In this series of blog posts, we will take you through the creative process behind Kinesics. This artistic research project explores the future role of body language in Virtual Reality. This is the fourth post in a series of ten.
In January 2019 Niki was invited for an Artist in Residency at The Seoul Institute of the Arts. The art academy offered access to twenty five students studying not only technology and game design, but also dance and theatre subjects. This interdisciplinary selection of students was a unique opportunity for the Kinesics project. We decided to use it as the first phase of our research.
Niki designed a ten day workshop around collaborative play through body language, and the academy sent out a signup sheet to technology, dance, and acting students. As the workshops were primarily about Virtual Reality, we expected a large amount of tech students, and only a few from acting and dance subjects. The opposite turned out to be true. There was a surprisingly small amount of interest from the techies and game designers, compared with that of the performers. This was an interesting and ultimately a very educational challenge.
The small amount of game design students meant that we couldn't quickly develop all the ideas that were brainstormed, because the majority of students were not trained in the technical aspects of game design. This did, however, result in new opportunities. These students understood a different kind of craft, one that works with body language. We introduced the group to paper prototyping, teaching them interaction flowcharts, and physically acting out a play session. In this way, we bypassed the missing skills, but immediately applied the flowcharts on stage by performing. This worked out really well, as the physical feeling of ‘doing’ yielded a better understanding of the game feel, opposed to diving straight into the cod
As body language is a broad context we needed to give the students a clear direction. The first assignments for the workshop were:
Design activities for two players;
Activities must stimulate players to pay attention to the body of the other player;
Activities must include a problem to solve together;
Design simple activities; simple is clear and clear is fun.
The most central example that we used in the first workshop was the game ‘Charades’. In this popular party game, players have to portray words to each other through body language. In this phase, Charades functioned as a tool for exploration for the students. They started out with variations of this guessing game, but quickly elaborated beyond portraying meaning only by use of the body. Examples were rowing in sync to control a rowboat on an endless lake, whilst collecting stars as they fell into the water. Or an excellent idea of guessing three snapshots of body postures that separately don't mean anything, but together form a crude 3-frame animation that suggests an action.
Lessons learnt:
The affordances of VR
Physical movement in VR is still very limited. Only the movement of your head and hands is tracked. Surprisingly, instead of limiting the students it created new affordances in movement for them. Being in VR made them think differently about how they can move, and gave them a new perspective of their bodies. When analysing the students’ dancing and moving in VR, it is clear that they move like that BECAUSE they are in VR. Being in VR changed their body language and the process of choreography.
Interdisciplinary balance
Working with an interdisciplinary group always leads to surprising outcomes. Professional dancers and actors can push the thinking process into totally new directions that game designers might not expect. At the same time, true interdisciplinary balance can be hard. We saw acting and dance students really starting to think like game designers, but also sometimes forgetting their own field of expertise in the process. For example, it was fascinating to see that none of the dance students came up with a dance game. On the other hand, the game concepts they came up with were original and uniquely whimsical. So, their ‘outsider’ view did yield interdisciplinary results.
Technology needs planning
The biggest hurdle was technology. The game design students had the brave job of being realists. Listening to ideas, and then either saying ‘no’, or creatively translating them into something that was more easily realised in a game engine. It was interesting to see the performance students becoming more aware of the limitations of game development in a short time, and becoming more adept at formulating ideas that could be quickly prototyped in code. This was good because it led to more realistic ideas, but also bad because some of the more unique and crazy ideas were lost. This way of thinking is ultimately a double edged sword that is necessary but needs to be managed well.
Managing a creative process
The tension between originality and realism is very familiar to Monobanda. Making concepts free of realistic constraints leads to things that can never realistically be made, and making concepts that are limited by what you can achieve right now can only lead to variations of something that has already been done before. We combat this by having multiple phases of diverging (free ideas) and converging (being realistic). We applied these small cycles of ‘diverge’ and ‘converge’ to the workshop too. Starting out with free brainstorm sessions, then iterating those ideas and seeing which ones could realistically evolve into a prototype. Both the brainstorm ideas (diverge) and the prototype outlines (converge) are written down on big pieces of paper. The next day we start all over again. After doing this for a few cycles a pattern starts to emerge of the underlying logic. What you are trying to do becomes more clear. This understanding then influences your problem solving logic, and leads to new ways of approaching a concept.
In our next post we’ll talk about the first reflection moment and our further expectations. This research was a collaboration with ImproVive and funded by Creative Industries NL.