# data[].attributes.body
Today we were introduced to some web-based authoring sites for 3D mixed reality experiences, as well as some tools for creating interactive 360 videos. Looking at the prompts for project 2: A moment in time and the work of previous students, I was drawn to both the use of a game engine like godot, and the chose your own adventure style 360 videos. Particularly the site Wonda vr.

When looking at interactive 360 videos and it's branching story paths, it made me think of a lot of game examples, namely those of David Cage, who aims to bring story telling and cinema into video games. His works Detroit Become Human and other smaller titles all embody his anthem of "every choice affecting your story" and I do like this mindset in approaching my project. Moreso, I thought of Disco Elysium, a tabletop rpg where the choices and paths are myriad, but similar story beats remain. I am inspired to gamify this experience.

While doing a few brain storming activities with random image / sentence generators, I came across a few concepts I took a liking to.

1. a meaningless easter egg hunt. A game environment with the main goal of looking for a monument, (the egg). Each location is contextless and arbituary, linked only by the appearance of this monument, which once discovered by the player, triggers a snap teleportation to the next environment. An exploration and attempt to make sense of infinitely meaningless spaces.

2. The prompt gave us snowy path, night sky and chinese experimental theatre. I thought of a simple interactive element. Simply following a snowy path with a snow particle / environment that has actual collision physics. You are slowed down by the piling of snow around you.

These brainstorming activities helped me alot with conceptualising a simple idea and how I would actualise them.

An Idea I had is to make a 360 video, perhaps interactive. I found that a lot of the MR examples we looked at all utilised the empathy machine to document and bring light to tragedies, whether it be plane crashes, boat sinkings or disease and war ridden communities. Obviously the medium of VR lends itself to this, and perhaps the forward nature of this technology makes it more appealing to governmental information hubs and UN articles. I wanted to call towards the domestic and comfortable, a night dinner with your loved ones simulator. I had this idea of a simple sequence of two robots enjoying a meal together for the last project, but I think this captures the theme of a moment in time better. It could be a 360 video sequence of still shots within this 3D model apartment, following two small robots sharing an intimate and domestic moment. I admire the aesthetics of early ps2 games, low poly and bright colours, glitchy pixelated textures and janky movement. A game cut scene.

Attached to this post is a small story board :3

How i would achieve this is most likely constructing the 3D environment and modelling the robots (could photoscan and rig a physical sculpture), animating it and then record it as a 360 video. The viewer model will stay stationary but can look around in these still frames. I will however have to learn godot or how to animate in blender, and subsequently recording it as a 360 video. Worse come to worse I could leave them all as frames with no movement except maybe video textures, subtitles and sound.

# data[].attributes.body
Notes from the lecture today. Discussion of psychogeography have further informed my on the development of my idea.

Flaneur of the toilette. Dynamism of a dog in a bathroom. I intend to construct a space, extrapolating the feeling of being a transgender person and having to deal with the dilemma of gendered bathrooms. To construct an uncomfortable space, littered with nonsensically scaled urinals and toilets, in addition to using the motif of dogs. I intend to use photogrammetry and 3D scanning to produce less than ideal scans. Utilising the fragmented and distorted nature of incomplete models of these toilette items to emphasise the animosity of this space. Furthermore I want to experiment with scanning of moving subjects, ie. dogs, to see what kind of blurry mess I could create. For now, I am envisioning the end product to be a nonsensical, cruel, dreamland of a bathroom.

I did some scan experiments of moving subjects, as well as 2 scans of the bathroom. I've inserted them into blendr to test out its textures and interaction with lighting.

Also, with John's reference to the painting Dynamism of a dog on a leash, in relation to a moving scan test, I discovered this: https://variants.artbase.rhizome.org/Q1545/balla01.html

Unsure of the origins of this work or even the creator, but I find the digital replication and disruption of the painting to be beautiful.

# data[].attributes.body
idea 1: exploring the environment of bathrooms : the atmosphere of gendered toilets through the lens of a afab trans person, the disorientating feeling of being in a space that seems hostile towards you, whilst feeling a sense of belonging towards them.

idea consists of photoscanning multiple male toilets with low light and merging them together in a 3d software, creating a amalgam of a space. (variation could be purely scans of toilets and urinals.)

intend to play with scale and audio to disrupt its form.

also include imagery of dogs (guard dogs, hostility, belonging to a pack, idea of sacrifice) - test out photogrammatry on actual dogs, see what kind of model i end up with when scanning a moving object out of my control

use of low poly / leaning into the limited forms

environment thought of as seemingly enclosed, claustrophobic space of a bathroom disrupted and walls missing, revealing red sky / opressive atmosphere of the open space with scaled up dogs or toilets. (inspired by UMURANGI GENERATION)

lack of linear narrative / seeming progression, just letting the viewer exist within this uncomfortable space. (inspired by LSD dream simulator)

idea 2: a couple of robots on a friday night. a more narrative experience. Story of two robots set in a post apocalyptic cyber punk future but in a purely domestic setting where it feels almost the same as reality, told through progressing still shots where the camera is placed around their apartment, as they go through their friday night. One waits for the other to come home from work. Welcomed home with a kiss on the cheek. They cook and eat dinner, wash dishes, mop up. One lies on the dining table and the other opens up a mechanic chasm to tweak some gears. They put their nice outfits and seem to head out for a walk. They seem just like us, domestic and human and banal. story ends with frame of them holding hands infront of annihilation.

perhaps its linear and narrative structure does not lend itself to the immersiveness of vr, but i find the material of 3d modelling and scanning to perhaps lend itself to its aesthetic

inspired by the intro sequence of cruelty game, intending to use rudementary and limited vertex snapping low poly models, textures over saturated and chaotic. voices weird and off putting but their domesticity warms the heart.

into the death machine? (the sun? junkyard?)

# data[].attributes.body
Experiences that are not MR but inspire me to recreate the same feeling using MR technologies and techniques:

UMURANGI GENERATION

NZ indie game, main mechanic / game play loop consists of taking photos of specific targets. in the background, constructed with low polygon models and an excellent atmospheric light and audio design in every level, portrays the reality of a fictional future. One where giant aliens resembling blue bottles has invaded NZ, where the UN send in giant mechas and armies to defend against them. The local protest against UN occupation as well as themes of colonialism. None of this is written in any single line of exposition in the game, rather, presented within its rich set design, sound design and mise en scene. I admire how this game, on the surface, is about photography, but through just existing in the various spaces it spawns you in, looking for the objects you must take photos of, the rest of the story is told. A masterclass in environmental immersion.

LSD dream simulator

more of an art piece walking simulator of randomnly generated environments with no real goal than a game.

the aesthetic of this experience is beyond surreal, disorienting, weird and dream-like (as suggested by the title)

I am inspired by each and every environment within the experience, its use of game conventions settling the "player" to try to understand it with game logic and time and time again subverting it with pure anti-utilitarian aestheticism. or just weirdness

The intro sequence of the game cruelty squad

The game itself puts you as a mercenary to kill targets within a obscure, chaotic and some of the time eye-burning levels.

The intro sequence itself is weird enough. Multiple still frame shots of a man recieving a call - mundane enough, but through its use of low polygon 3D models (doom esque), sound design and camera placement, it creates a unsettling viewing experience. I wish to emulate this aesthetic and viewing experience.

ABZU

I'll keep it short - beautiful environments of ocean scenes rendered with simple models but ungodly breathtaking lighting and ambience. A swimming simulator.

JAZZPUNK

pure weirdness in narrative, lowpolygon visuals once again.

Kid Amnesia

radiohead's walking simulator - immersive environments, music sound track

Main take aways i want to apply to my work

immersive, environmental story telling

low poly, leaning into the rudementary and dated aesthetic

surreality and weirdness - using incongruent models and textures in addition to weird, senseless narratives.

playing with scale

audio enhancing the work

video game logic / the reversal of it

contrast of real textures and the extremely stylised

# data[].attributes.body
A pretty successful scan - loving the texture of the tile on the floor, especially when it comes out pixelated and somewhat disrupted.

# data[].attributes.body
This scan appeared more fragmented and shitty as it was within a stall. The limited space did not allow for me to get as many angles for the scanning process to take place, resulting in a more compressed and misinformed scan, which I think could be interesting to explore. Especially when lighting effects are applied, to look at the dark shadows casted. The fragmentation also plays into the emotion place i intend to capture.

# data[].attributes.headline
some past work also relating to urinals 

# data[].attributes.subject
some past work also relating to urinals 

# data[].attributes.body
i like the posterisation and digital crunch.

# data[].attributes.body
Using a insta360 X3 we wanted to play with the idea of VR and space in the camera. Recording in a crowded space like a toilet stall and being extremely close to the camera (ie the viewer) and repeating one phrase to create an uncomfortable experience. Inspired by the death stranding 2 game trailers.

In premiere pro, i applied adjustment layers to alter the colour of the setting to enhance the atmosphere, adding glow and a cold tint. In addition, I masked in faces into the poster and walls of the stall, creating a even more crowded and unsettling space. I really like the effect on the wall, due to the blending mode it looks like a face projected onto the wall.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Experiment from my mixed reality production elective - could be interesting to use in future projects! Masked in clips from the same video, one on existing posters and the other on the wall with a blending mode to make it look like a projection.

^editing the equirectangular video in premiere after exporting out of Insta360

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Experiment from my mixed reality production elective - could be interesting to use in future projects! Masked in clips from the same video, one on existing posters and the other on the wall with a bl...

# data[].attributes.body
Using the previous photo scans we made we did an introduction to blender, learning the basics on navigation. I tried my hand at sculpting something. Started with a isometric shape as i wanted to achieve a low polygon vertex snapped look (but reverse engineering it) I learnt how to select multiple vertices and use tools such as push / pull. Eventually i did have to remesh the model to be able to get any semblance of detail in there, but I was excited to find some of my knowledge in 3D modelling has transferred over from Nomad to Blender. Still, lots to learn and the UI sure doesn't make it easy :D

My main goal with this test was to get up to date and reach the "equivalent" of my modelling knowledge in Nomad. To be able to upload textures and sculpt (even very shittily), as well as play with the lighting and camera. In the future I also want to learn how to replicate the low polygon style of ps1 / ps2 games in blender to incorporate it into the style of my first project.

In addition, I was testing out some ideas for the project. To fragment and distort the space of a bathroom, especially with the masculine exclusive motif of the urinal. I also wanted to play with lighting, using one main fill light of cool hues and a yellow grimy spotlight to create an uncomfortable atmosphere.

I did have a lot of struggles with uploading textures, sometimes they just don't show up even when the image is allocated to the object. I would also like to learn texture painting, and using the grease pencil to do simple animations.

Finally - I think I have the ability to make a crude version of what my final product will be. I will utilise lots of 3d photo scanned objects of urinals, toilet stalls and other objects of that atmosphere. In addition, I will attempt do some photoscan experiments of moving subjects - the dog. Playing into the unrefined nature of photoscanned models.

# data[].attributes.headline
Rendering samples that i found interesting 

# data[].attributes.subject
Rendering samples that i found interesting 

# data[].attributes.body
Changing from eevee sampling to cycle sampling produces an interesting effect, the loading rendering producing a grainy, pixelated effect. I wish i could replicate this in animation !

# data[].attributes.body
could not figure out how to export it so i just screen recorded it - excuse my friends yapping in the bg

# data[].attributes.body
I want to include video textures into the 3d space (which i think? you can achieve in blender?)

Could be in small built in screens or simply mapped across other objects. I want to use this to include more dog motifs as well as making the whole atmosphere more uncomfortable - like a morphing breathing porcelain urinal, or to use it for sky maps / backgrounds. Also for small screens to play grease pencil animations of a dog run cycle.

# data[].attributes.body
Here is the first test as my introduction to styly today. I wanted to test out some concepts I want to include in my final project, the surreal godlike worship of urinals, the unsettling environment and use of video textures. I created a small island in the middle of a wavy dark vastness, desolate besides only a multi monitor console with still images of toilets on them, a 3D scan of a urinal and a curved screen posterised image of a bathroom entrance.

I first experimented with scale - the rock and trash bags are scaled up vastly to create the island. I like the sense of unreality this creates. I especially like the dissonance between pixelised textures and chunky meshes that is created when small models are scaled up.

Secondly I want to include just an abundance of toilets in my work. The work itself will be a toilet, but i also want to accentuate the sheer vastness of grimy porcelain constructions and the suggestion of pee stained tile. Not only in 3D model / scan form, but in image, in video, perhaps even audio. further more the appearance of these toilets on what seems to be a desolate island creates an unsettling atmosphere.

Lastly I tried out Styly's environment, filters and particle tools, especially relating to video textures and texture maps that emphasise the digital shoddiness and lack of refinement. Inspired by games like cruelty squad and LSD dream simulator, as well as some VR works i looked at when first exploring Styly, I want the textures to be ever-morphing, abstract and eye-straining pixel goodness. By importing a video and selecting the "fracture" effect, i was able to create this rotating wall of flat circle videos that oscilate between whole and broken. I really enjoyed this aspect.

I think moving on I want to lean further into the digital degradation of it all. Like previously documented, I think i will screen record the pixel loading effect in Blender (using the cycles sample mode) and reimport it into the scene as a video to be texture. I also want to populate the environment with an uncomfortable abundance of toilet imagery through a variety of techniques - animations on tangible screens, video textures warped over walls and particles, incongruently scaled 3D models, floating, sitting, evaporating.

# data[].attributes.body
This one was the first to catch my attention. It reminded me of a level in We Love Katamari - but in addition to the low poly aesthetics there is also more of the stretched pixelated texture i am often drawn to.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
TECH.C.仙台　チーム『WiMio』 ＜ストーリー＞ この海に飲まれた世界で釣りをしよう!! ＜背景とコンセプト＞ コンセプトは『都会に海を届ける』水棲生物が都市で泳ぎそれを釣れたら楽しいという理由でこの作品が完成した。せっかくの非現実的環境なのだからと空に魚を浮かばせたり、街で遊ぶことによりその町が海に飲まれ滅びたように演出される。そんな作品です。

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
TECH.C.仙台　チーム『WiMio』 ＜ストーリー＞ この海に飲まれた世界で釣りをしよう!! ＜背景とコンセプト＞ コンセプトは『都会に海を届ける』水棲生物が都市で泳ぎそれを釣れたら楽しいという理由でこの作品が完成した。せっかくの非現実的環境なのだからと空に魚を浮かばせたり、街で遊ぶことによりその町が海に飲まれ滅びたように演出される。そんな作品です。

# data[].attributes.body
I liked the method of animation in this one. It's an AR world, and the real world image you occupy slowly gets filled with 3D scanned colourful yet vulgar figures, animated with a skeleton. I like this way of animating, but I'm unsure of how i would include time based / animations in Styly. I MUST LEARN.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Welcome to the bathroom from another dimensional world. Men and women of all ages, welcome to the bath house. This bath house is blessed by the God of mountains, and open for free to anybody. Various creatures from this side world and another gather here to take bath cure.Come sneak and peek in, enjoy your bath. Ensure that you are safe in the open space or park and enjoy.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
NEW YOKU VIEW feat. EVISBEATS / SAIGO NO SHUDAN

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Welcome to the bathroom from another dimensional world. Men and women of all ages, welcome to the bath house. This bath house is blessed by the God of mountains, and open for free to anybody. Various creatures from this side world and another gather here to take bath cure.Come sneak and peek in, enjoy your bath.

# data[].attributes.body
When I first experienced it i got the greatest motion sickness headache known to man. I had to step outside the class room and lie on the floor. I wish i could replicate this level of unpleasantness.

(i like it's use of jarring and sharp meshes, constant movement and bright colours. It was psychedelic and immersive and sickening)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
新しい絵画没入型VR作品。スタートと同時に自動で絵画作品の中に入っていきます。なるべく動かず視点もなるべく前方を見て、時たま左右前後上下に見ていただけるといいといいと思います。
私は画家です。最近はリアルスタジオとVRスタジオを行きしながら絵を描いています。そうしていると、やはり自分の絵の世界をVR空間で表現して、そこに没入してみたいという欲望がフツフツと湧いてくる訳です。そんな珍妙で奇天烈でスリリングな世界を鑑賞者がVRゴーグルを装着し絵の中をトラベルする体験をすれば､リアルと仮想がもっと地続きになるような新しい感覚を体験してもらえるのでないかと思っています。

# data[].attributes.body
This work was very surreal and unsettling, playing with the affect of vr and distance to the camera. very violating of personal space and an incredibly effective way to create an uncomfortable atmosphere. I also like it's simple linear progression. I am unsure if Styly supports interaction triggered actions or is simply operating on time. I also like the flat background textures in the second half, when you are to the side of it enough it becomes invisible.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Movie https://vimeo.com/765658695 VR artwork completely controls the viewer's sense of sight, thereby influencing other senses and even recreating a sense of physicality. In this way, VR is the ultimate form of "retinal" expression. Given that contemporary art began by rejecting retinal painting, how can we understand VR artwork in this context? This artist responsible for this rejection is Marcel Duchamp, widely regarded as the father of contemporary art. Here then, I would like to focus on his last major artwork, Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas (1944-1966). Unveiled after his death, Given is a multi-layered virtual landscaped composed of a brick wall, a reclining nude figure, a motorized waterfall, and a background screen made out of collaged and painted photographs. This tableau is visible only through two peepholes cut in a wooden door. I was moved by the fact that Duchamp, who had seemingly given up art for chess, produced an artwork in his later years which required not just his hands, but his entire body to create. In Given, I see an artwork which has melted into virtual reality. My own work, Given: Marcel Duchamp, draws inspiration from this posthumous artwork in an attempt to gain insight into Marcel Duchamp's world. Through my VR artwork, I attempt to demonstrate my respect for his ideas and his sincerity toward art. VR作品は、視界を完全に支配する事で他の知覚にも影響を与え身体性まで再現するという点では、究極の"網膜的"表現であると考える。 網膜的絵画を否定する事で始まった現代美術の文脈と、どのように接続できるだろうか。 ここで私は、その言説の張本人である「現代美術の父」マルセル・デュシャンの死後に発表された「Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas」通称「遺作」に注目したい。 覗き穴が開けられた扉、煉瓦壁、横たわる裸体像、電気仕掛けの滝、写真をコラージュし彩色された背景幕等によって複層的に作り出されたバーチャルの景色。 作品制作をやめ、専らチェスにふけっていると考えられていたデュシャンが手、どころか全身を動かして晩年に制作した作品がこれであった事に、私は感動を覚えると共に、バーチャル・リアリティとの融合を見るのである。 この作品では、「遺作」からインスピレーションを得てマルセル・デュシャンの世界に独自に迫る事を試みた。 彼の思考と美術に対する誠実さに敬意を表する。

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Movie https://vimeo.com/765658695 VR artwork completely controls the viewer's sense of sight, thereby influencing other senses and even recreating a sense of physicality. In this way, VR is the ultimate form of "retinal" expression. Given that contemporary art began by rejecting retinal painting, how can we understand VR artwork in this context?

# data[].attributes.body
I like the use of video textures and constant movement in the stationary object. reminds me of lsd dream simulator.

# data[].attributes.body
I intend to create a game like map to promote both linear progression and exploration from the player. The start of the environment will be relatively normal, most reminiscent of a normal bathroom. As the player begins to explore further, traversing deeper into the bathroom hell hole, the models will become more off scale, disorienting and eye straining. The normal grainy tile walls will transform into morphing video textures. Finally ending in a open space platform with full view of the sky map. I want to make this section the most chaotic and surreal. much like the 202 work i previously explored.

# data[].attributes.headline
Game design in relation to developing my space

# data[].attributes.subject
Game design in relation to developing my space

# data[].attributes.body
I've been away for a few weeks due to injuries and illness, but coming back into the swing of things I looked back at somethings discussed in class in week 7. I read this article about considerations of game design in terms of narrative and play and thought it was beneficial to my project. I have been approaching my VR project with a pretext of gaming, a lot of inspirations I've previously mentioned are all games, and it is also how I first experienced VR. Especially with VR, such an immersive substance that elicits a sense of exploration and wonder in addition to the deeper connection to the viewers physicality, I thought transferring knowledge of game design and specifically level / map design would be beneficial.

Games are not (often) linear stories, it takes away the agency of the player and the innate need for control and movement in a game itself. However, tools of storytelling are embedded within the environments the player encounters, the movements of the player character, the game play mechanic itself, the music, the graphics, the meat of the game itself. Of course, with this VR experience using styly, there are a lot of limitations in terms of code and intractability, however I intend to take inspiration from game / level design in order to guide the viewer to experience the space.

The plan diagram I illustrated previously is heavily inspired by level design's logic of a descent from normality into obscurity, manifesting itself in the environment. I also intend to use spatial audio to emphasize this. I was thinking of a doom mod called "My House", in which the gameplay loop consisted of beating normal doom maps in between a level of exploring a replica of the creator's house in doom. The house slowly starts being altered and distorted after every loop, eventually descending into a sort of purgatory populated by monsters and unnatural alterations to a space defined as home. In a shortened version, I intend to create a space which at first appears to be a seemingly normal toilet, but as the viewer is guided in deeper by the lack of choice, it distorts into a surreal and chaotic space.

I also intend to utilise spatial audio within styly to imbue each area with a specific sound, distorting towards the end/.

Some limitations I will have to consider is the ability to make an enclosed map like this in styly, as well as the movement of the player within this space.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
GAME DESIGN AS NARRATIVE ARCHITECTURE
By Henry Jenkins
The relationship between games and story remains a divisive question among game fans, designers, and scholars alike. At a recent academic Games Studies conference, for example, a blood feud threatened to erupt between the self-proclaimed Ludologists, who wanted to see the focus shift onto the mechanics of game play, and the Narratologists, who were interested in studying games alongside other storytelling media. Consider some recent statements made on this issue:

"Interactivity is almost the opposite of narrative; narrative flows under the direction of the author, while interactivity depends on the player for motive power" --Ernest Adams

"There is a direct, immediate conflict between the demands of a story and the demands of a game. Divergence from a story's path is likely to make for a less satisfying story; restricting a player's freedom of action is likely to make for a less satisfying game." --Greg Costikyan

"Computer games are not narratives....Rather the narrative tends to be isolated from or even work against the computer-game-ness of the game." --Jesper Juul

"Outside academic theory people are usually excellent at making distinctions between narrative, drama and games. If I throw a ball at you I don't expect you to drop it and wait until it starts telling stories."
--Markku Eskelinen

I find myself responding to this perspective with mixed feelings. On the one hand, I understand what these writers are arguing against - various attempts to map traditional narrative structures ("hypertext," "Interactive Cinema," "nonlinear narrative") onto games at the expense of an attention to their specificity as an emerging mode of entertainment. You say narrative to the average gamer and what they are apt to imagine is something on the order of a choose-your-own adventure book, a form noted for its lifelessness and mechanical exposition rather than enthralling entertainment, thematic sophistication, or character complexity. And game industry executives are perhaps justly skeptical that they have much to learn from the resolutely unpopular (and often overtly antipopular) aesthetics promoted by hypertext theorists. The application of film theory to games can seem heavy-handed and literal minded, often failing to recognize the profound differences between the two media. Yet, at the same time, there is a tremendous amount that game designers and critics could learn through making meaningful comparisons with other storytelling media. One gets rid of narrative as a framework for thinking about games only at one's own risk. In this short piece, I hope to offer a middle ground position between the ludologists and the narratologists, one that respects the particularity of this emerging medium - examining games less as stories than as spaces ripe with narrative possibility.

Let's start at some points where we might all agree:

1) Not all games tell stories. Games may be an abstract, expressive, and experiential form, closer to music or modern dance than to cinema. Some ballets ( The Nutcracker for example) tell stories, but storytelling isn't an intrinsic or defining feature of dance. Similarly, many of my own favorite games - Tetris, Blix, Snood - are simple graphic games that do not lend themselves very well to narrative exposition. To understand such games, we need other terms and concepts beyond narrative, including interface design and expressive movement for starters. The last thing we want to do is to reign in the creative experimentation that needs to occur in the earlier years of a medium's development.

2)Many games do have narrative aspirations. Minimally, they want to tap the emotional residue of previous narrative experiences. Often, they depend on our familiarity with the roles and goals of genre entertainment to orientate us to the action, and in many cases, game designers want to create a series of narrative experiences for the player. Given those narrative aspirations, it seems reasonable to suggest that some understanding of how games relate to narrative is necessary before we understand the aesthetics of game design or the nature of contemporary game culture.

3) Narrative analysis need not be prescriptive, even if some narratologist - Janet Murray is the most oft cited example - do seem to be advocating for games to pursue particular narrative forms. There is not one future of games. The goal should be to foster diversification of genres, aesthetics, and audiences, to open gamers to the broadest possible range of experiences. The past few years has been one of enormous creative experimentation and innovation within the games industry, as might be represented by a list of some of the groundbreaking titles. The Sims, Black and White, Majestic, Shenmue; each represents profoundly different concepts of what makes for compelling game play. A discussion of the narrative potentials of games need not imply a privileging of storytelling over all the other possible things games can do, even if we might suggest that if game designers are going to tell stories, they should tell them well. In order to do that, game designers, who are most often schooled in computer science or graphic design, need to be retooled in the basic vocabulary of narrative theory.

4) The experience of playing games can never be simply reduced to the experience of a story. Many other factors which have little or nothing to do with storytelling per se contribute to the development of a great games and we need to significantly broaden our critical vocabulary for talking about games to deal more fully with those other topics. Here, the ludologist's insistence that game scholars focus more attention on the mechanics of game play seems totally in order.

5) If some games tell stories, they are unlikely to tell them in the same ways that other media tell stories. Stories are not empty content that can be ported from one media pipeline to another. One would be hard-pressed, for example, to translate the internal dialogue of Proust's In Remembrance of Things Past into a compelling cinematic experience and the tight control over viewer experience which Hitchcock achieves in his suspense films would be directly antithetical to the aesthetics of good game design. We must, therefore, be attentive to the particularity of games as a medium, specifically what distinguishes them from other narrative traditions. Yet, in order to do so requires precise comparisons - not the mapping of old models onto games but a testing of those models against existing games to determine what features they share with other media and how they differ.

Much of the writing in the ludologist tradition is unduly polemical: they are so busy trying to pull game designers out of their "cinema envy" or define a field where no hypertext theorist dare to venture that they are prematurely dismissing the use value of narrative for understanding their desired object of study. For my money, a series of conceptual blind spots prevent them from developing a full understanding of the interplay between narrative and games. First, the discussion operates with too narrow a model of narrative, one preoccupied with the rules and conventions of classical linear storytelling at the expense of consideration of other kinds of narratives, not only the modernist and postmodernist experimentation that inspired the hypertext theorists, but also popular traditions which emphasize spatial exploration over causal event chains or which seek to balance between the competing demands of narrative and spectacle. Second, the discussion operates with too limited an understanding of narration, focusing more on the activities and aspirations of the storyteller and too little on the process of narrative comprehension. Third, the discussion deals only with the question of whether whole games tell stories and not whether narrative elements might enter games at a more localized level. Finally, the discussion assumes that narratives must be self-contained rather than understanding games as serving some specific functions within a new transmedia storytelling environment. Rethinking each of these issues might lead us to a new understanding of the relationship between games and stories. Specifically, I want to introduce an important third term into this discussion - spatiality - and argue for an understanding of game designers less as storytellers and more as narrative architects.

SPATIAL STORIES AND ENVIRONMENTAL STORYTELLING
Game designers don't simply tell stories; they design worlds and sculpt spaces. It is no accident, for example, that game design documents have historically been more interested in issues of level design than plotting or character motivation. A prehistory of video and computer games might take us through the evolution of paper mazes or board games, both preoccupied with the design of spaces, even where they also provided some narrative context. Monopoly, for example, may tell a narrative about how fortunes are won and lost; the individual Chance cards may provide some story pretext for our gaining or losing a certain number of places; but ultimately, what we remember is the experience of moving around the board and landing on someone's real estate. Performance theorists have described RPGs as a mode of collaborative storytelling, but the Dungeon Master's activities start with designing the space - the dungeon - where the players' quest will take place. Even many of the early text-based games, such as Zork, which could have told a wide array of different kinds of stories, centered around enabling players to move through narratively-compelling spaces: "You are facing the north side of a white house. There is no door here, and all of the windows are boarded up. To the north a narrow path winds through the trees." The early Nintendo games have simple narrative hooks - rescue Princess Toadstool - but what gamers found astonishing when they first played them were their complex and imaginative graphic realms, which were so much more sophisticated than the simple grids that Pong or Pac-Man had offered us a decade earlier. When we refer to such influential early works as Shigeru Miyamoto's Super Mario Bros. as "scroll games," we situate them alongside a much older tradition of spatial storytelling: many Japanese scroll paintings map, for example, the passing of the seasons onto an unfolding space. When you adopt a film into a game, the process typically involves translating events in the film into environments within the game. When gamer magazines want to describe the experience of gameplay, they are more likely to reproduce maps of the game world than to recount their narratives. Before we can talk about game narratives, then, we need to talk about game spaces. Across a series of essays, I have made the case that game consoles should be regarded as machines for generating compelling spaces, that their virtual playspaces have helped to compensate for the declining place of the traditional backyard in contemporary boy culture, and that the core narratives behind many games center around the struggle to explore, map, and master contested spaces. Communications in Cyberspace (New York: Sage, 1994); Henry Jenkins, "'Complete Freedom of Movement': Video Games as Gendered Playspace," in Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins (Ed.) From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998). Here, I want to broaden that discussion further to consider in what ways the structuring of game space facilitates different kinds of narrative experiences.

As such, games fit within a much older tradition of spatial stories, which have often taken the form of hero's odysseys, quest myths, or travel narratives. The best works of J.R.R. Tolkien, Jules Verne, Homer, L. Frank Baum, or Jack London fall loosely within this tradition, as does, for example, the sequence in War and Peace which describes Pierre's aimless wanderings across the battlefield at Borodino. Often, such works exist on the outer borders of literature. They are much loved by readers, to be sure, and passed down from one generation to another, but they rarely figure in the canon of great literary works. How often, for example, has science fiction been criticized for being preoccupied with world-making at the expense of character psychology or plot development? These writers seem constantly to be pushing against the limits of what can be accomplished in a printed text and thus their works fare badly against aesthetic standards defined around classically-constructed novels. In many cases, the characters - our guides through these richly-developed worlds - are stripped down to the bare bones, description displaces exposition, and plots fragment into a series of episodes and encounters. When game designers draw story elements from existing film or literary genres, they are most apt to tap those genres - fantasy, adventure, science fiction, horror, war - which are most invested in world-making and spatial storytelling. Games, in turn, may more fully realize the spatiality of these stories, giving a much more immersive and compelling representation of their narrative worlds. Anyone who doubts that Tolstoy might have achieved his true calling as a game designer should reread the final segment of War and Peace where he works through how a series of alternative choices might have reversed the outcome of Napoleon's Russian campaign. The passage is dead weight in the context of a novel, yet it outlines ideas which could be easily communicated in a god game like Civilization.

Don Carson, who worked as a Senior Show Designer for Walt Disney Imagineering, has argued that game designers can learn a great deal by studying techniques of "environmental storytelling" which Disney employs in designing amusement park attractions. Carson explains, "The story element is infused into the physical space a guest walks or rides through. It is the physical space that does much of the work of conveying the story the designers are trying to tell....Armed only with their own knowledge of the world, and those visions collected from movies and books, the audience is ripe to be dropped into your adventure. The trick is to play on those memories and expectations to heighten the thrill of venturing into your created universe." The amusement park attraction doesn't so much reproduce the story of a literary work, such as The Wind in the Willows, as it evokes its atmosphere; the original story provides "a set of rules that will guide the design and project team to a common goal" and which will help give structure and meaning to the visitor's experience. If, for example, the attraction centers around pirates, Carson writes, "every texture you use, every sound you play, every turn in the road should reinforce the concept of pirates," while any contradictory element may shatter the sense of immersion into this narrative universe. The same might be said for a game like Sea Dogs which, no less than The Pirates of the Caribbean, depends on its ability to map our pre-existing pirate fantasies. The most significant difference is that amusement park designers count on visitors keeping their hands and arms in the car at all times and thus have a greater control in shaping our total experience, whereas game designers have to develop worlds where we can touch, grab, and fling things about at will.

Environmental storytelling creates the preconditions for an immersive narrative experience in at least one of four ways: spatial stories can evoke pre-existing narrative associations; they can provide a staging ground where narrative events are enacted; they may embed narrative information within their mise-en-scene; or they provide resources for emergent narratives.

EVOCATIVE SPACES
The most compelling amusement park attractions build upon stories or genre traditions already well known to visitors, allowing them to enter physically into spaces they have visited many times before in their fantasies. These attractions may either remediate a pre-existing story ( Back to the Future) or draw upon a broadly shared genre tradition (Disney's Haunted Mansion). Such works do not so much tell self-contained stories as draw upon our previously existing narrative competencies. They can paint their worlds in fairly broad outlines and count on the visitor/player to do the rest. Something similar might be said of many games. For example, American McGee's Alice is an original interpretation of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. Alice has been pushed into madness after years of living with uncertainty about whether her Wonderland experiences were real or hallucinations; now, she's come back into this world and is looking for blood. McGee's wonderland is not a whimsical dreamscape but a dark nightmare realm. McGee can safely assume that players start the game with a pretty well-developed mental map of the spaces, characters, and situations associated with Carroll's fictional universe and that they will read his distorted and often monstrous images against the background of mental images formed from previous encounters with storybook illustrations and Disney movies. McGee rewrites Alice's story, in large part, by redesigning Alice's spaces.

Arguing against games as stories, Jesper Juul suggests, "you clearly can't deduct the story of Star Wars from Star Wars the game," where-as a film version of a novel will give you at least the broad outlines of the plot. This is a pretty old fashioned model of the process of adaptation. Increasingly, we inhabit a world of transmedia story-telling, one which depends less on each individual work being self-sufficient than on each work contributing to a larger narrative economy. The Star Wars game may not simply retell the story of Star Wars, but it doesn't have to in order to enrich or expand our experience of the Star Wars saga. We already know the story before we even buy the game and would be frustrated if all it offered us was a regurgitation of the original film experience. Rather, the Star Wars game exists in dialogue with the films, conveying new narrative experiences through its creative manipulation of environmental details. One can imagine games taking their place within a larger narrative system with story information communicated through books, film, television, comics, and other media, each doing what it does best, each relatively autonomous experience, but the richest understanding of the story world coming to those who follow the narrative across the various channels. In such a system, what games do best will almost certainly center around their ability to give concrete shape to our memories and imaginings of the storyworld, creating an immersive environment we can wander through and interact with.

ENACTING STORIES
Most often, when we discuss games as stories, we are referring to games that either enable players to perform or witness narrative events - for example, to grab a lightsabre and dispatch Darth Maul in the case of a Star Wars game. Narrative enters such games on two levels - in terms of broadly defined goals or conflicts and on the level of localized incidents.

Many game critics assume that all stories must be classically constructed with each element tightly integrated into the overall plot trajectory. Costikyan writes, for example, that "a story is a controlled experience; the author consciously crafts it, choosing certain events precisely, in a certain order, to create a story with maximum impact." Adams claims, "a good story hangs together the way a good jigsaw puzzle hangs together. When you pick it up, every piece locked tightly in place next to its neighbors." Spatial stories, on the other hand, are often dismissed as episodic - that is, each episode (or set piece) can become compelling on its own terms without contributing significantly to the plot development and often, the episodes could have been reordered without significantly impacting our experience as a whole. There may be broad movements or series of stages within the story, as Troy Dunniway suggests when he draws parallels between the stages in the Hero's journey as outlined by Joseph Campbell and the levels of a classic adventure game, but within each stage, the sequencing of actions may be quite loose. Spatial stories are not badly constructed stories; rather, they are stories which respond to alternative aesthetic principles, privileging spatial exploration over plot development. Spatial stories are held together by broadly defined goals and conflicts and pushed forward by the character's movement across the map. Their resolution often hinges on the player's reaching their final destination, though, as Mary Fuller notes, not all travel narratives end successfully or resolve the narrative enigmas which set them into motion. Once again, we are back to principles of "environmental storytelling." The organization of the plot becomes a matter of designing the geography of imaginary worlds, so that obstacles thwart and affordances facilitate the protagonist's forward movement towards resolution. Over the past several decades, game designers have become more and more adept at setting and varying the rhythm of game play through features of the game space.

Narrative can also enter games on the level of localized incident, or what I am calling micronarratives. We might understand how micronarratives work by thinking about the Odessa Steps sequence in Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potempkin. First, recognize that, whatever its serious moral tone, the scene basically deals with the same kind of material as most games - the steps are a contested space with one group (the peasants) trying to advance up and another (the Cossacks) moving down. Eisenstein intensifies our emotional engagement with this large scale conflict through a series of short narrative units. The woman with the baby carriage is perhaps the best-known of those micronarratives. Each of these units builds upon stock characters or situations drawn from the repertoire of melodrama. None of them last more than a few seconds, though Eisenstein prolongs them (and intensifies their emotional impact) through crosscutting between multiple incidents. Eisenstein used the term, "attraction," to describe such emotionally-packed elements in his work; contemporary game designers might call them "memorable moments." Just as some memorable moments in games depend on sensations (the sense of speed in a racing game) or perceptions (the sudden expanse of sky in a snowboarding game) as well as narrative hooks, Eisenstein used the word, attractions, broadly to describe any element within a work which produces a profound emotional impact and theorized that the themes of the work could be communicate across and through these discrete elements. Even games which do not create large-scale plot trajectories may well depend on these micronarratives to shape the player's emotional experience. Micronarratives may be cut scenes, but they don't have to be. One can imagine a simple sequence of preprogrammed actions through which an opposing player responds to your successful touchdown in a football game as a micronarrative.

Game critics often note that the player's participation poses a potential threat to the narrative construction, where-as the hard rails of the plotting can overly constrain the "freedom, power, self-expression" associated with interactivity. The tension between performance (or game play) and exposition (or story) is far from unique to games. The pleasures of popular culture often center around spectacular performance numbers and self-contained set pieces. It makes no sense to describe musical numbers or gag sequences or action scenes as disruptions of the film's plots: the reason we go to see a kung fu movie is to see Jackie Chan show his stuff. Yet, few films consist simply of such moments, typically falling back on some broad narrative exposition to create a framework within which localized actions become meaningful. We might describe musicals, action films or slapstick comedies as having accordion-like structures. Certain plot points are fixed where-as other moments can be expanded or contracted in response to audience feedback without serious consequences to the overall plot. The introduction needs to establish the character's goals or explain the basic conflict; the conclusion needs to show the successful completion of those goals or the final defeat of the antagonist. In commedia del arte, for example, the masks define the relationships between the characters and give us some sense of their goals and desires. The masks set limits on the action, even though the performance as a whole is created through improvisation. The actors have mastered the possible moves or lassi associated with each character, much as a game player has mastered the combination of buttons that must be pushed to enable certain character actions. No author prescribes what the actors do once they get on the stage, but the shape of the story emerges from this basic vocabulary of possible actions and from the broad parameters set by this theatrical tradition. Some of the lassi can contribute to the plot development, but many of them are simple restagings of the basic oppositions (the knave tricks the master or gets beaten). These performance or spectacle-centered genres often display a pleasure in process - in the experiences along the road - that can overwhelm any strong sense of goal or resolution, while exposition can be experienced as an unwelcome interruption to the pleasure of performance. Game designers struggle with this same balancing act - trying to determine how much plot will create a compelling framework and how much freedom players can enjoy at a local level without totally derailing the larger narrative trajectory. As inexperienced storytellers, they often fall back on rather mechanical exposition through cut scenes, much as early film makers were sometimes overly reliant on intertitles rather than learning the skills of visual storytelling. Yet, as with any other aesthetic tradition, game designers are apt to develop craft through a process of experimentation and refinement of basic narrative devices, becoming better at shaping narrative experiences without unduly constraining the space for improvisation within the game.

EMBEDDED NARRATIVES
Russian formalist critics make a useful distinction between plot (or Syuzhet) which refers to, in Kristen Thompson's terms, "the structured set of all causal events as we see and hear them presented in the film itself," and story (or fabula), which refers to the viewer's mental construction of the chronology of those events. Few films or novels are absolutely linear; most make use of some forms of back story which is revealed gradually as we move through the narrative action. The detective story is the classic illustration of this principle, telling two stories - one more or less chronological ( the story of the investigation itself) and the other told radically out of sequence (the events motivating and leading up to the murder). According to this model, narrative comprehension is an active process by which viewers assemble and make hypothesis about likely narrative developments on the basis of information drawn from textual cues and clues. As they move through the film, spectators test and reformulate their mental maps of the narrative action and the story space. In games, players are forced to act upon those mental maps, to literally test them against the game world itself. If you are wrong about whether the bad guys lurk behind the next door, you will find out soon enough - perhaps by being blown away and having to start the game over. The heavy-handed exposition that opens many games serves a useful function in orienting spectators to the core premises so that they are less likely to make stupid and costly errors as they first enter into the game world. Some games create a space for rehearsal, as well, so that we can make sure we understand our character's potential moves before we come up against the challenges of navigating narrational space.

Read in this light, a story is less a temporal structure than a body of information. The author of a film or a book has a high degree of control over when and if we receive specific bits of information, but a game designer can somewhat control the narrational process by distributing the information across the game space. Within an open-ended and exploratory narrative structure like a game, essential narrative information must be redundantly presented across a range of spaces and artifacts, since one can not assume the player will necessarily locate or recognize the significance of any given element. Game designers have developed a variety of kludges which allow them to prompt players or steer them towards narratively salient spaces. Yet, this is no different from the ways that redundancy is built into a television soap opera, where the assumption is that a certain number of viewers are apt to miss any given episode, or even in classical Hollywood narrative, where the law of three suggests that any essential plot point needs to be communicated in at least three ways.

To continue with the detective example, then, one can imagine the game designer as developing two kinds of narratives - one relatively unstructured and controlled by the player as they explore the game space and unlock its secrets; the other pre-structured but embedded within the mise-en-scene awaiting discovery. The game world becomes a kind of information space, a memory palace. Myst is a highly successful example of this kind of embedded narrative, but embedded narrative does not necessarily require an emptying of the space of contemporary narrative activities, as a game like Half Life might suggest. Embedded narrative can and often does occur within contested spaces. We may have to battle our way past antagonists, navigate through mazes, or figure out how to pick locks in order to move through the narratively-impregnated mise-en-scene. Such a mixture of enacted and embedded narrative elements can allow for a balance between the flexibility of interactivity and the coherence of a pre-authored narrative.

Using Quake as an example, Jesper Juuls argues that flashbacks are impossible within games, because the game play always occurs in real time. Yet, this is to confuse story and plot. Games are no more locked into an eternal present than films are always linear. Many games contain moments of revelation or artifacts that shed light on past actions. Carson suggests that part of the art of game design comes in finding artful ways of embedding narrative information into the environment without destroying its immersiveness and without giving the player a sensation of being drug around by the neck: "Staged areas...[can] lead the game player to come to their own conclusions about a previous event or to suggest a potential danger just ahead. Some examples include...doors that have been broken open, traces of a recent explosion, a crashed vehicle, a piano dropped from a great height, charred remains of a fire." Players, he argues, can return to a familiar space later in the game and discover it has been transformed by subsequent (off-screen) events. Clive Barker's The Undying, for example, creates a powerful sense of back story in precisely this manner. It is a story of sibling rivalry which has taken on supernatural dimensions. As we visit each character's space, we have a sense of the human they once were and the demon they have become. In Peter Muleneux's Black and White, the player's ethical choices within the game leave traces on the landscape or reconfigure the physical appearances of their characters. Here, we might read narrative consequences off mise-en-scene the same way we read Dorian Grey's debauchery off of his portrait. Carson describes such narrative devices as "following Saknussemm," referring to the ways that the protagonists of Jules Verne's Journey to The Center of the Earth, keep stumbling across clues and artifacts left behind by a sixteenth Century Icelandic scientist/explorer Arne Saknussemm, and readers become fascinated to see what they can learn about his ultimate fate as the travelers come closer to reaching their intended destination.

Game designers might study melodrama for a better understanding of how artifacts or spaces can contain affective potential or communicate significant narrative information. Melodrama depends on the external projection of internal states, often through costume design, art direction, or lighting choices. As we enter spaces, we may become overwhelmed with powerful feelings of loss or nostalgia, especially in those instances where the space has been transformed by narrative events. Consider, for example, the moment in Doctor Zhivago when the characters return to the mansion, now completely deserted and encased in ice, or when Scarlet O'Hara travels across the scorched remains of her family estate in Gone With the Wind following the burning of Atlanta. In Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca, the title character never appears, but she exerts a powerful influence over the other characters - especially the second Mrs. DeWinter who must inhabit a space where every artifact recalls her predecessor. Hitchcock creates a number of scenes of his protagonist wandering through Rebecca's space, passing through locked doors, staring at her overwhelming portrait on the wall, touching her things in drawers, or feeling the texture of fabrics and curtains. No matter where she goes in the house, she can not escape Rebecca's memory.

A game like Neil Young's Majestic pushes this notion of embedded narrative to its logical extreme. Here, the embedded narrative is no longer contained within the console but rather flows across multiple information channels. The player's activity consists of sorting through documents, deciphering codes, making sense of garbled transmissions, moving step by step towards a fuller understanding of the conspiracy which is the game's primary narrative focus. We follow links between websites; we get information through webcasts, faxes, e-mails, and phonecalls. Such an embedded narrative doesn't require a branching story structure but rather depends on scrambling the pieces of a linear story and allowing us to reconstruct the plot through our acts of detection, speculation, exploration, and decryption. Not surprisingly, most embedded narratives, at present, take the form of detective or conspiracy stories, since these genres help to motivate the player's active examination of clues and exploration of spaces and provide a rationale for our efforts to reconstruct the narrative of past events. Yet, as my examples above suggest, melodrama provides another - and as yet largely unexplored - model for how an embedded story might work, as we read letters and diaries, snoop around in bedroom drawers and closets, in search of secrets which might shed light on the relationships between characters.

EMERGENT NARRATIVES
The Sims represents a fourth model of how narrative possibilities might get mapped onto game space. Emergent narratives are not pre-structured or pre-programmed, taking shape through the game play, yet they are not as unstructured, chaotic, and frustrating as life itself. Game worlds, ultimately, are not real worlds, even those as densely developed as Shenmue or as geographically expansive as Everquest. Will Wright frequently describes The Sims as a sandbox or dollhouse game, suggesting that it should be understood as a kind of authoring environment within which players can define their own goals and write their own stories. Yet, unlike Microsoft Word, the game doesn't open on a blank screen. Most players come away from spending time with The Sims with some degree of narrative satisfaction. Wright has created a world ripe with narrative possibilities, where each design decision has been made with an eye towards increasing the prospects of interpersonal romance or conflict. The ability to design our own "skins" encourages players to create characters who are emotionally significant to them, to rehearse their own relationships with friends, family or coworkers or to map characters from other fictional universes onto The Sims. A quick look at the various scrapbooks players have posted on the web suggests that they have been quick to take advantage of its relatively open-ended structure. Yet, let's not underestimate the designers' contributions. The characters have a will of their own, not always submitting easily to the player's control, as when a depressed protagonist refuses to seek employment, preferring to spend hour upon hour soaking in their bath or moping on the front porch. Characters are given desires, urges, and needs, which can come into conflict with each other, and thus produce dramatically compelling encounters. Characters respond emotionally to events in their environment, as when characters mourn the loss of a loved one. Our choices have consequences, as when we spend all of our money and have nothing left to buy them food. The gibberish language and flashing symbols allow us to map our own meanings onto the conversations, yet the tone of voice and body language can powerfully express specific emotional states, which encourage us to understand those interactions within familiar plot situations. The designers have made choices about what kinds of actions are and are not possible in this world, such as allowing for same sex kisses, but limiting the degree of explicit sexual activity that can occur. (Good programers may be able to get around such restrictions, but most players probably work within the limitations of the program.)

Janet Murray's Hamlet on the Holodeck might describe some of what Wright accomplishes here as procedural authorship. Yet, I would argue that his choices go deeper than this, working not simply through the programming, but also through the design of the game space. For example, just as a doll house offers a streamlined representation which cuts out much of the clutter of an actual domestic space, The Sims' houses are stripped down to only a small number of artifacts, each of which perform specific kinds of narrative functions. Newspapers, for example, communicate job information. Characters sleep in beds. Bookcases can make your smarter. Bottles are for spinning and thus motivating lots of kissing. Such choices result in a highly legible narrative space. In his classic study, The Image of The City, Kevin Lynch made the case that urban designers needed to be more sensitive to the narrative potentials of city spaces, describing city planning as "the deliberate manipulation of the world for sensuous ends." Urban designers exert even less control than game designers over how people use the spaces they create or what kinds of scenes they stage there. Yet, some kinds of space lend themselves more readily to narratively memorable or emotionally meaningful experiences than others. Lynch suggested that urban planners should not attempt to totally predetermine the uses and meanings of the spaces they create:"a landscape whose every rock tells a story may make difficult the creation of fresh stories" Rather, he proposes an aesthetic of urban design which endows each space with "poetic and symbolic" potential: "Such a sense of place in itself enhances every human activity that occurs there, and encourages the deposit of a memory trace." Game designers would do well to study Lynch's book, especially as they move into the production of game platforms which support player-generated narratives.

In each of these cases, choices about the design and organization of game spaces have narratological consequences. In the case of evoked narratives, spatial design can either enhance our sense of immersion within a familiar world or communicate a fresh perspective on that story through the altering of established details. In the case of enacted narratives, the story itself may be structured around the character's movement through space and the features of the environment may retard or accelerate that plot trajectory. In the case of embedded narratives, the game space becomes a memory palace whose contents must be deciphered as the player tries to reconstruct the plot and in the case of emergent narratives, game spaces are designed to be rich with narrative potential, enabling the story-constructing activity of players. In each case, it makes sense to think of game designers less as storytellers than as narrative architects.

(1) The term, Ludology, was coined by Espen Aardseth, who advocates the emergence of a new field of study, specifically focused on the study of games and game play, rather than framed through the concerns of pre-existing disciplines or other media.
(2) Ernest Adams, "Three Problems For Interactive Storytellers," Gamasutra,
(3) Greg Costikyan, "Where Stories End and Games Begin," Game Developer, September 2000, pp. 44-53.
(4) Jesper Juul, "A Clash Between Games and Narrative," paper presented at the Digital Arts and Culture Conference, Bergen, November 1998, http://www.jesperjuul.dk/text/DA%20Paper%201998.html. For a more recent formulation of this same argument, see Jesper Juul, "Games Telling Stories?", Game Studies, http://cmc.uib.no/gamestudies/0101/juul-gts
(5) Markku Eskelinen, "The Gaming Situation," Game Studies, htttp:cmc.uib.no/gamestudies/0101/eskelinen

(6) Eskelinen, op cit., takes Janet Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997) to task for her narrative analysis of Tetris as "a perfect enactment of the over tasked lives of Americans in the 1990s - of the constant bombardment of tasks that demand our attention and that we must somehow fit into our overcrowded schedules and clear off our desks in order to make room for the next onslaught." Eskelinen is correct to note that the abstraction of Tetris would seem to defy narrative interpretation, but that is not the same thing as insisting that no meaningful analysis can be made of the game and its fit within contemporary culture. Tetris might well express something of the frenzied pace of modern life, just as modern dances might, without being a story.
(7) "A story is a collection of facts in a time sequenced order that suggests a cause and effect relationship." Chris Crawford, The Art of Computer Game Design, chapter one, http://members.nbci.com/kalid/art/art.html . "The story is the antithesis of game. The best way to tell a story is in linear form. The best way to create a game is to provide a structure within which the player has freedom of action." Costikyan, op cit.
(8) "In its richest form, storytelling - narrative - means the reader's surrender to the author. The author takes the reader by the hand and leads him into the world of his imagination. The reader has a role to play, but it's a fairly passive role: to pay attention, to understand, perhaps to think...but not to act." Adams, op. cit.
(9) As I have noted elsewhere, these maps take a distinctive form - not objective or abstract top-down views but composites of screenshots which represent the game world as we will encounter it in our travels through its space. Game space never exists in abstract, but always experientially.
(10) Henry Jenkins and Mary Fuller, "Nintendo and New World Narrative," in Steve Jones (ed.)

(11) My concept of spatial stories is strongly influenced by Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) and Henri LeFebvre, The Production of Space (London: Blackwell, 1991).
(12) Don Carson, "Environmental Storytelling: Creating Immersive 3D Worlds Using Lessons Learned From the Theme Park Industry," Gamasutra.com, http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20000301/carson_pfv.htm
(13) Juul, op. cit.
(14) Costikyan, . For a fuller discussion of the norms of classically constructed narrative, see David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristen Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
(15) Adams, op. cit.
(16) Troy Dunniway, "Using the Hero's Journey in Games," Gamasutra.com, http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20001127/dunniway_pfv.htm.
(17) Fuller and Jenkins, op. cit.
(18) Adams, op. cit.
(19) For useful discussion of this issue in film theory, see Donald Crafton, "Pie and Chase: Gag, Spectacle and Narrative in Slapstick Comedy," in Kristine Brunovska Karnick and Henry Jenkins (Eds.) Classical Hollywood Comedy (New York: Routledge/American Film Institute, 1995); Henry Jenkins, What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and The Vaudeville Aesthetic (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991); Rick Altman, The American Film Musical (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999); Tom Gunning, "The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant Gare" in Thomas Elsaesser with Adam Barker (Eds.), Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative (London: British Film Institute, 1990); Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and 'The Frenzy of the Visible' (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
(20) "Games that just have nonstop action are fun for a while but often get boring. This is because of the lack of intrigue, suspense, and drama. How many action movies have you seen where the hero of the story shoots his gun every few seconds and is always on the run? People loose interest watching this kind of movie. Playing a game is a bit different, but the fact is the brain becomes over stimulated after too much nonstop action." Dunniway, op. cit.
(21) See, for example, John Rudlin, Commedia Dell'Arte: An Actor's Handbook (New York: Routledge, 1994) for a detailed inventory of the masks and lassi of this tradition.
(22) Kristen Thompson, Breaking the Glass Armor: Neoformalist Film Analysis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp.39-40.
(23) See, for example, David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1989) and Edward Branigan, Narrative Comprehension and Film (New York: Routledge, 1992).
(24) Juul, op cit.
(25) Carson, op. cit.
(26) "..." Murray, p. .
(27) Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960), p 116.
(28) Ibid, p. 6.
(29) Ibid, p 119.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The relationship between games and story remains a divisive question among game fans, designers, and scholars alike. At a recent academic Games Studies conference, for example, a blood feud threatened to erupt between the self-proclaimed Ludologists, who wanted to see the focus shift onto the mechanics of game play, and the Narratologists, who were interested in studying games alongside other storytelling media.(1) Consider some recent statements made on this issue:

# data[].attributes.body
I am coming across a lot of limitations and technical difficulties within styly, mostly being the ability for the program to run well, as well as reaching the asset storage limit. I will have to make my project more simple to accommodate these limitations but I feel it will result in a more simplified and not necessarily as good project.

options:

creating a urinal "museum", a sterile and empty gallery space with toilets and urinals on display. This emphasizes the concept of animosity and an uncomfortable hostile environment with focus on object and sculptural forms. This is inspired by the work Monuments To Guilt https://louisthings.itch.io/monuments-to-guilt

Glitch mindfield - to create a large open space like many other experiences in styly occupied by distorted and glitched toilet models and video textures.

another variation of this could be a more simplified bathroom space, clashing the aesthetics of badly photoscanned models with bright and glitchy video textures.

# data[].attributes.body
I am currently at a point where I can only open styly, and any action I take crashes the site. not really sure what to do now.

# data[].attributes.body
some issues with allocated memory web GL? the thing is I can't even open the project to edit or allocate more memory to it, or play it in public view.

# data[].attributes.body
Status update, etc. explores the surreal and uncomfortable mindscape of the toilet. Specifically, the experience of the male toilet as a transgender man. Using intentionally distorted and incomplete photo scans of various toilets and urinals, I intend to emulate the transportation of a seemingly domestic and regular space into a foreign and uncomfortable space. A clearly institutionally gendered space, reverberating with a hostile and desolate reminder of:" You don't belong here.". I am attempting to replicate the conceptual dialectic contradiction I experience whenever entering these spaces, battling between a need for conformity to my own gender identity, and a fear for safety. I use corrupted and jarring video textures to further represent the sense of chaos and sub-reality brought by an incongruent thought to body interaction with space. To immerse the player in this mind scape further, I constructed a sound scape by combining synth drones, dark echoing ambience and jarring, rhythmic alarm noises. In the process of creating this project, I found myself struggling to use Styly. It presented me with many challenges including lagging web usage, as well as total corruption of the finished project. Because of the limited allocated memory, I was not able to utilise many of my scanned models. I also had to completely redo the whole space because it simply wouldn't let me open my file.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
MR elective assignment 1: Capturing the essence of a space

# data[].attributes.body
unempathetic / immersive dinner with a loved one simulator

game like graphics, simplicity

360 video made with animated scenes in blender or godot

Article by Robert Yang

inspired by cruelty squad intro

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
BY Robert Yang

THEME LEADER James Bridle

SUPPORTED BY University of Melbourne, as part of the NGV Triennial - exploring the emerging intersections of art, design, science and society.

In a 2015 TED Talk VR filmmaker Chris Milk claimed that virtual reality could be the ultimate 'empathy machine'. Instead of fading away into irrelevance like most TED Talks, this concept of the VR empathy machine has somehow survived into 2017. VR boosters, such as the United Nations Virtual Reality (UNVR) program and influential podcast Voices of VR, continue to push this line of thinking.
I'm here to argue absolutely in the strongest terms: I am against the promise of any claim to a 'VR empathy machine', and I am against it forever.

The rhetoric of the empathy machine asks us to endorse technology without questioning the politics of its construction or who profits from it. Empathy is good, and VR facilitates empathy, so therefore VR is good - no questions please. (And if you hate VR that means you hate empathy!) It is a disturbing marketing strategy, and I hope it's obvious how making a refugee tourism simulator your 'flagship' VR experience can come across as an extremely cynical use of pain and suffering to sell your product.

I also doubt any empathy machine supporters have ever been the actual 'target' of an actual empathy machine. Ironically, as empathisers, they seem totally unable to empathise with the empathised, so let me spell this out. The basic problem with empathy machines is, what if we don't want your fucking empathy?

First, let's get some other basic questions about VR empathy out of the way. How do you know this is actually empathy you're feeling? Do you really need to wear a VR headset in order to empathise with someone? Can't you just listen to them and believe them? You need to be entertained as well? Are you sure this isn't about you?

I am very familiar with people annexing other peoples' experiences under the banner of empathy. Specifically, I've been making realistic 3D games about gay relationships for a while, and the vast majority of my players and fans happen to be straight people.This leads to a widely held but incorrect assumption that I make my games for 'straight people to understand what being gay is like' - and some of the worst homophobes on YouTube even call my games 'gay simulators' so they can react with disgust towards them.

This 'straight empathy' suddenly makes my games more about 'how beautiful and benevolent the straight people are, to tolerate my gay existence instead of vomiting' - instead of highlighting gay culture or queer solidarity, as I intended. I want to imagine fantastic worlds where straight people aren't as important - and yet, they demand that I dance for them in VR, whenever they want, forever. For this reason,
I hate it when people think my games are like empathy machines. I don't want your empathy, I want justice!

As usual, tech needs to step back and maybe, for once, consider the possible cruelty of what they're doing and demanding of people. Empathy, like any emotion, is not only a buzzword to decorate your bank-branded tech start-up playground - it is also a complicated tool with history and politics behind its deployment.

In her book Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers Project, historian Catherine Stewart talks about one of the most powerful 'analogue' empathy machines ever built: the American slave narrative. You can read the full write-up on Slate for a more detailed account, but I'll try to summarise it right here and now.

During the Great Depression, the US government sent out researchers to interview elderly ex-slaves across the American South to record their experiences and histories with slavery. This sounds like a great and noble thing, putting people to work to record and recognising the pain of oppressed people - but, uh, that's not exactly how it actually turned out.

For one thing, the researchers were mostly white people. And they weren't just any white people, but local white people who had enough privilege to be educated and win government research positions. They were white people often descended from educated slave-owning families across the South. Some of the interviewers were even members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

So let's try this 'empathy' experiment. Imagine you are an ex-slave, forever traumatised by white people enslaving you. One day, totally unannounced, your former torturer's white friends knock on your door and ask you about your life as a slave... Would you tell these white people about how bad white people were? Or... would you try to put a positive spin on slavery, and tell this white person that it wasn't so bad, that white people were always fair and good, and even claim that you deserved to be whipped?

Or maybe you would change the subject, tell them some folktales. It'll seem to them like slave culture was so exotic and eclectic that it was a 'shame' that it ended. You could even tell a story about how you're afraid of ghosts and how white people remind you of ghosts. They are more likely to accept stereotypes of black superstition than tales of white cruelty.

When Stewart compared white interviewers' reports with the smaller number of black interviewers' reports, she found that black interviewers recorded many more up-front stories about cruel oppression and pain. In some cases, white supervisors would even advise their black researchers to look for more 'variety' because they had enough of the 'white people are bad' content. They wanted to hear more about the 'good times' during slavery ... So what seemed like 'raw', 'authentic', 'immediate' stories to white readers (even if they were Northern abolitionists) were actually extremely constructed and self-conscious stories that black people told to appease white people.

Black people were just trying to survive white empathy. In a similar way, are Syrian refugees trying to survive UNVR empathy, even as many of them blame the UN for not doing more? (Don't count on the UN to forward these objections, though!)

Do black people want you to feel better about enslaving them, or would they prefer safety and resources and equal treatment in the eyes of the law? Do Syrian refugees want you to appreciate their resilience, or do they want political justice and stability and to return to their homes?

If we want to empathise, we must always question who really 'benefits' from our 'empathy'. But VR empathy machines, especially slick UN-sponsored empathy productions built to milk donations from millionaires at Davos, definitely do not foster any type of critical reflection.

To quote Wendy H. K. Chun's excellent talk at Weird Reality: if you 'walk in someone else's shoes then you've taken their shoes'. If you won't believe someone's pain unless they wrap an expensive 360 video around you, then perhaps you don't actually care about their pain.

I think empathy machine apologists are lying to themselves. The 'embodied' 'transparent immediacy' of virtual reality (or much less, 360 video) does not obliterate political divisions. Even a culturally advanced medium like books can barely chip away at the problem, so VR definitely can not. In this political sense, VR can't actually offer any embodiment, transparency or immediacy to anyone. At best, VR can only offer the illusion of empathy.

I don't use the 'A word' lightly, but I think this is such a bad look for VR culture that we must deploy the white liberal kryptonite immediately: VR empathy machines are just VR appropriation machines. They are fundamentally about mining the experiences of suffering people to enrich the self-image of VR users ... or, even worse, they're about mining the experiences of suffering people to enrich the cultural appeal of VR brands. The world is going to shit, and VR wants to profit from it. Great!

Wait, no. Yuck. Gross. Let's try to be better than this, OK?

BIO
Robert Yang makes surprisingly popular games about gay culture and intimacy: his male shower simulator Rinse and Repeat has millions of views across YouTube, and his gay sex triptych Radiator 2 has over 150,000 users on Steam. He is currently an Assistant Arts Professor at NYU Game Center, and he has given talks about games at GDC, IndieCade, Queerness and Games Conference, and Games for Change. He holds a BA in English Literature from UC Berkeley, and an MFA in Design and Technology from Parsons School for Design. His work can be found at http://debacle.us/.

The full game can be downloaded free or with a donation from https://radiatoryang.itch.io/the-tearoom.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
'If you walk in someone else's shoes, then you've taken their shoes': empathy machines as appropriation machines | NGV

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In a 2015 TED Talk VR filmmaker Chris Milk claimed that virtual reality could be the ultimate 'empathy machine'. Instead of fading away into irrelevance like most TED Talks, this concept of the VR empathy machine has somehow survived into 2017.

# data[].attributes.body
use mixamo for rigging on simple models

exporting 360 video out of blender

using blender - optimise the most, details all through pixelised video textures, low poly simple models and movements to try and lessen rendering time

Time line

build models in blender, optimize

texture

animate

export and edit for 360 video

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
PS1 style vertex snapping in blender - Free addon

# data[].attributes.body
idea of translating surrealist painting into dreamscape in VR is interesting

physical relation and immersion of VR reacting to the body as a key feature of VR, though utilised effectively, I feel more so takes away from the work of art itself.

Releasing the painting from its 2 dimensional frame, though adds intrigue and further experiences, takes away the control and composition.

3D models and environment crafting itself is great. Human animations are a little uncanny but that is the typical VR experience. Though it doesn't one-to-one translate the feeling of viewing a Dali work, you can't really compare an image constructed to obstruct and a VR experience designed to immerse.

Does it make it less surreal? To experience a Dali painting as if it were real life.

Teleportation aspect then ruins this immersion - If allowed viewer to explore like open world would be more evocative, further emphasising the unfamiliar and desolation of Dali's landscapes.

Changing soundscape effective in terms of relating to the position of the viewer.

too familiar?

idea of paintings becoming environments - this new mode of creation.

spectacle art object

Either become completely linear with constructed viewing angles (limited teleportation, linear sound scape) or completely open world exploration.

Overall, as a stand alone experience, it is a well-constructed dreamscape, expanding on Dali's paintings and legacy. but the experience of it could be improved by viewing VR as something more than the follow up capitialisation this feels like. Surreal dreamscape walking simulator experiences are not a unfounded genre, I feel if this leaned into that more it could be a better experience.

# data[].attributes.headline
Archaeological Reminiscence of Millet's Angelus

# data[].attributes.subject
Archaeological Reminiscence of Millet's Angelus

# data[].attributes.body
Archaeological Reminiscence of Millet's Angelus, 1934, Salvador Dali

# data[].attributes.body
The Elephants, 1948, Salvador Dali

# data[].attributes.body
tutorial in canvas

# data[].attributes.headline
not an empathy machine - Janet H. Murray

# data[].attributes.subject
not an empathy machine - Janet H. Murray

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
With the arrival of the first generation of consumer headsets, virtual reality has produced a wealth of exploratory projects from a diverse group of very talented practitioners including game designers, animators, documentary journalists, Hollywood filmmakers, social activists, university researchers, and visual artists. Most of what these adventurous folks (myself and my students included) are producing is terrible, which is just as it should be.

Expanding human expressivity into new formats and genres is culturally valuable but difficult work. We are collectively engaged in making necessary mistakes, creating examples of what works and what doesn't work for one another to build on. The technical adventurism and grubby glamour of working in emerging technologies can make it hard to figure out what is good or bad from what is just new.

As someone who has been practicing and teaching narrative design in new digital media genres long enough to have seen the phenomenon of over-excitement at a novel technology combined with design confusion many times before, I want to counter two of the most common confusions about VR. I also want to offer some illustrative examples of how to spot good design in the hope of speeding up the process of finding the lasting expressive strategies on which to build new story forms.

Confusion One: VR is not a film to be watched but a virtual space to be visited and navigated through.

Therefore:

Please forget everything you know about composition that reflects the physical properties of film and screen-watching. This includes thinking of VR as "movies without a frame" or as having "edits" or as needing introductory titles and credits that play in real time.

Please leave out anything that can be heard or seen that is not diegetically part of the virtual space that is the actual focus of your design. Everything the interactor sees or hears must be part of the space VR creates for them to inhabit. This means no voice-overs, no text overlays, no background music.

Please omit any cuts or edits that are not the result of voluntary and conscious movement on the part of the interactor - whose sense of agency is the single most important design value in any digital artifact.

Please remember Nonny de la Peña's first rule of VR design: Begin by thinking of your body in the space. The focus of VR design is not the camera frame, but the embodied visitor.

Please remember that sound design is your friend (as in film - here is the place for your training to kick in!) But it should be spatialized, dramatically: louder as you approach; surprising you from behind; cueing you to look left or right, and reflecting the materiality of the virtual world. The breathing of the bison in one VR travelog was the feature my students found the most immersive, and real audio is an important feature in the immersive power of de la Peña's work as well.

Confusion Two: Empathy is not something that automatically happens when a user puts on a headset.

It must be produced as in any other story-telling medium by mature narrative techniques employed by skilled practitioners. The job for the present is to collectively invent those techniques. Therefore:

Looking down and seeing breasts will not give males sudden insight into the experience of females.

This experiment from The Machine to Be Another can't tell the full story about how it feels to inhabit a body that's not the one you were born with.

Showing people in sad circumstances via a headset will not make them any more or less relatable than showing them on TV or in photos in a newspaper. In fact, some 2D still photos are worth 1000 VRs.

Instead of overhyping the inherent empathy-value of VR documentary, we should look for the specific moments that point to the genuine promise of the medium in creating compassionate understanding, and build on those.

For example:

A heavy relief package of food is dropped from the air seemingly at our feet, and a young man tries to lift it, triggering our desire to reach out and help. The experience of hunger and dependency is not narrated by voice-over but made concrete as we witness the physically challenging task of lifting this bundle, and experience the urgency of the need through the frantic activity in the field. Our clear positioning at the edge of the action prevents us from thinking we can interact with the food seekers, and it turns our inability to reach out to a particular person at a particular moment into a dramatically experienced desire to be of assistance to the hungry refugees.As in a good documentary the experience is encapsulated by one sympathetic boy's efforts to find, claim, and carry one bag of food. This vignette, part of an uneven though well-meaning larger project on refugees, was all the more effective when it was released as a short separate experience because it is limited to this one dramatic incident, the arrival the food drop, which is immediately understandable on its own terms.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Not a Film and Not an Empathy Machine, by Janet H. Murray

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
How necessary failures will help VR designers invent new storyforms

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
BY Robert Yang

THEME LEADER James Bridle

SUPPORTED BY University of Melbourne, as part of the NGV Triennial - exploring the emerging intersections of art, design, science and society.

In a 2015 TED Talk VR filmmaker Chris Milk claimed that virtual reality could be the ultimate 'empathy machine'. Instead of fading away into irrelevance like most TED Talks, this concept of the VR empathy machine has somehow survived into 2017. VR boosters, such as the United Nations Virtual Reality (UNVR) program and influential podcast Voices of VR, continue to push this line of thinking.
I'm here to argue absolutely in the strongest terms: I am against the promise of any claim to a 'VR empathy machine', and I am against it forever.

The rhetoric of the empathy machine asks us to endorse technology without questioning the politics of its construction or who profits from it. Empathy is good, and VR facilitates empathy, so therefore VR is good - no questions please. (And if you hate VR that means you hate empathy!) It is a disturbing marketing strategy, and I hope it's obvious how making a refugee tourism simulator your 'flagship' VR experience can come across as an extremely cynical use of pain and suffering to sell your product.

I also doubt any empathy machine supporters have ever been the actual 'target' of an actual empathy machine. Ironically, as empathisers, they seem totally unable to empathise with the empathised, so let me spell this out. The basic problem with empathy machines is, what if we don't want your fucking empathy?

First, let's get some other basic questions about VR empathy out of the way. How do you know this is actually empathy you're feeling? Do you really need to wear a VR headset in order to empathise with someone? Can't you just listen to them and believe them? You need to be entertained as well? Are you sure this isn't about you?

I am very familiar with people annexing other peoples' experiences under the banner of empathy. Specifically, I've been making realistic 3D games about gay relationships for a while, and the vast majority of my players and fans happen to be straight people.This leads to a widely held but incorrect assumption that I make my games for 'straight people to understand what being gay is like' - and some of the worst homophobes on YouTube even call my games 'gay simulators' so they can react with disgust towards them.

This 'straight empathy' suddenly makes my games more about 'how beautiful and benevolent the straight people are, to tolerate my gay existence instead of vomiting' - instead of highlighting gay culture or queer solidarity, as I intended. I want to imagine fantastic worlds where straight people aren't as important - and yet, they demand that I dance for them in VR, whenever they want, forever. For this reason,
I hate it when people think my games are like empathy machines. I don't want your empathy, I want justice!

As usual, tech needs to step back and maybe, for once, consider the possible cruelty of what they're doing and demanding of people. Empathy, like any emotion, is not only a buzzword to decorate your bank-branded tech start-up playground - it is also a complicated tool with history and politics behind its deployment.

In her book Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers Project, historian Catherine Stewart talks about one of the most powerful 'analogue' empathy machines ever built: the American slave narrative. You can read the full write-up on Slate for a more detailed account, but I'll try to summarise it right here and now.

During the Great Depression, the US government sent out researchers to interview elderly ex-slaves across the American South to record their experiences and histories with slavery. This sounds like a great and noble thing, putting people to work to record and recognising the pain of oppressed people - but, uh, that's not exactly how it actually turned out.

For one thing, the researchers were mostly white people. And they weren't just any white people, but local white people who had enough privilege to be educated and win government research positions. They were white people often descended from educated slave-owning families across the South. Some of the interviewers were even members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

So let's try this 'empathy' experiment. Imagine you are an ex-slave, forever traumatised by white people enslaving you. One day, totally unannounced, your former torturer's white friends knock on your door and ask you about your life as a slave... Would you tell these white people about how bad white people were? Or... would you try to put a positive spin on slavery, and tell this white person that it wasn't so bad, that white people were always fair and good, and even claim that you deserved to be whipped?

Or maybe you would change the subject, tell them some folktales. It'll seem to them like slave culture was so exotic and eclectic that it was a 'shame' that it ended. You could even tell a story about how you're afraid of ghosts and how white people remind you of ghosts. They are more likely to accept stereotypes of black superstition than tales of white cruelty.

When Stewart compared white interviewers' reports with the smaller number of black interviewers' reports, she found that black interviewers recorded many more up-front stories about cruel oppression and pain. In some cases, white supervisors would even advise their black researchers to look for more 'variety' because they had enough of the 'white people are bad' content. They wanted to hear more about the 'good times' during slavery ... So what seemed like 'raw', 'authentic', 'immediate' stories to white readers (even if they were Northern abolitionists) were actually extremely constructed and self-conscious stories that black people told to appease white people.

Black people were just trying to survive white empathy. In a similar way, are Syrian refugees trying to survive UNVR empathy, even as many of them blame the UN for not doing more? (Don't count on the UN to forward these objections, though!)

Do black people want you to feel better about enslaving them, or would they prefer safety and resources and equal treatment in the eyes of the law? Do Syrian refugees want you to appreciate their resilience, or do they want political justice and stability and to return to their homes?

If we want to empathise, we must always question who really 'benefits' from our 'empathy'. But VR empathy machines, especially slick UN-sponsored empathy productions built to milk donations from millionaires at Davos, definitely do not foster any type of critical reflection.

To quote Wendy H. K. Chun's excellent talk at Weird Reality: if you 'walk in someone else's shoes then you've taken their shoes'. If you won't believe someone's pain unless they wrap an expensive 360 video around you, then perhaps you don't actually care about their pain.

I think empathy machine apologists are lying to themselves. The 'embodied' 'transparent immediacy' of virtual reality (or much less, 360 video) does not obliterate political divisions. Even a culturally advanced medium like books can barely chip away at the problem, so VR definitely can not. In this political sense, VR can't actually offer any embodiment, transparency or immediacy to anyone. At best, VR can only offer the illusion of empathy.

I don't use the 'A word' lightly, but I think this is such a bad look for VR culture that we must deploy the white liberal kryptonite immediately: VR empathy machines are just VR appropriation machines. They are fundamentally about mining the experiences of suffering people to enrich the self-image of VR users ... or, even worse, they're about mining the experiences of suffering people to enrich the cultural appeal of VR brands. The world is going to shit, and VR wants to profit from it. Great!

Wait, no. Yuck. Gross. Let's try to be better than this, OK?

BIO
Robert Yang makes surprisingly popular games about gay culture and intimacy: his male shower simulator Rinse and Repeat has millions of views across YouTube, and his gay sex triptych Radiator 2 has over 150,000 users on Steam. He is currently an Assistant Arts Professor at NYU Game Center, and he has given talks about games at GDC, IndieCade, Queerness and Games Conference, and Games for Change. He holds a BA in English Literature from UC Berkeley, and an MFA in Design and Technology from Parsons School for Design. His work can be found at http://debacle.us/.

The full game can be downloaded free or with a donation from https://radiatoryang.itch.io/the-tearoom.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
'If you walk in someone else's shoes, then you've taken their shoes': empathy machines as appropriation machines | NGV

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In a 2015 TED Talk VR filmmaker Chris Milk claimed that virtual reality could be the ultimate 'empathy machine'. Instead of fading away into irrelevance like most TED Talks, this concept of the VR empathy machine has somehow survived into 2017.

# data[].attributes.body
Instead of modelling in blender, could create real 3D sculptures, photoscan, optimise and apply vertex snapping, texture, and animate with mixamo.

Also 180 video instead of 360 for more concisely constructed shot by shot narrative.

# data[].attributes.body
using uv maps

Adobe 3D substance painter

# data[].attributes.body
3D games and CRTs never coincided but

low poly ps2 style + CRT layer effect (applied at end before 180 video in premiere)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
One indie developer discusses his research and approach to understanding and simulating a CRT television screen.

# data[].attributes.body
to use as textures

pixelise + other shit

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
With the arrival of the first generation of consumer headsets, virtual reality has produced a wealth of exploratory projects from a diverse group of very talented practitioners including game designers, animators, documentary journalists, Hollywood filmmakers, social activists, university researchers, and visual artists. Most of what these adventurous folks (myself and my students included) are producing is terrible, which is just as it should be.

Expanding human expressivity into new formats and genres is culturally valuable but difficult work. We are collectively engaged in making necessary mistakes, creating examples of what works and what doesn't work for one another to build on. The technical adventurism and grubby glamour of working in emerging technologies can make it hard to figure out what is good or bad from what is just new.

As someone who has been practicing and teaching narrative design in new digital media genres long enough to have seen the phenomenon of over-excitement at a novel technology combined with design confusion many times before, I want to counter two of the most common confusions about VR. I also want to offer some illustrative examples of how to spot good design in the hope of speeding up the process of finding the lasting expressive strategies on which to build new story forms.

Confusion One: VR is not a film to be watched but a virtual space to be visited and navigated through.

Therefore:

Please forget everything you know about composition that reflects the physical properties of film and screen-watching. This includes thinking of VR as "movies without a frame" or as having "edits" or as needing introductory titles and credits that play in real time.

Please leave out anything that can be heard or seen that is not diegetically part of the virtual space that is the actual focus of your design. Everything the interactor sees or hears must be part of the space VR creates for them to inhabit. This means no voice-overs, no text overlays, no background music.

Please omit any cuts or edits that are not the result of voluntary and conscious movement on the part of the interactor - whose sense of agency is the single most important design value in any digital artifact.

Please remember Nonny de la Peña's first rule of VR design: Begin by thinking of your body in the space. The focus of VR design is not the camera frame, but the embodied visitor.

Please remember that sound design is your friend (as in film - here is the place for your training to kick in!) But it should be spatialized, dramatically: louder as you approach; surprising you from behind; cueing you to look left or right, and reflecting the materiality of the virtual world. The breathing of the bison in one VR travelog was the feature my students found the most immersive, and real audio is an important feature in the immersive power of de la Peña's work as well.

Confusion Two: Empathy is not something that automatically happens when a user puts on a headset.

It must be produced as in any other story-telling medium by mature narrative techniques employed by skilled practitioners. The job for the present is to collectively invent those techniques. Therefore:

Looking down and seeing breasts will not give males sudden insight into the experience of females.

This experiment from The Machine to Be Another can't tell the full story about how it feels to inhabit a body that's not the one you were born with.

Showing people in sad circumstances via a headset will not make them any more or less relatable than showing them on TV or in photos in a newspaper. In fact, some 2D still photos are worth 1000 VRs.

Instead of overhyping the inherent empathy-value of VR documentary, we should look for the specific moments that point to the genuine promise of the medium in creating compassionate understanding, and build on those.

For example:

A heavy relief package of food is dropped from the air seemingly at our feet, and a young man tries to lift it, triggering our desire to reach out and help. The experience of hunger and dependency is not narrated by voice-over but made concrete as we witness the physically challenging task of lifting this bundle, and experience the urgency of the need through the frantic activity in the field. Our clear positioning at the edge of the action prevents us from thinking we can interact with the food seekers, and it turns our inability to reach out to a particular person at a particular moment into a dramatically experienced desire to be of assistance to the hungry refugees.As in a good documentary the experience is encapsulated by one sympathetic boy's efforts to find, claim, and carry one bag of food. This vignette, part of an uneven though well-meaning larger project on refugees, was all the more effective when it was released as a short separate experience because it is limited to this one dramatic incident, the arrival the food drop, which is immediately understandable on its own terms.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Not a Film and Not an Empathy Machine, by Janet H. Murray

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
How necessary failures will help VR designers invent new storyforms

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
GAME DESIGN AS NARRATIVE ARCHITECTURE
By Henry Jenkins
The relationship between games and story remains a divisive question among game fans, designers, and scholars alike. At a recent academic Games Studies conference, for example, a blood feud threatened to erupt between the self-proclaimed Ludologists, who wanted to see the focus shift onto the mechanics of game play, and the Narratologists, who were interested in studying games alongside other storytelling media. Consider some recent statements made on this issue:

"Interactivity is almost the opposite of narrative; narrative flows under the direction of the author, while interactivity depends on the player for motive power" --Ernest Adams

"There is a direct, immediate conflict between the demands of a story and the demands of a game. Divergence from a story's path is likely to make for a less satisfying story; restricting a player's freedom of action is likely to make for a less satisfying game." --Greg Costikyan

"Computer games are not narratives....Rather the narrative tends to be isolated from or even work against the computer-game-ness of the game." --Jesper Juul

"Outside academic theory people are usually excellent at making distinctions between narrative, drama and games. If I throw a ball at you I don't expect you to drop it and wait until it starts telling stories."
--Markku Eskelinen

I find myself responding to this perspective with mixed feelings. On the one hand, I understand what these writers are arguing against - various attempts to map traditional narrative structures ("hypertext," "Interactive Cinema," "nonlinear narrative") onto games at the expense of an attention to their specificity as an emerging mode of entertainment. You say narrative to the average gamer and what they are apt to imagine is something on the order of a choose-your-own adventure book, a form noted for its lifelessness and mechanical exposition rather than enthralling entertainment, thematic sophistication, or character complexity. And game industry executives are perhaps justly skeptical that they have much to learn from the resolutely unpopular (and often overtly antipopular) aesthetics promoted by hypertext theorists. The application of film theory to games can seem heavy-handed and literal minded, often failing to recognize the profound differences between the two media. Yet, at the same time, there is a tremendous amount that game designers and critics could learn through making meaningful comparisons with other storytelling media. One gets rid of narrative as a framework for thinking about games only at one's own risk. In this short piece, I hope to offer a middle ground position between the ludologists and the narratologists, one that respects the particularity of this emerging medium - examining games less as stories than as spaces ripe with narrative possibility.

Let's start at some points where we might all agree:

1) Not all games tell stories. Games may be an abstract, expressive, and experiential form, closer to music or modern dance than to cinema. Some ballets ( The Nutcracker for example) tell stories, but storytelling isn't an intrinsic or defining feature of dance. Similarly, many of my own favorite games - Tetris, Blix, Snood - are simple graphic games that do not lend themselves very well to narrative exposition. To understand such games, we need other terms and concepts beyond narrative, including interface design and expressive movement for starters. The last thing we want to do is to reign in the creative experimentation that needs to occur in the earlier years of a medium's development.

2)Many games do have narrative aspirations. Minimally, they want to tap the emotional residue of previous narrative experiences. Often, they depend on our familiarity with the roles and goals of genre entertainment to orientate us to the action, and in many cases, game designers want to create a series of narrative experiences for the player. Given those narrative aspirations, it seems reasonable to suggest that some understanding of how games relate to narrative is necessary before we understand the aesthetics of game design or the nature of contemporary game culture.

3) Narrative analysis need not be prescriptive, even if some narratologist - Janet Murray is the most oft cited example - do seem to be advocating for games to pursue particular narrative forms. There is not one future of games. The goal should be to foster diversification of genres, aesthetics, and audiences, to open gamers to the broadest possible range of experiences. The past few years has been one of enormous creative experimentation and innovation within the games industry, as might be represented by a list of some of the groundbreaking titles. The Sims, Black and White, Majestic, Shenmue; each represents profoundly different concepts of what makes for compelling game play. A discussion of the narrative potentials of games need not imply a privileging of storytelling over all the other possible things games can do, even if we might suggest that if game designers are going to tell stories, they should tell them well. In order to do that, game designers, who are most often schooled in computer science or graphic design, need to be retooled in the basic vocabulary of narrative theory.

4) The experience of playing games can never be simply reduced to the experience of a story. Many other factors which have little or nothing to do with storytelling per se contribute to the development of a great games and we need to significantly broaden our critical vocabulary for talking about games to deal more fully with those other topics. Here, the ludologist's insistence that game scholars focus more attention on the mechanics of game play seems totally in order.

5) If some games tell stories, they are unlikely to tell them in the same ways that other media tell stories. Stories are not empty content that can be ported from one media pipeline to another. One would be hard-pressed, for example, to translate the internal dialogue of Proust's In Remembrance of Things Past into a compelling cinematic experience and the tight control over viewer experience which Hitchcock achieves in his suspense films would be directly antithetical to the aesthetics of good game design. We must, therefore, be attentive to the particularity of games as a medium, specifically what distinguishes them from other narrative traditions. Yet, in order to do so requires precise comparisons - not the mapping of old models onto games but a testing of those models against existing games to determine what features they share with other media and how they differ.

Much of the writing in the ludologist tradition is unduly polemical: they are so busy trying to pull game designers out of their "cinema envy" or define a field where no hypertext theorist dare to venture that they are prematurely dismissing the use value of narrative for understanding their desired object of study. For my money, a series of conceptual blind spots prevent them from developing a full understanding of the interplay between narrative and games. First, the discussion operates with too narrow a model of narrative, one preoccupied with the rules and conventions of classical linear storytelling at the expense of consideration of other kinds of narratives, not only the modernist and postmodernist experimentation that inspired the hypertext theorists, but also popular traditions which emphasize spatial exploration over causal event chains or which seek to balance between the competing demands of narrative and spectacle. Second, the discussion operates with too limited an understanding of narration, focusing more on the activities and aspirations of the storyteller and too little on the process of narrative comprehension. Third, the discussion deals only with the question of whether whole games tell stories and not whether narrative elements might enter games at a more localized level. Finally, the discussion assumes that narratives must be self-contained rather than understanding games as serving some specific functions within a new transmedia storytelling environment. Rethinking each of these issues might lead us to a new understanding of the relationship between games and stories. Specifically, I want to introduce an important third term into this discussion - spatiality - and argue for an understanding of game designers less as storytellers and more as narrative architects.

SPATIAL STORIES AND ENVIRONMENTAL STORYTELLING
Game designers don't simply tell stories; they design worlds and sculpt spaces. It is no accident, for example, that game design documents have historically been more interested in issues of level design than plotting or character motivation. A prehistory of video and computer games might take us through the evolution of paper mazes or board games, both preoccupied with the design of spaces, even where they also provided some narrative context. Monopoly, for example, may tell a narrative about how fortunes are won and lost; the individual Chance cards may provide some story pretext for our gaining or losing a certain number of places; but ultimately, what we remember is the experience of moving around the board and landing on someone's real estate. Performance theorists have described RPGs as a mode of collaborative storytelling, but the Dungeon Master's activities start with designing the space - the dungeon - where the players' quest will take place. Even many of the early text-based games, such as Zork, which could have told a wide array of different kinds of stories, centered around enabling players to move through narratively-compelling spaces: "You are facing the north side of a white house. There is no door here, and all of the windows are boarded up. To the north a narrow path winds through the trees." The early Nintendo games have simple narrative hooks - rescue Princess Toadstool - but what gamers found astonishing when they first played them were their complex and imaginative graphic realms, which were so much more sophisticated than the simple grids that Pong or Pac-Man had offered us a decade earlier. When we refer to such influential early works as Shigeru Miyamoto's Super Mario Bros. as "scroll games," we situate them alongside a much older tradition of spatial storytelling: many Japanese scroll paintings map, for example, the passing of the seasons onto an unfolding space. When you adopt a film into a game, the process typically involves translating events in the film into environments within the game. When gamer magazines want to describe the experience of gameplay, they are more likely to reproduce maps of the game world than to recount their narratives. Before we can talk about game narratives, then, we need to talk about game spaces. Across a series of essays, I have made the case that game consoles should be regarded as machines for generating compelling spaces, that their virtual playspaces have helped to compensate for the declining place of the traditional backyard in contemporary boy culture, and that the core narratives behind many games center around the struggle to explore, map, and master contested spaces. Communications in Cyberspace (New York: Sage, 1994); Henry Jenkins, "'Complete Freedom of Movement': Video Games as Gendered Playspace," in Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins (Ed.) From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998). Here, I want to broaden that discussion further to consider in what ways the structuring of game space facilitates different kinds of narrative experiences.

As such, games fit within a much older tradition of spatial stories, which have often taken the form of hero's odysseys, quest myths, or travel narratives. The best works of J.R.R. Tolkien, Jules Verne, Homer, L. Frank Baum, or Jack London fall loosely within this tradition, as does, for example, the sequence in War and Peace which describes Pierre's aimless wanderings across the battlefield at Borodino. Often, such works exist on the outer borders of literature. They are much loved by readers, to be sure, and passed down from one generation to another, but they rarely figure in the canon of great literary works. How often, for example, has science fiction been criticized for being preoccupied with world-making at the expense of character psychology or plot development? These writers seem constantly to be pushing against the limits of what can be accomplished in a printed text and thus their works fare badly against aesthetic standards defined around classically-constructed novels. In many cases, the characters - our guides through these richly-developed worlds - are stripped down to the bare bones, description displaces exposition, and plots fragment into a series of episodes and encounters. When game designers draw story elements from existing film or literary genres, they are most apt to tap those genres - fantasy, adventure, science fiction, horror, war - which are most invested in world-making and spatial storytelling. Games, in turn, may more fully realize the spatiality of these stories, giving a much more immersive and compelling representation of their narrative worlds. Anyone who doubts that Tolstoy might have achieved his true calling as a game designer should reread the final segment of War and Peace where he works through how a series of alternative choices might have reversed the outcome of Napoleon's Russian campaign. The passage is dead weight in the context of a novel, yet it outlines ideas which could be easily communicated in a god game like Civilization.

Don Carson, who worked as a Senior Show Designer for Walt Disney Imagineering, has argued that game designers can learn a great deal by studying techniques of "environmental storytelling" which Disney employs in designing amusement park attractions. Carson explains, "The story element is infused into the physical space a guest walks or rides through. It is the physical space that does much of the work of conveying the story the designers are trying to tell....Armed only with their own knowledge of the world, and those visions collected from movies and books, the audience is ripe to be dropped into your adventure. The trick is to play on those memories and expectations to heighten the thrill of venturing into your created universe." The amusement park attraction doesn't so much reproduce the story of a literary work, such as The Wind in the Willows, as it evokes its atmosphere; the original story provides "a set of rules that will guide the design and project team to a common goal" and which will help give structure and meaning to the visitor's experience. If, for example, the attraction centers around pirates, Carson writes, "every texture you use, every sound you play, every turn in the road should reinforce the concept of pirates," while any contradictory element may shatter the sense of immersion into this narrative universe. The same might be said for a game like Sea Dogs which, no less than The Pirates of the Caribbean, depends on its ability to map our pre-existing pirate fantasies. The most significant difference is that amusement park designers count on visitors keeping their hands and arms in the car at all times and thus have a greater control in shaping our total experience, whereas game designers have to develop worlds where we can touch, grab, and fling things about at will.

Environmental storytelling creates the preconditions for an immersive narrative experience in at least one of four ways: spatial stories can evoke pre-existing narrative associations; they can provide a staging ground where narrative events are enacted; they may embed narrative information within their mise-en-scene; or they provide resources for emergent narratives.

EVOCATIVE SPACES
The most compelling amusement park attractions build upon stories or genre traditions already well known to visitors, allowing them to enter physically into spaces they have visited many times before in their fantasies. These attractions may either remediate a pre-existing story ( Back to the Future) or draw upon a broadly shared genre tradition (Disney's Haunted Mansion). Such works do not so much tell self-contained stories as draw upon our previously existing narrative competencies. They can paint their worlds in fairly broad outlines and count on the visitor/player to do the rest. Something similar might be said of many games. For example, American McGee's Alice is an original interpretation of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. Alice has been pushed into madness after years of living with uncertainty about whether her Wonderland experiences were real or hallucinations; now, she's come back into this world and is looking for blood. McGee's wonderland is not a whimsical dreamscape but a dark nightmare realm. McGee can safely assume that players start the game with a pretty well-developed mental map of the spaces, characters, and situations associated with Carroll's fictional universe and that they will read his distorted and often monstrous images against the background of mental images formed from previous encounters with storybook illustrations and Disney movies. McGee rewrites Alice's story, in large part, by redesigning Alice's spaces.

Arguing against games as stories, Jesper Juul suggests, "you clearly can't deduct the story of Star Wars from Star Wars the game," where-as a film version of a novel will give you at least the broad outlines of the plot. This is a pretty old fashioned model of the process of adaptation. Increasingly, we inhabit a world of transmedia story-telling, one which depends less on each individual work being self-sufficient than on each work contributing to a larger narrative economy. The Star Wars game may not simply retell the story of Star Wars, but it doesn't have to in order to enrich or expand our experience of the Star Wars saga. We already know the story before we even buy the game and would be frustrated if all it offered us was a regurgitation of the original film experience. Rather, the Star Wars game exists in dialogue with the films, conveying new narrative experiences through its creative manipulation of environmental details. One can imagine games taking their place within a larger narrative system with story information communicated through books, film, television, comics, and other media, each doing what it does best, each relatively autonomous experience, but the richest understanding of the story world coming to those who follow the narrative across the various channels. In such a system, what games do best will almost certainly center around their ability to give concrete shape to our memories and imaginings of the storyworld, creating an immersive environment we can wander through and interact with.

ENACTING STORIES
Most often, when we discuss games as stories, we are referring to games that either enable players to perform or witness narrative events - for example, to grab a lightsabre and dispatch Darth Maul in the case of a Star Wars game. Narrative enters such games on two levels - in terms of broadly defined goals or conflicts and on the level of localized incidents.

Many game critics assume that all stories must be classically constructed with each element tightly integrated into the overall plot trajectory. Costikyan writes, for example, that "a story is a controlled experience; the author consciously crafts it, choosing certain events precisely, in a certain order, to create a story with maximum impact." Adams claims, "a good story hangs together the way a good jigsaw puzzle hangs together. When you pick it up, every piece locked tightly in place next to its neighbors." Spatial stories, on the other hand, are often dismissed as episodic - that is, each episode (or set piece) can become compelling on its own terms without contributing significantly to the plot development and often, the episodes could have been reordered without significantly impacting our experience as a whole. There may be broad movements or series of stages within the story, as Troy Dunniway suggests when he draws parallels between the stages in the Hero's journey as outlined by Joseph Campbell and the levels of a classic adventure game, but within each stage, the sequencing of actions may be quite loose. Spatial stories are not badly constructed stories; rather, they are stories which respond to alternative aesthetic principles, privileging spatial exploration over plot development. Spatial stories are held together by broadly defined goals and conflicts and pushed forward by the character's movement across the map. Their resolution often hinges on the player's reaching their final destination, though, as Mary Fuller notes, not all travel narratives end successfully or resolve the narrative enigmas which set them into motion. Once again, we are back to principles of "environmental storytelling." The organization of the plot becomes a matter of designing the geography of imaginary worlds, so that obstacles thwart and affordances facilitate the protagonist's forward movement towards resolution. Over the past several decades, game designers have become more and more adept at setting and varying the rhythm of game play through features of the game space.

Narrative can also enter games on the level of localized incident, or what I am calling micronarratives. We might understand how micronarratives work by thinking about the Odessa Steps sequence in Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potempkin. First, recognize that, whatever its serious moral tone, the scene basically deals with the same kind of material as most games - the steps are a contested space with one group (the peasants) trying to advance up and another (the Cossacks) moving down. Eisenstein intensifies our emotional engagement with this large scale conflict through a series of short narrative units. The woman with the baby carriage is perhaps the best-known of those micronarratives. Each of these units builds upon stock characters or situations drawn from the repertoire of melodrama. None of them last more than a few seconds, though Eisenstein prolongs them (and intensifies their emotional impact) through crosscutting between multiple incidents. Eisenstein used the term, "attraction," to describe such emotionally-packed elements in his work; contemporary game designers might call them "memorable moments." Just as some memorable moments in games depend on sensations (the sense of speed in a racing game) or perceptions (the sudden expanse of sky in a snowboarding game) as well as narrative hooks, Eisenstein used the word, attractions, broadly to describe any element within a work which produces a profound emotional impact and theorized that the themes of the work could be communicate across and through these discrete elements. Even games which do not create large-scale plot trajectories may well depend on these micronarratives to shape the player's emotional experience. Micronarratives may be cut scenes, but they don't have to be. One can imagine a simple sequence of preprogrammed actions through which an opposing player responds to your successful touchdown in a football game as a micronarrative.

Game critics often note that the player's participation poses a potential threat to the narrative construction, where-as the hard rails of the plotting can overly constrain the "freedom, power, self-expression" associated with interactivity. The tension between performance (or game play) and exposition (or story) is far from unique to games. The pleasures of popular culture often center around spectacular performance numbers and self-contained set pieces. It makes no sense to describe musical numbers or gag sequences or action scenes as disruptions of the film's plots: the reason we go to see a kung fu movie is to see Jackie Chan show his stuff. Yet, few films consist simply of such moments, typically falling back on some broad narrative exposition to create a framework within which localized actions become meaningful. We might describe musicals, action films or slapstick comedies as having accordion-like structures. Certain plot points are fixed where-as other moments can be expanded or contracted in response to audience feedback without serious consequences to the overall plot. The introduction needs to establish the character's goals or explain the basic conflict; the conclusion needs to show the successful completion of those goals or the final defeat of the antagonist. In commedia del arte, for example, the masks define the relationships between the characters and give us some sense of their goals and desires. The masks set limits on the action, even though the performance as a whole is created through improvisation. The actors have mastered the possible moves or lassi associated with each character, much as a game player has mastered the combination of buttons that must be pushed to enable certain character actions. No author prescribes what the actors do once they get on the stage, but the shape of the story emerges from this basic vocabulary of possible actions and from the broad parameters set by this theatrical tradition. Some of the lassi can contribute to the plot development, but many of them are simple restagings of the basic oppositions (the knave tricks the master or gets beaten). These performance or spectacle-centered genres often display a pleasure in process - in the experiences along the road - that can overwhelm any strong sense of goal or resolution, while exposition can be experienced as an unwelcome interruption to the pleasure of performance. Game designers struggle with this same balancing act - trying to determine how much plot will create a compelling framework and how much freedom players can enjoy at a local level without totally derailing the larger narrative trajectory. As inexperienced storytellers, they often fall back on rather mechanical exposition through cut scenes, much as early film makers were sometimes overly reliant on intertitles rather than learning the skills of visual storytelling. Yet, as with any other aesthetic tradition, game designers are apt to develop craft through a process of experimentation and refinement of basic narrative devices, becoming better at shaping narrative experiences without unduly constraining the space for improvisation within the game.

EMBEDDED NARRATIVES
Russian formalist critics make a useful distinction between plot (or Syuzhet) which refers to, in Kristen Thompson's terms, "the structured set of all causal events as we see and hear them presented in the film itself," and story (or fabula), which refers to the viewer's mental construction of the chronology of those events. Few films or novels are absolutely linear; most make use of some forms of back story which is revealed gradually as we move through the narrative action. The detective story is the classic illustration of this principle, telling two stories - one more or less chronological ( the story of the investigation itself) and the other told radically out of sequence (the events motivating and leading up to the murder). According to this model, narrative comprehension is an active process by which viewers assemble and make hypothesis about likely narrative developments on the basis of information drawn from textual cues and clues. As they move through the film, spectators test and reformulate their mental maps of the narrative action and the story space. In games, players are forced to act upon those mental maps, to literally test them against the game world itself. If you are wrong about whether the bad guys lurk behind the next door, you will find out soon enough - perhaps by being blown away and having to start the game over. The heavy-handed exposition that opens many games serves a useful function in orienting spectators to the core premises so that they are less likely to make stupid and costly errors as they first enter into the game world. Some games create a space for rehearsal, as well, so that we can make sure we understand our character's potential moves before we come up against the challenges of navigating narrational space.

Read in this light, a story is less a temporal structure than a body of information. The author of a film or a book has a high degree of control over when and if we receive specific bits of information, but a game designer can somewhat control the narrational process by distributing the information across the game space. Within an open-ended and exploratory narrative structure like a game, essential narrative information must be redundantly presented across a range of spaces and artifacts, since one can not assume the player will necessarily locate or recognize the significance of any given element. Game designers have developed a variety of kludges which allow them to prompt players or steer them towards narratively salient spaces. Yet, this is no different from the ways that redundancy is built into a television soap opera, where the assumption is that a certain number of viewers are apt to miss any given episode, or even in classical Hollywood narrative, where the law of three suggests that any essential plot point needs to be communicated in at least three ways.

To continue with the detective example, then, one can imagine the game designer as developing two kinds of narratives - one relatively unstructured and controlled by the player as they explore the game space and unlock its secrets; the other pre-structured but embedded within the mise-en-scene awaiting discovery. The game world becomes a kind of information space, a memory palace. Myst is a highly successful example of this kind of embedded narrative, but embedded narrative does not necessarily require an emptying of the space of contemporary narrative activities, as a game like Half Life might suggest. Embedded narrative can and often does occur within contested spaces. We may have to battle our way past antagonists, navigate through mazes, or figure out how to pick locks in order to move through the narratively-impregnated mise-en-scene. Such a mixture of enacted and embedded narrative elements can allow for a balance between the flexibility of interactivity and the coherence of a pre-authored narrative.

Using Quake as an example, Jesper Juuls argues that flashbacks are impossible within games, because the game play always occurs in real time. Yet, this is to confuse story and plot. Games are no more locked into an eternal present than films are always linear. Many games contain moments of revelation or artifacts that shed light on past actions. Carson suggests that part of the art of game design comes in finding artful ways of embedding narrative information into the environment without destroying its immersiveness and without giving the player a sensation of being drug around by the neck: "Staged areas...[can] lead the game player to come to their own conclusions about a previous event or to suggest a potential danger just ahead. Some examples include...doors that have been broken open, traces of a recent explosion, a crashed vehicle, a piano dropped from a great height, charred remains of a fire." Players, he argues, can return to a familiar space later in the game and discover it has been transformed by subsequent (off-screen) events. Clive Barker's The Undying, for example, creates a powerful sense of back story in precisely this manner. It is a story of sibling rivalry which has taken on supernatural dimensions. As we visit each character's space, we have a sense of the human they once were and the demon they have become. In Peter Muleneux's Black and White, the player's ethical choices within the game leave traces on the landscape or reconfigure the physical appearances of their characters. Here, we might read narrative consequences off mise-en-scene the same way we read Dorian Grey's debauchery off of his portrait. Carson describes such narrative devices as "following Saknussemm," referring to the ways that the protagonists of Jules Verne's Journey to The Center of the Earth, keep stumbling across clues and artifacts left behind by a sixteenth Century Icelandic scientist/explorer Arne Saknussemm, and readers become fascinated to see what they can learn about his ultimate fate as the travelers come closer to reaching their intended destination.

Game designers might study melodrama for a better understanding of how artifacts or spaces can contain affective potential or communicate significant narrative information. Melodrama depends on the external projection of internal states, often through costume design, art direction, or lighting choices. As we enter spaces, we may become overwhelmed with powerful feelings of loss or nostalgia, especially in those instances where the space has been transformed by narrative events. Consider, for example, the moment in Doctor Zhivago when the characters return to the mansion, now completely deserted and encased in ice, or when Scarlet O'Hara travels across the scorched remains of her family estate in Gone With the Wind following the burning of Atlanta. In Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca, the title character never appears, but she exerts a powerful influence over the other characters - especially the second Mrs. DeWinter who must inhabit a space where every artifact recalls her predecessor. Hitchcock creates a number of scenes of his protagonist wandering through Rebecca's space, passing through locked doors, staring at her overwhelming portrait on the wall, touching her things in drawers, or feeling the texture of fabrics and curtains. No matter where she goes in the house, she can not escape Rebecca's memory.

A game like Neil Young's Majestic pushes this notion of embedded narrative to its logical extreme. Here, the embedded narrative is no longer contained within the console but rather flows across multiple information channels. The player's activity consists of sorting through documents, deciphering codes, making sense of garbled transmissions, moving step by step towards a fuller understanding of the conspiracy which is the game's primary narrative focus. We follow links between websites; we get information through webcasts, faxes, e-mails, and phonecalls. Such an embedded narrative doesn't require a branching story structure but rather depends on scrambling the pieces of a linear story and allowing us to reconstruct the plot through our acts of detection, speculation, exploration, and decryption. Not surprisingly, most embedded narratives, at present, take the form of detective or conspiracy stories, since these genres help to motivate the player's active examination of clues and exploration of spaces and provide a rationale for our efforts to reconstruct the narrative of past events. Yet, as my examples above suggest, melodrama provides another - and as yet largely unexplored - model for how an embedded story might work, as we read letters and diaries, snoop around in bedroom drawers and closets, in search of secrets which might shed light on the relationships between characters.

EMERGENT NARRATIVES
The Sims represents a fourth model of how narrative possibilities might get mapped onto game space. Emergent narratives are not pre-structured or pre-programmed, taking shape through the game play, yet they are not as unstructured, chaotic, and frustrating as life itself. Game worlds, ultimately, are not real worlds, even those as densely developed as Shenmue or as geographically expansive as Everquest. Will Wright frequently describes The Sims as a sandbox or dollhouse game, suggesting that it should be understood as a kind of authoring environment within which players can define their own goals and write their own stories. Yet, unlike Microsoft Word, the game doesn't open on a blank screen. Most players come away from spending time with The Sims with some degree of narrative satisfaction. Wright has created a world ripe with narrative possibilities, where each design decision has been made with an eye towards increasing the prospects of interpersonal romance or conflict. The ability to design our own "skins" encourages players to create characters who are emotionally significant to them, to rehearse their own relationships with friends, family or coworkers or to map characters from other fictional universes onto The Sims. A quick look at the various scrapbooks players have posted on the web suggests that they have been quick to take advantage of its relatively open-ended structure. Yet, let's not underestimate the designers' contributions. The characters have a will of their own, not always submitting easily to the player's control, as when a depressed protagonist refuses to seek employment, preferring to spend hour upon hour soaking in their bath or moping on the front porch. Characters are given desires, urges, and needs, which can come into conflict with each other, and thus produce dramatically compelling encounters. Characters respond emotionally to events in their environment, as when characters mourn the loss of a loved one. Our choices have consequences, as when we spend all of our money and have nothing left to buy them food. The gibberish language and flashing symbols allow us to map our own meanings onto the conversations, yet the tone of voice and body language can powerfully express specific emotional states, which encourage us to understand those interactions within familiar plot situations. The designers have made choices about what kinds of actions are and are not possible in this world, such as allowing for same sex kisses, but limiting the degree of explicit sexual activity that can occur. (Good programers may be able to get around such restrictions, but most players probably work within the limitations of the program.)

Janet Murray's Hamlet on the Holodeck might describe some of what Wright accomplishes here as procedural authorship. Yet, I would argue that his choices go deeper than this, working not simply through the programming, but also through the design of the game space. For example, just as a doll house offers a streamlined representation which cuts out much of the clutter of an actual domestic space, The Sims' houses are stripped down to only a small number of artifacts, each of which perform specific kinds of narrative functions. Newspapers, for example, communicate job information. Characters sleep in beds. Bookcases can make your smarter. Bottles are for spinning and thus motivating lots of kissing. Such choices result in a highly legible narrative space. In his classic study, The Image of The City, Kevin Lynch made the case that urban designers needed to be more sensitive to the narrative potentials of city spaces, describing city planning as "the deliberate manipulation of the world for sensuous ends." Urban designers exert even less control than game designers over how people use the spaces they create or what kinds of scenes they stage there. Yet, some kinds of space lend themselves more readily to narratively memorable or emotionally meaningful experiences than others. Lynch suggested that urban planners should not attempt to totally predetermine the uses and meanings of the spaces they create:"a landscape whose every rock tells a story may make difficult the creation of fresh stories" Rather, he proposes an aesthetic of urban design which endows each space with "poetic and symbolic" potential: "Such a sense of place in itself enhances every human activity that occurs there, and encourages the deposit of a memory trace." Game designers would do well to study Lynch's book, especially as they move into the production of game platforms which support player-generated narratives.

In each of these cases, choices about the design and organization of game spaces have narratological consequences. In the case of evoked narratives, spatial design can either enhance our sense of immersion within a familiar world or communicate a fresh perspective on that story through the altering of established details. In the case of enacted narratives, the story itself may be structured around the character's movement through space and the features of the environment may retard or accelerate that plot trajectory. In the case of embedded narratives, the game space becomes a memory palace whose contents must be deciphered as the player tries to reconstruct the plot and in the case of emergent narratives, game spaces are designed to be rich with narrative potential, enabling the story-constructing activity of players. In each case, it makes sense to think of game designers less as storytellers than as narrative architects.

(1) The term, Ludology, was coined by Espen Aardseth, who advocates the emergence of a new field of study, specifically focused on the study of games and game play, rather than framed through the concerns of pre-existing disciplines or other media.
(2) Ernest Adams, "Three Problems For Interactive Storytellers," Gamasutra,
(3) Greg Costikyan, "Where Stories End and Games Begin," Game Developer, September 2000, pp. 44-53.
(4) Jesper Juul, "A Clash Between Games and Narrative," paper presented at the Digital Arts and Culture Conference, Bergen, November 1998, http://www.jesperjuul.dk/text/DA%20Paper%201998.html. For a more recent formulation of this same argument, see Jesper Juul, "Games Telling Stories?", Game Studies, http://cmc.uib.no/gamestudies/0101/juul-gts
(5) Markku Eskelinen, "The Gaming Situation," Game Studies, htttp:cmc.uib.no/gamestudies/0101/eskelinen

(6) Eskelinen, op cit., takes Janet Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997) to task for her narrative analysis of Tetris as "a perfect enactment of the over tasked lives of Americans in the 1990s - of the constant bombardment of tasks that demand our attention and that we must somehow fit into our overcrowded schedules and clear off our desks in order to make room for the next onslaught." Eskelinen is correct to note that the abstraction of Tetris would seem to defy narrative interpretation, but that is not the same thing as insisting that no meaningful analysis can be made of the game and its fit within contemporary culture. Tetris might well express something of the frenzied pace of modern life, just as modern dances might, without being a story.
(7) "A story is a collection of facts in a time sequenced order that suggests a cause and effect relationship." Chris Crawford, The Art of Computer Game Design, chapter one, http://members.nbci.com/kalid/art/art.html . "The story is the antithesis of game. The best way to tell a story is in linear form. The best way to create a game is to provide a structure within which the player has freedom of action." Costikyan, op cit.
(8) "In its richest form, storytelling - narrative - means the reader's surrender to the author. The author takes the reader by the hand and leads him into the world of his imagination. The reader has a role to play, but it's a fairly passive role: to pay attention, to understand, perhaps to think...but not to act." Adams, op. cit.
(9) As I have noted elsewhere, these maps take a distinctive form - not objective or abstract top-down views but composites of screenshots which represent the game world as we will encounter it in our travels through its space. Game space never exists in abstract, but always experientially.
(10) Henry Jenkins and Mary Fuller, "Nintendo and New World Narrative," in Steve Jones (ed.)

(11) My concept of spatial stories is strongly influenced by Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) and Henri LeFebvre, The Production of Space (London: Blackwell, 1991).
(12) Don Carson, "Environmental Storytelling: Creating Immersive 3D Worlds Using Lessons Learned From the Theme Park Industry," Gamasutra.com, http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20000301/carson_pfv.htm
(13) Juul, op. cit.
(14) Costikyan, . For a fuller discussion of the norms of classically constructed narrative, see David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristen Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
(15) Adams, op. cit.
(16) Troy Dunniway, "Using the Hero's Journey in Games," Gamasutra.com, http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20001127/dunniway_pfv.htm.
(17) Fuller and Jenkins, op. cit.
(18) Adams, op. cit.
(19) For useful discussion of this issue in film theory, see Donald Crafton, "Pie and Chase: Gag, Spectacle and Narrative in Slapstick Comedy," in Kristine Brunovska Karnick and Henry Jenkins (Eds.) Classical Hollywood Comedy (New York: Routledge/American Film Institute, 1995); Henry Jenkins, What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and The Vaudeville Aesthetic (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991); Rick Altman, The American Film Musical (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999); Tom Gunning, "The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant Gare" in Thomas Elsaesser with Adam Barker (Eds.), Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative (London: British Film Institute, 1990); Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and 'The Frenzy of the Visible' (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
(20) "Games that just have nonstop action are fun for a while but often get boring. This is because of the lack of intrigue, suspense, and drama. How many action movies have you seen where the hero of the story shoots his gun every few seconds and is always on the run? People loose interest watching this kind of movie. Playing a game is a bit different, but the fact is the brain becomes over stimulated after too much nonstop action." Dunniway, op. cit.
(21) See, for example, John Rudlin, Commedia Dell'Arte: An Actor's Handbook (New York: Routledge, 1994) for a detailed inventory of the masks and lassi of this tradition.
(22) Kristen Thompson, Breaking the Glass Armor: Neoformalist Film Analysis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp.39-40.
(23) See, for example, David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1989) and Edward Branigan, Narrative Comprehension and Film (New York: Routledge, 1992).
(24) Juul, op cit.
(25) Carson, op. cit.
(26) "..." Murray, p. .
(27) Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960), p 116.
(28) Ibid, p. 6.
(29) Ibid, p 119.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The relationship between games and story remains a divisive question among game fans, designers, and scholars alike. At a recent academic Games Studies conference, for example, a blood feud threatened to erupt between the self-proclaimed Ludologists, who wanted to see the focus shift onto the mechanics of game play, and the Narratologists, who were interested in studying games alongside other storytelling media.(1) Consider some recent statements made on this issue:

# data[].attributes.body
blender

eevee faster

for cycles - up noise threshold to 0.5

add detail first then optimise, doesnt have to do that much bc pre-rendered

edit texture maps in photoshop then import back, attaching in shading tab

# data[].attributes.body
Hello... To construct the models for the two unnamed robots in my animated 360 video, originally I wanted to create low poly models that mimic old ps2 games. But that would recquire a lot of time especially in learning vertex snapping, so instead I'm taking an alternative route in how I am creating my models.

Inspired by New Yoku View, a VR/AR work I first found on styly.

https://gallery.styly.cc/scene/9f864a11-386c-4603-ba77-dba4697042a2

I liked the aesthetic of the moving models. I guessed that they were photoscanned clay sculptures which were then imported into blender, rigged and animated.

I thrifted a digimon plastic craft kit and used its parts to construct two small robot figures. I found that while using the 3D scanner app the true depth function was less effective in capturing smaller objects. I used the photo mode instead. I then imported these into Blender as GLTFs. I need to work on adding some more detail, using sculpt mode to really carve in the ridges. After that I'll optimise it a litte. Since I'm rendering these in blender to be 360 videos, I don't have to worry about optimisation that much. I'll also mess with the textures in photoshop. When I have the model ready I'll upload them the mixamo to rig and animate.

That's where I'm at. Hopefully I'll have some animated shots of the characters ready by next week.

# data[].attributes.body
I exported the texture files out and messed around with them in photoshop. To slightly mimic the pixelised effect of low poly models I isolated areas by colour range and overlayed pixelated images. I do think there is probably an easier way to do this but I do kind of want the original texture to remain. I used an image of macaroni to texture this.

# data[].attributes.body
Unsure how to view lighting uhhhh yeah

# data[].attributes.body
will have to make it a 360 vidoe but ayyeyeeee

also i am a little confused about such file type exports but such is life

# data[].attributes.body
using video textures for background models (to distract from how bare they are)

interpolated textures etc

# data[].attributes.headline
refined floor plan and some object designs

# data[].attributes.subject
refined floor plan and some object designs

# data[].attributes.body
prioritising simplicity and using video textures to enhance

# data[].attributes.body
spatial sound design question - difficult to achieve, recommended to edit audio in pp instead

research vr propeties in pp for spatial audio control

# data[].attributes.body
for scanned models

in shading tabs

emissive quality - lights up / property lighting to other models

ambient occlusion - might have to use add on, or brute force - manually texture paint in shadows in recesses of robot models

# data[].attributes.body
subdividing square

using sculpt tool to drag out vertices - star like

edit mode, select random vertices and pushpull, snap vertices to cursor

# data[].attributes.headline
Blending / meshing seperate animated models

# data[].attributes.subject
Blending / meshing seperate animated models

# data[].attributes.body
instead of having to create a new scene every time a different animation is used, only when new shot.

# data[].attributes.body
rather than voice over - using these pixel voices i made by getting small clips of vowels and duplicating them

More game vibe? and robotic. also would be funny that these are the voices speaking and the subtitles are french,

oh yeah its gonna be french. i think. l'amour c'est comme une machine à mort.

# data[].attributes.body
I have been granted with a simple extension, meaning by the time I submit my blog seperately there may not be as much documentation of project 2 on here

# data[].attributes.headline
Making furniture objects in nomad sculpt

# data[].attributes.subject
Making furniture objects in nomad sculpt

# data[].attributes.body
other things that need to be made are the cityscape/outside which i plan to just use a sky box or some object with a video texture and the death machine model for the final shot.

going to do a test 360 render now

# data[].attributes.body
putting camera setting to equirectangular AKJFDHASFIOEKLSDJLK i hate blender

# data[].attributes.body
As i modelled most of the furniture set pieces in nomad and imported them with baked textures into blender as STLs, they worked fine in the eevee render engine. But inorder to render out the scene as a 360 video, I need to use the cycles rendering engine, which for some reason makes all the textures into just black and glossy. I'm not really sure how to fix this, I've tried looking into the shading nodes from something that is only compatible with eevee but I'll be honest I don't think I know enough about blender to figure this out.

# data[].attributes.body
not focused on immersion / empathy machine - lo fi, unrealistic textures and wrapping, changing camera angles to purposefully misplace the human physicality of the viewer. not an empathy machine. a death machine.

nice robot guys

guys blender is really hard to use

The low resolution is due to blender render optimisation and time limits, however I also do enjoy the pixelated wash it brings across the whole environment.

playing with the idea of immersion using audio, movement, camera angles and the aesthetic of the models used. There are a lot of mistakes / incongruences when experiencing it as a viewer, some clashing between the watching and the body, succinctly taking yourself out of its shoes. watch this youtube video, don't feel empathy. These robots are eating eggs and walking into the death machine.

In relation to time - the doll house floating in a void creates a liminal sense of timelessness. This set exists outside of the world, unreal and self contained. It is embracing its technical artefacts and not trying to disguise itself from anything other than a shoddy blender environment. This thing exists in no time and a flash, in eternity and 3 minutes and 58 seconds.