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...
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Week 1: World building
Aug. 27
The stakes of world design
Diegesis, metaphor and metalepsis
Case study: Battlestar Galactica
Week 2: Online spaces // Physical spaces
Sept. 3
Read and discuss:
Paul Dourish and Genevieve Bell, “The Infrastructure of Experience and the Experience of Infrastructure: Meaning and Structure in Everyday Encounters with Space”
Assignment:
Analyze the terms of use of an online community in which you take part (anything from Facebook to YouTube to IMD) and come to class prepared to talk about this community in terms of its:
-origins and reason for existence
-borders, limits and exclusions
-assumptions and lacunae regarding users
-values, ethics and ideological commitments
-presumed and encouraged behaviors
-cultures and customs
-economies of value
-laws and consequences
-similarities and differences from your physical world communities
Week 3: Virtual worlds
Sept. 10
Read selections from Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America
Visiting artist: Todd Furmanski, Here Be Dragons, an entirely procedurally generated 3D environment
Assignment:
Use de Tocqueville’s mode of outsider observation to perform an analysis of a virtual world, game environment or story world, including MMOGs, MUVEs, ARGs, TV series, novel(s), comic books (e.g., World of Warcraft, Spore, Second Life, Dwarf Fortress, I Love Bees, Lord of the Rings, Dune, DC/Marvel multiverses, etc.)
Week 4: Imaginary cosmologies
Sept. 17
Read Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”
Assignment:
I find it striking that many of the examples we have considered thus far in class seem to emerge from the conjunction of disparate elements – for Borges’ narrator of Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, it is the mirror and the encyclopedia; for de Tocqueville it was nascent democracy and an uncivilized landscape; for Furmanski, genetic algorithms and architecture; for Dourish and Bell, spatial congruence of physical architecture and wireless data infrastructure, etc. Your thought experiment for the week (after reading the Borges) is to imagine a world that comes into being as the result of two disparate elements of your choosing. What work do these elements do in allowing us to imagine an entire world?
Lab:
Continue “Sphereworld” exercise in Unity; meet in pairs to plan first Unity assignment
Week 5: Transmediality
Sept. 24:
Henry Jenkins, "Transmedia Storytelling 101"
Don Carson, “Environmental Storytelling”
Assignment:
Analyze a transmedial story environment or media franchise (examples: Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, Star Trek)
Lab: project pitches for Unity assignment #1 due October 8
Week 6: Hybrids
Oct. 1
Case study: Emergence
Videoconference with Patrick Jagoda and Casey Alt from Duke University
Analyze a hybrid world in terms of its engagement/disengagement with real-world issues, politics, ideologies, history, etc. (examples: Google Earth, Google Mars, District 9, Star Trek, True Blood, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Star Wars, Darfur is Dying, Peacemaker, Superstruct)
Week 7: Lab session
Oct. 8: Work on Unity assignment #1
Week 8: Assignment #1 due
Oct. 15 Present and critique Unity assignments in class!
Week 9: Physical worlds
Oct. 22 Read:
Edward Soja, “The Trialectics of Spatiality” from Thirdspace: journeys to Los Angeles and other real and imagined places
Norman Klein “Scripted spaces” in From the Vatican to Vegas
Visit and document (in some form that is bloggable) one of the following scripted spaces in or around Los Angeles:
-Hollywood and Highland
-Universal CityWalk
-Disneyland
-Playa Vista
-Museum of Jurassic Technology
-SCA
-Las Vegas
Come to class prepared to analyze its effectiveness at functioning as a designed environment and/or the extent to which it allows for resistant navigation. Alternatively, you may visit a public space that resists the concept of scripting and attempt to account for the ways in which it contradicts the models put forward by Soja and Klein.
Week 10: Games for Change
Oct. 29
Tracy Fullerton, “Documentary Games: putting the player in the path of history”
Week 11: Assignment #2 due
Nov. 5 Present and critique assignments in class
Week 12: The Social Construction of Space
Nov. 12 Utopias/Dystopias
Read or scan at least one of the following:
The Communist Manifesto
The Cyborg Manifesto
The Internet Manifesto
The Unabomber Manifesto
Analyze the rhetorical strategies of each of these attempts to define or empower a social movement. Compose your own manifesto or, if appropriate, the terms of use for the world you are creating as your final project in this class.
Week 13: Alternate Realities
Nov. 19 Reading TBA
Week 15: Thanksgiving
Nov. 26 No class!
Week 16: Assignment #3 due
Dec. 3 Present and critique final assignments in class
Thesis projections due in class or on December 10!
Requirements
Students are expected to come to class prepared and to participate actively in class discussions and blog posting. With the addition of a lab component in this class, readings have been kept to a minimum, so it is especially important to engage thoughtfully with the contents of each assigned reading. In the early part of the class, each student will be responsible for researching, analyzing and presenting on a story world. There will be three lab assignments, due in weeks 7, 11 and 16, with ample opportunities for critique. Projects may be completed individually or in pairs. Finally, you will be asked to write a brief reflection on the ways in which you imagine mobilizing the issues and insights of this class in conceiving your thesis project.
Grading
Participation 10%
World analysis 15%
Blog contributions 10%
Unity assignment 15%
Second lab assignment 15%
Final project 25%
Thesis projection 10%
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