/credit cards, where if you lose the card you don't lose all the money in your account.

This led me to the concept of Enablers - credit cards, membership cards, tickets (ticket stubs), keys - things that allowed us to do other things or go places. I had a very large number of these things, and in fact they represented more than 20% of the total number of objects that I had on me.

Presentation available here for those who would like to see it. It's in a keynote wrapper, so I hope you have iWork.

Posted by Peter Van Dyke at 5:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)