Games and Immersive Role Play as Storytelling
Posted by Aya Jaffar on December 16, 2014Two weeks ago, I attended the Permanent Garbage: Victor Papanek and Beautiful Visions of Failed Systems symposium held at the Parsons School of Design. The symposium was an extension of the How Things don’t Work: The Dreamspace of Victor Papanek exhibition currently on display at the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery. I was intrigued by something Stuart Candy, futurist and instructor at OCADU in Toronto, said. While addressing the projects on display at the exhibition, Candy responded to the video based storytelling approach most of the projects utilized to speculate and imagine the future.
His main argument was that we try and use more interactive ways of storytelling, such as games and immersive role play.
Personally, I’ve been looking forward to learning videography techniques within next semester’s studio to be able to tell stories, produce meaning, imagine alternatives, and evoke emotions. Yet I see the importance of what Candy suggested, as it helps place the viewer/audience within the context of the future we are imagining. The impact could be profound and meaningful.
Telling stories through moving images and video
Videos and film are powerful, in my opinion, for several reasons. They visualize what words cannot easily describe; they transport the audience to a world you imagine. When combines with graphics, editing, and sound- the effect can be moving. We all watch movies, so we feel comfortable interacting with the medium, and are thus able to concentrate on the content and the narrative. I recently watched this short clip about Turkey that kept me stunned for a good five minutes. The beauty of the frames, colors, music, and vocal overlay tells the story of a country with an imperialist past and a colorful ethnic mosaic. It simply is beautiful on every level.
However, videos are told through your eyes (when you shoot the film), your thoughts (as you stitch together the content), and your voice. Every member of your audience might interpret the video based on their own reaction, background, emotions, etc. But the artifact remains the same: a video playing on a screen or projected on a surface.
Telling stories through games and role play
On the other hand, games and role play forces the audience to immerse themselves within your vision. They alter it, move it, change it, and live it. The results vary, and could definitely fail sometimes- but if they are done right, then the impact on the audience is as real as it can ever get.
I am reminded of Christian Paul’s lecture in Clive Dilnot’s Design for this Century lecture series. Christian talked of games as modes of providing feedback and feed-forward loops. One powerful example of an immersive game she mentioned was Gone Gitmo. A simulation of Guantanamo’s infamous military prison. The simulation is a virtual reality game that places you in the prison. Using the tricky relationship between reality and the reconstruction of it, and between what information we actually have on Gitmo and what can be hidden from us, the user repeatedly gains and loses control within the simulation. Nothing re-created can actually visualize and bring to life what actually happens in Guantanamo Bay, but utilizing a virtual reality game is probably the closest anyone can experience to being there, save for actually ending up in Gitmo.
Keeping all of this in mind, I look forward to moving forward with our studio, and with exploring my own ways of storytelling and building narratives.