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Gifting Design – Start of Progress and Prototypes – Project Three (2130)

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Instruction

Start progress on the prototypes for your gifting design final.

 

Purpose

Decide on what you want to give and begin the hard work towards the final product. Consider what your recipient talked to you about and how that may impact every aspect of the creation

 

My Interpretation

I was unable to start prototyping the figures as the clay had not arrived yet in the strange times we currently are living in. Instead, I focused on what I could do, the gift box. The idea I had was to use a theatre as the gift box with a moving retractable curtain as the main reveal to the rest of the figures. I wanted to paint it all black with white or ivory or gold detailing alongside the velvety red curtain. I created sixteen holes for the bases of the figures to be places, all identical so they can be interchanged. I started with Bristol but quickly ran out. Using the net I made out of the lighter paper, I decided to use recycled chipboard for the final form, hinting at my recipients field of study and interest in recycling and sustainability.

Analogue Game Design – Concept Sketches – Project Three (2330)

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Instruction

Begin concept drafts for your final game design concept. Highlight mechanics and how the game may be laid out.

 

Purpose

Start the organization and storytelling of your game design. Communicate clearly what and how the game will take place and how it deals with conflict, goals, and mechanics.

 

My Interpretation

I want the game to take place over seven days, if you successfully survive to the end of the seven days you win. You lose the game if any of your four stats (health, sanity, reputation, will) reach zero. Stats are determined by which stat card/character you pick at the start of the game. Each stats card has a unique advantage and disadvantage. Stats increase and decrease when you pick up event, check, and item cards from a shuffled deck. On day one you would pick up one card and react accordingly. On day two you will pick two and react accordingly after each card. On day three you pick up three cards, and so on until you pick seven cards on the seventh day. Event cards are the majority of the shuffled deck where you pick cards from, in these cards, a particular event happens and you are given two options which differently impact stats, overall having the same net gain/loss. You may also pull check and item cards, though these are much more rare. Check cards are designed to check a particular stat, and if it fails, you suffer the consequences. However, if you are lucky enough to have an item card saved, you may use it to reverse the negative effects of a bad check card or amplify the positive effects of a good check card. The game heavily emphasizes fate and moral decisions regarding survival. Once the character is selected and the deck is shuffled, the game is already set in terms of story, but your choices on which options to pick on the event cards is the meat of the game, alongside resource management of stats and items and the risk-reward system that comes with keeping cards for saving you later or using them now for a potentially less effective play.

Research and Reflection – Analogue Game Design – Project Three (2330)

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Original Story From Project Two

Horror Story  – Final Version

 

Abstract Takeaways

  • divine punishment
  • hunger
    • insatiable
    • insanity-inducing
    • murderous
      • only relieved by consumption of human flesh
  • moral conflict
    • eat oneself?
      • hurts
      • can kill you
      • still hungry
    • eat another?
      • murder is wrong
      • dangerous, damages reputation and psyche
      • full, not hungry anymore
  • coming to terms with terrible outcomes

 

Themes

  • divine intervention, fate, and unfairness
  • moral conflict, murder is wrong, is sacrifice any better?
    • can you call it “murder” if it’s to survive?
  • madness, insanity, slowly succumbing to temptation, the pull of evil becoming stronger every moment

 

Potential Message

  • there is no right answer in desperate times
  • survival is a test of morality, not fitness

 

How Interaction and Play Can Communicate the Message

The themes of succumbing to an ever-present creeping madness definitely can be a conflict within the game design, the goal being to simply make it to the end, whatever that means (time-based? challenge-based? experience-based?). The machinic of the game would likely be something to do with surviving each day to the end, but facing various effects of the hunger each day. Perhaps this is a card game, the goal to last a week long with this ever-growing hunger within you. Maybe each day you draw an additional card that has the chance of serious setbacks upon them each day, drawing one on day one and seven on day seven. I would like this game to be played alone, if possible, a game between yourself and fate and random chance. The concept of keeping up facades, reputation, and not being creepy could play into the game design as well, perhaps including a player card that has a series of stats (health, reputation, suspicious, hunger) that change as you draw cards, and as one gets too low, you must react accordingly and potentially hurt other stats.

Research and Analysis – Gifting Design – Project Three (2130)

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Research on Rhys Grubel

I have emailed and been in light contact with Rhys, my gift recipient in visual communications. He has replied to me, stating he will answer the questions I have sent him within the week, but as of writing this post, I am answerless. As I already had some ideas in mind, I asked some quasi-pointed questions aiming at a few aspects I plan to focus on in my designed gift. The questions I asked Rhys were:

  1. What is your relationship to live performance (theatre, dance, stand-up, dynamic arts)? Have you ever performed in front of a live audience? If not, have you ever wanted to?
  1. What is your relationship to board games? What are your favorite AND least favorite design elements within them? Do you like to play with small or large groups? Do you not like to ply at all? Why?
  1. What is your relationship to subtlety? Do you prefer to be loud and proud with blunt communication? Quiet and complex with mysterious character quirks? Do you prefer things to have subtlety or lack subtlety? What is your favorite AND least favorite example of subtlety?
  1. Define these words/phrases as they relate to you:
    “my own body”
    “the body of another”
    “myself”
    “other”
    “human form”
    “human shape”
  1. What is the best way for you, logically, to receive a gift from me? In person? Mail? Digital instruction?
  1. If you want me to know more about you, what are your social medias?

 

Since I was unable to get these answers before the time this post was due, I stalked Rhys slightly online. I looked up his name on Instagram and Facebook to no avail but found his name motioned on the Twitter for OSU design. There, I found his MFA thesis proposals and what interests him in design. One of the first things he mentioned about design was “storytelling” in design and how that can reshape things. He has a strong interest in the political space, particularly about sustainability and how we can repair the recycling system in America. He is a family man. On that same Twitter I found out that Rhys also was awarded Global Arts and Humanities Graduate Team Fellowships, further supporting our shared interest in the arts.

 

Designer Quote

From the wonderful mind of Marcel Marceau, a French mime who revolutionized the craft with his design of sixteen fundamental emotions in silence called The Conventions of Character: “Mime makes the invisible , visible and the visible, invisible.” So often in design do we talk about great design being invisible, and this is no different. In his craft, he deliberately designed The Conventions of Character to be invisible tools within mime, much like how designs goal is to be entirely invisible, to be great.

 

Attached is my wonderful friend, Taylor Moriarty (a theatre major who studies mime), and her best representation and description of each of the sixteen conventions.

Marceau’s Conventions of Character (Taylor’s Representation)

 

Narrative/Concept Statement

From the information I have currently received from Rhys (none), I can’t perfectly describe quite what I want to gift yet, but here is my idea for what I plan to do regardless:

I want to show off the invisible conventions of visual communication and design in the most visually communicative way possible, human performance and mime. No words, just deeply meaningful and subtle poses that represent the sixteen Marcel Marceau’s Conventions of Character. I plan to create a set of sixteen (or more – some poses have movement, requiring two figures for one pose) clay figurines as the gift, enclosed within a gift box representative of a stage with the curtain rising to reveal the figures. Oven-cured-clay will be the easiest material to work with from home, and an additional layer of paint/glaze to further emphasize the subtle differences in form would help distinguish some of the similar poses. I plan to create these clay forms in all sixteen Conventions of Character poses, although heavily stylized, the eyes simply being arrows on where they would be looking, and the mouth enlarged for detail. Each figure has an accompanying card (digitally done) that describes the pose, how to do it, what it means, what it is based off of, and why it was included in the conventions.

Exercise – The Best Gift – Project Three (2130)

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Instruction

Illustrate or write about the best gift you’ve ever received. Keep it concise, but convey the proper emotions it makes you feel.

 

Purpose

Understand what gift-giving elicits in others and how it can be perceived. Practice only allowing the most essential elements of something bleed through in your work, think of materiality, style, color, etc.

 

My Interpretation

I wanted to not only convey what my gift was in words but also style. The sketchy, black and off-white color scheme highlights the memory I have of my best gift, a gray Cleveland Indian’s “C” baseball hat, which is fuzzy, distant, and very melancholy. It is fragmented and I don’t like thinking of that time very often. I was a very different person, specifically much more rude, aggressive, and standoffish. My then-partner gave this hat to me for my birthday in 2016, when I was 16 in high school (the summer I was to become a junior), they were a year older. I wore this hat all the time, to workout, to lounge, when my hair was too messy to bother with. It became worn rather quickly but I still often use it today, it’s a memory of a person I treated poorly and wish I could apologize to, but not someone I really want to see again. Its a strange bittersweet mix of emotions that remind and humble me everyday. The gift itself isn’t necessarily the best ~thing~ I’ve ever recieved, but it has become the best gift to me as it has kept me more grounded and reflective of the past, almost a warning to not be what I was before and that everyday people change. That developing understanding is the true gift.

Narrative Style – Final (Story) – Project Two (2330)

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     ​I know hunger more than you ever could. I have been “gifted” with a curse from what some call God, though I clearly see her in a different light. She decided one day to punish me for reasons I am uncertain. I simply woke up and I was hungry. Not hungry in a peckish kind of way, not hungry in a discomforting kind of way, not hungry in starving kind of way. Hungry in a kind of way that is reminiscent of having a hole where your stomach would be and your body desperately trying to tell you something is wrong the only way it knows how. Pain. Indescribable, unrelenting pain. I thought I could simply eat, and the problem would be solved, just a cruel joke my body was pulling on itself. I was wrong. I ate and ate and ate but I was still hungry, I had to eat more, I had to eat something, I had to eat someone.

     I don’t remember the first time I tasted human meat very well. I remember it was my own arm, out of sheer desperation to alleviate the pain I took a heaping chunk of it off. To my surprise it was filling. It alleviated the pain and I felt a moment of serendipitous relief as the blood trickled from my teeth down my arm and onto the once clean wooden planks below. I thought that was it, but I could feel the urge deep down, dormant. I realized that this hunger will not go away after such a small snack and my body can only hold so much flesh. 

     I was not a murderer. I was not a cannibal. I will not kill, I will not eat, this is a test that I can overcome, I told myself. Other people will not suffer because of my ailment and I will not be the cause of pain and destruction in others when I have felt such pain myself. I can overcome this. I can overcome this.

However, the hunger remained unwavering. It grew and grew with such force that it drove me mad. The pain was hardly bearable, and to have the solution be right in front of me at all times, just out of reach, was torture. What do morals matter when you’re desperate? It’s survival. I was hungry and I must survive. I stormed outside and made my way to the neighbors plot.

     My first full meal was alive when I had them, albeit not for long. It started with their thigh, if I remember correctly. I strapped them to a chair and made sure their leg was secure and sunk my teeth into the side of the leg. I suppose I must’ve hit an important artery because they fortunately bled out only a few minutes later. Good for them. What came next disgusted even me, selective memory has blocked it out. The point is, I had no leftovers and a big mess to clean, but I wasn’t hungry. I had a feast.

Narrative Style – Draft – Project Two (2330)

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Instruction

Bring a draft of your progress to class.

 

Purpose

Allow for critique from other classmates and see how well the story is coming along with minimal verbal aid. Check if the style is consistent and emphasizes the tone of the story chosen.

 

My Interpretation

Presenting my project to other classmates revealed some confusion and critique that was extremely helpful. Obviously, the lack of color is currently the largest issue but that will change in the future. I plan to use a mixture of pen and faded colored pencil to allow for a contrast between stark dark colors (black and red) and muted, aged colors both of which reflect different eras of Romanesque art. Some miscommunication and confusion in character differentiation was brought to my attention through the critique and further efforts to change the character designs for more clarity is happening. Finally, frame eight was a place of confusion for the viewers of my storyboard, so I plan to make the frame smaller, add a border, and change the figures pose to emphasize the distraught feeling floating through the scene.

Face Off – Concept Statement and Script – Project Two (2130)

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Concept Statement

The Zodiac and Cancer (script)

Instruction

Create a concept statement for your project. Create a script for the performance aspect of the project.

 

Purpose

The concept statement is to hone into the essence of the project and how everything comes together to create a cohesive project. The script is to allow for structure within the performance as well as a guide for the performers to follow, should anyone be able to use the masking forms.

 

My Interpretation

I wrote the script while my partner, Fabian, created the concept statement. We both edited the first iterations into the final versions. For the script, I wanted to focus on the duality of factual scientific aspects of Cancer contrasted against the emotional, mythical, and metaphorical aspects. The two performers strike a balance of speaking over each other at first, allowing the other to speak as the performance goes on, and ultimately ending by cooperating and speaking together in unison as a way of communicating that both parties need to exist to create the whole of what “Cancer” stands for. While one party is speaking, they speak directly to the audience in two very different ways. In the same fashion, the party that is not speaking moves in a very particular way to emphasize the speaker’s words and meaning. The performer with the metaphorical crab claw as a masking form is speaking analytically, as if lecturing a class. The performer with the constellation arm masking form is speaking as if telling a story to an enthused audience.