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 third post in a series of ten.
During our first brainstorm we formulated basic game ideas. These were meant to illustrate the direction we wanted to explore. Our goal: design forms of cooperative play through interpreting each others movement. The questions we asked ourselves were:
What kind of situations can we design that require body language?
What kind of movements or body language can we facilitate?
What kind of playful behaviour do we want to research and facilitate?
What kind of situations can we design in which one user needs to explain something to the other through body language physically?
How do we reward player personal expressiveness, which can’t be measured by a rule set?
Art by the wonderful Astrid Martirossian
Idea 1 : For inspiration, we tend to use aspects of classic playground games. For example, in “skip the rope” the two rope swinging players share a rhythm and flow, and they are able to get so in tune that they can feel the other player speeding up or slowing down, and wordlessly go along in that rhythm. It is these kinds of unspoken connections in movement that we aim to facilitate.
Art by the wonderful Astrid Martirossian
Idea 2: This idea facilitates cooperative actions performed by two players who together solve problems. For example coordinating different actions to open doors, or communicating the timing or certain order in which both players have to interact with elements in their world. We were discussing giving the solution to only one player, which facilitates the need for messages to be conveyed.
Art by the wonderful Astrid Martirossian
Idea 3: This idea focuses on conveying information that is only visible to one of the players - get it wrong and the solution changes, get it right and you move on to the next puzzle. Through arm movements, the player on the left tries to portray the correct shape necessary for the other player to open the door. Color, and order of actions were other themes for puzzles.
Lessons learnt:
Game mechanics versus Free Play: A catch 22.
At this early start of the process we only paper prototyped and acted out these ideas. It soon turned out that the prototypes resulted in very simple , goal-oriented behaviour with almost no room for personal expression or emergent play. It’s a bit of a catch22. Having no game rules results also means there is no goal, resulting in players not knowing what to do, but adding game rules results in players doing exactly what the rules require. It became clear we needed to give players a clear ‘assignment’ to motivate them to do something, but that same assignment needed to be so open ended that players could express in their own creative way and elaborate on the premise. This juxtaposition between free expression and rigid game rule became our conceptual challenge.
In our next post we’ll talk about our artist-in-residence in South Korea. This research was a collaboration with ImproVive and funded by Creative Industries NL.