Students Blog

518 - Flatword Assignment

• Title: Cortex.

• Genre: Historical science-fiction fantasy.

• Content:

1944. A German wartime research facility beneath the small Northern town of Lubeck. In Cortex, the users play a set of ten ‘volunteers’ who have been selected to help their country with its wartime research. They are escorted into the first FlatWorld set by a German SS officer, named Leytenant Hoffnung.

It is a medical lab. A gramophone plays Wagner in the background. The room smells of disinfectant. The lone scientist in the room, Dr. Uta Hagen, introduces herself. She thanks them for volunteering and explains that the work being done at this research lab may turn the tide of the war, which is currently not progressing in Germany’s favour.

She explains that the lab complex is thirty metres underground and stretches for half a square mile. The volunteers are here to assist with routine manual tasks and administration. Suddenly, the lights flicker. An alarm sounds. A voice over the speaker system tells us that Allied planes are bombing Lubeck. Moments later distant explosions can be heard and the whole room shakes. The power goes out, leaving everything bathed in low red emergency lighting. The gramophone begins skipping. Dr Hagen rushes to a door on the far side of the room, telling the soldier ‘Hurry, come with me - with the power out she might escape!’.

Dr Hagen enters a combination into the door-lock at the far end of the room and runs through followed by the soldier. The ten volunteers are now left on their own to escape from the facility. And so the puzzles begin. In order to escape from the room, the users have to look at Dr. Hagen’s diary, which sits on her desk, to find the door-lock combination.

To summarise the rest of the experience, the users move on room by room solving puzzles to progress and discovering information about the research being done here. It emerges from a brief 16mm film (discovered in a projector) that this lab is dedicated to paranormal research. The volunteers have been brought her to be used as test subjects – or target practice – for newly conditioned psychic militia. Hoffnung has been responsible for running this training program, which is torturous both for the new soldiers and the human or animal test-subjects brought in so that these soldiers can hone their abilities.

The most powerful subject, a girl named Alexandra Lars, turned utterly psychopathic during the process of conditioning and is now kept in a padded cell on level eight. A series of electromagnets around this room suppress her abilities. It becomes clear that with the Allied attack, Alexandra is now free.

At this point the experience becomes more like a haunted house. Alexandra can make the users see things which aren’t there, for example, blood dripping down walls. Through telekinesis she can move objects as well as appearing to the users in person. She kills Hoffnung, in true Scanners style, by making his head explode. (All this occurs in the digital projections obviously). Her revenge complete, Alexandra then commits suicide and allows the volunteers to reach the surface.

Finally, the group are faced a view of Lubeck burning after the bombing, before exiting the simulation.

• Design Concepts:

The design of this interactive narrative is tailored to the strengths and limitations of the FlatWorld system.

Most of the narrative takes place within subterranean indoor environments, until the final section.

This is designed to avoid the use of flat screens behind operable doors, which shatters any illusion of reality. Of course, flats will still be positioned behind windows, gratings, holes blown in walls etc. This merely removes the problem of showing users an exterior which they are unable to enter although the door is open (or the unwieldy solution of using enemy soldiers or other means to block their path once the door is open).

I also wanted to make use of FlatWorld’s much vaunted set dressing to create complete environments, filled with interactive props and clues, rather than simply adding a few set pieces near doors and windows as has been done previously. For example, in the first room, the users might try to use the phone system to call for help, only to receive an engaged tone. The world should have this kind of depth.

I am also keen to make this a multi-sensory experience, since this seems to me to be the most powerful attribute of the FlatWorld system. Vivid audio should allow the users to hear commotion in other sections of the lab, and can be used to chilling effect in the supernatural sequences. Additionally, there should be dynamic practical lighting on set: flickering lights, lamps etc. The sets should also make use of different smells – for example, the opening lab set reeks of disinfectant.

This experience is designed to become part of a theme park, and as such, it will be important to keep large numbers of people moving through the system. It is designed to work for batches of ten people, with a new batch entering the system every few minutes. As each batch moves on to a new section, the doors will seal behind them, so that a new batch can enter the previous room. If users are unable to work out how to progress (although this is unlikely given the number of people and the simplicity of the puzzles) hints can be given over the lab’s speaker system using an in-game context. For example, if the solution to progressing to the next room is to crawl through an air-vent, then the announcer might tell everyone in the complex to consider using the vents if the doors are locked.

I also wanted to begin the Cortex experience with actors, so that the users become involved easily in the narrative.

Cortex would consist of around fifteen different rooms on four levels and would take up to an hour to complete. The final level is an exterior and will show a panoramic view of war-torn Lubeck after the bombings. As the users emerge from this room, they return not to Lubeck, but reality.

• Interactivity:

The users will interact with the world in a number of ways:

1) Physical interaction with props, set dressing and actors.

2) Additional sensory interaction: smells, sounds etc.

3) Puzzle solving (both physical and mental). Users will have to solve puzzles in order to progress. This will also involve interacting with each other!

4) Users will also discover the back-story of the lab as they progress, through audio recordings, logs, films and projected characters.

• FlatWorld asset elements required:

- Set design: Extensive, period set design. Many elements are functional (record players, telephones, lamps etc).

- Projected Backgrounds: They will be used primarily to create the supernatural events of the story – i.e. Alexandra’s mind projections – as well as views of large sections of the facility and war-torn Lubeck.

- Animated Elements – Fire-fights between soldiers and test-subjects, explosions, Hoffnung’s exploding head…

• Characters:

Chiefly, Dr. Uta Hagen, Leytenant Hoffnung, Alexandra Lars. Each character has been roughly sketched in this outline but each would be profiled in depth for the actual project. See below.

• Environmental Elements – Wind via the fan systems, vibrations from explosions.

Appendix:

● JOSEPH AMADEUS HOFFNUNG :

Those who served under Leytenant Hoffnung saw a childless, cheerless man as fastidious about discipline as his appearance. They saw the neatly cropped black beard, the polished boots, the razor straight uniform creases and the stumps of two fingers on his left hand. His other possessed long, elegant fingers that matched his tall frame and his limbs were lean but muscular, like an underfed tiger. Indeed, there was not an ounce of superfluous weight on his body. They saw all this, but they did not see Joseph. Precisely setting up his gramophone and switching off the lights, allowing waves of colour to flow over him like the Aurora Borealis, Joseph remembered the first moment he knew he was special.

Born in Hamburg during the winter of 1890, both Joseph’s parents were to die weeks later in a riot – his real identity dying with them. In a Berlin orphanage he attracted the attention of Marie Hoffnung, a young volunteer nurse. Joseph had contracted influenza and Marie took pity on the child, bringing him back to her husband and adopting him as her own.
His new middle-class parents determined that he would never know of his adoption and Marie named him Joseph (after the biblical tale of another abandoned child) and his father chose the name Amadeus, hoping that the boy would emulate the great composer. Even from this tender age Joseph was encouraged to play the piano, often sitting on his father’s lap so that he could reach the keys. Joseph in turn adopted his parents’ love of Prussia and classical culture. He was deeply influenced by the great past civilisations of Greece and Rome, dreaming of a Germany that could one day rival them. His parents ignited within him so a fierce passion for literature, theatre and opera that anyone who saw him as a young man, walking through the chilly night staring up at the stars, could not doubt his artist’s heart.
But Joseph was special. He could see, could feel colours when listening to sounds, as though his senses were somehow intertwined. He was synesthesic, but he was also terrified to be different, terrified that he was evil. And so his mother promised him that he was blessed, saying that he was touched by God for a special purpose. Joseph never forgot this and grew self-reliant and single-minded as a result – always awaiting the purpose she spoke of, ever vigilant. His unique abilities and superior attitude soon cut him off from others and left him friendless. No one else understood how he saw the world, and so he grew fond of playing the piano in the dark, alone, watching the vibrant shadows that swirled and swooped around him as he danced his way across the keys. He never felt alone when surrounded by those myriad colours.
After a glorious solo piano performance at twenty-four, his professional career as a pianist seemed certain. But with the outbreak of World War One, he was reluctantly compelled to fight, though he did not believe in that kind of violence - to him it seemed futile and without a worthy greater objective. Within a month of the hostilities, Joseph had been shot in the hand, destroying his ambitions. He grew bitter dwelling on this disappointment, and the hope in mother’s promise slowly turned to odium. Deciding to remain in the military, he finally discarded music forever. After his mother’s untimely death in 1937, Joseph supported his father financially, but was too embittered to ever return home.
Joseph is a German, a pianist, a loving son, a patriot – he has many facets. However, history will remember him as a Nazi, as the head of the Cortex Research Facility for more than seven years, as the man who sent innumerable people to their deaths in bizarre experiments. Germany would be pure and great again. For this goal Joseph would sacrifice anything, even handing his own mother to the S.S. for her foolish religion. His determination made him cold, ruthless and inhumane. But he had found his purpose.

And sometimes in the facility, Joseph still walks alone, listening to the cries of pain or screams of terror.

That is when he sees the most beautiful colours of all.