souvenir: videogames, remembering and moving on

8/10/2019 Souvenir: Videogames, remembering and Moving on

1/52

Souvenir

Learning to let go, and let players make their own story

Mohini DuttaTeam Srsly

Collaboration Thesis: Writing Sem. 2Thesis professors: Nick Fortugno | Colleen Macklin | Barbara Morris

Parsons: The New School05/13/2012


2/52

Introduction

Souvenir: something that serves as a reminder.

(orig.): French, literally, act of remembering, from Middle French, from (se)

souvenir to remember, from Latin subvenire to come up, come to mind.

Memory and perception work in strange ways. Often, what is

remembered has more to do with the psychological imprint left from an

experience instead of the facts. Add to this the bittersweet angst of growing up;

of miscalculated explorations of this transient space, full of deceptive memories

and tilted perspectives, and you will find the core of our thesis project

Souvenir.

Souvenir is an exploration of memory, perception and identity, using

game-play mechanics to recreate a familiar experience namely, the personal

evolution from childhood to adulthood. Coping with this transition is a familiar

experience, relatable to most people - something that we wanted to exploit in

this project. By using a common experience and adding the lens of narrative

upon it, we wanted to create a familiar landscape that could evoke memories

from the players past. We wanted to create an experience reminiscent of a

fable or folk-tale; resonating to the individual regardless of the unfamiliarity of

the narrative details, exploring a new mythology that relates to our time.


3/52

Figure 1: In Jaipur, Rajasthan - India

ROOTS

"What we seek we shall find; what we flee from, flees from us."

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Roots are important to me, although I feel like I have none. Which in itself is a

contradition, if you knew my family. We can trace our ancestry back at least several

hundred years, with suppositions and guesswork filgreeing back even further. So, with

such a defined base for my origins, why do I feel so rootless?

Part of the problem is that I am Indian, and in India, no one is rootless. The

idea is absurd. Even as a penniless beggar on the street, chances are you have some

history, at the very least a connection to your soil. Indians never break off their

umbilical relationship to the land. Mother India, mother to us all. The smell of Indian

monsoons is heady and intoxicating; that first drop of rain on the dry dusty ground,


4/52

the feeling of euphoria I get, as I am soaked, cleansed, reborn. Every year, everyone;

everyone who grew up here, that is.

My parents were young and experimental at the time, newly married and

already with a child, they had a decision to make, and they werent afraid of getting

creative with it. My father was a sailor, and my mother chose to leave her job to be with

him and raise me on the go. My childhood was their novel experiment, our private

little gypsy caravan on the ocean. The consequences of raising a child on the go are

that this child can never really ever settle down after that. Fit in quickly, assimilate

fast, but never last; like Ikea furniture. I have never lived anywhere for more than a few

years, at least not without feeling this painful physical yearning to move. To leave and

return some day, but never to stay forever.

I was raised on a ship for the first eleven years of my life. This is where I

learned to ride a bicycle, had my own swing, did home-work, went fishing, fell a lot,

and celebrated all my early birthdays. India felt more like an exotic vacation home to

me; we would only be there for a few months in the year, usually around the holidays,

when life was shrouded in gauzy unreality and everything was larger than life. India

was that weird in-between place where people did not talk like they did in my Enid

Blyton books, and I got sick a lot. I felt as related to my roots as a tourist in Times

Square.

The thing about taking root is trading in the freedom of the road for

assimilation, the old gypsy dilemma. Trading in open road for social constrains. Isn't

that a lot to give up? It is to me. I can follow a pattern in my life of unconsciously

staying away from anything but the most essential societal networks and close


5/52

relationships for the fear of loosing myself in the process. But being myself means I

never really know who or what I will be, only what I am, and that too ephemerally.

Since I am incapable of settling down and growing my own roots, I instead

compromise. I study roots, I try and trace things as far back as I can, hoping to find

some clarity, some sense of understanding my tendency to flee when things look solid.

This has cost me 2 careers so far, and at the outset of a new one, I wonder if this one

will take. I loved journalism till I didn't, I loved film till I ran from it, and I love games

now, but for how much longer? Is it a case of picking the right shoe to fit into, or just

an ingrained tendency to abort and run?

HOME?

We are all wanderers on this earth.Our hearts are full of wonder, and our souls are deep with dreams.-Roma Saying

What is home? Is it the place you were born

(Indian govt. standard), the place where you

grew up, or the place that feels most

familiar? What do histories have to do with

making a place home? I dont know when it

started, but at some point, I started

augmenting my memories with snippets from

stories and I cant quite tell them apart. It

also doesnt help that things like fighting

pirates really happened, although going to

Figure 2: Me as an infant in our family

home in New Delhi


6/52

Australia never did. Although we had a house throughout all our travels, we never

really lived in it, and it never felt like a valid homestead to me. My earliest familiar

memory is the departure gate at the airport; they all looked a lot alike back in the day.

Right after a few life threatening health problems, and my subsequent recovery

from them, my parents, exhausted from everything decided that a touch of the

"different" might help us all. So we fled. First, to a quiet coastal town, where my

father traded in his winged shoes for an administrative position, a house and a steady

income. I had many near death adventures here as well. Once almost walking into the

open jaws of a type of local crocodile and made my mother faint (the crock and I both

lost interest in each other, and nothing bad happened). Right after this, an ancient

ceiling fan fell on my crib and crushed it to smithereens. I escaped unscathed, thanks

to my mother who felt like she needed to get me out of that room, and removed me

from the premises, just seconds before the fan fell. This was when someone suggested

that my incredible fortune was all thanks to my paternal Grandfather's spirit, who was

protecting me. And just like that, ghosts became real to me.

Life in Porbandar1was dull, never changing, and most of all, insular. It was a

tiny little town of 250 people, all employed at the dry dock my father administered, and

eventually the deathly creep of stagnation and casual institutional corruption began

creeping on my parents. Also, my mother was getting superstitious about my wellbeing

there. Official resignations took too long to get approved, and my parents had had

enough. We fled in the dead of the night, to shiny Bombay, and to a new beginning.

Bombay at the time was a transient seaport of great scale and many unique

"Colloquial, BritishPort, and HindiBandar- Port


7/52

wonders. It had the film industry, was the seat of commerce for India, and the most

modern utilities were easily available here. India was a socialist country at the time;

household amenities were on a lottery system and imported goods only available

illegally. As a result, government jobs were a prize catch, since it basically ensured a

nepotistic hold for the family of the employee for life. But Bombay was not our

destination at the time; it was our stepping-stone for a grander adventure to come.

Bombay was where the shipping industry thrived, and this was where all foreign

companies had offices. Eventually, my father

(overqualified as a chemical engineer working

on a ship's engine) got the perfect job. An

Iranian shipping company needed a Chief

Engineer for their ships, a long term posting

for several months of the year, and most

importantly, allowed him to take his family

along.

However, I was 3 years old, just starting

pre-school, and my parents had a big decision

to make at this point. This job would either

take my father away from us for even longer,

take both my parents away leaving me to be raised by the wolves, or something would

have to be done about me. The options seemed bleak at first. Leaving your kid(s)

behind and travelling for a few years was the option of choice for most newly married

sailor families, and openly endorsed by all my parents friends. But my mother had a

Figure 3: On the Ship, age 5


8/52

problem with this. Raising her children has been her lifes work, and even then, she

held on to this responsibility with far more dedication than anyone ever gave her credit

for. She found great value and personal satisfaction in it, and nothing would make her

miss the formative years of her first childs life.

My parents used to be pretty unconventional back then. My father used to be an

easygoing hippy, and my mother was a hip disco-girl. Both of them desperately wanted

to see and experience more of life before succumbing to the ever-tightening noose of

societal expectations. So they made a radical choice, to try to have their cake and eat it

too. They decided to take me along with them. Home-schooled on a ship by my

mother, and sailing all year long. They cut a deal with a local school2, as long as I

managed to pass the final exams each year, the school would accredit my

homeschooling, and I could continue my education in remote mode as a student of the

school. India had no homeschool accreditation at the time, so hacking the system was

our best bet.

And then began the best years of my life. We practically moved to Iran, and

began the gypsy life. Bombay became an in-between-house, a place where we spent a

few months every year, and the ship became my new home.

These years were spectacular. Apart from being my parents only child, most

often I was the only child on the ship, since no one else had the guts to extricate their

children off the system. Being the only child on a ship full of men, often stuck at sea

for months at end makes you everyones favourite. This meant that for a time, I lived

the Willy Wonka dream. I had 2 of everything I ever wanted. Once, for my 6 thbirthday,

2My mother was friends with the principal


9/52

I got 7 different birthday cakes, and enough toys to fill a small cargo container. I had

so many toys that we always ended up leaving most of them on the ship, with promises

of returning there sometime soon. We never did, and that might be why I hold on to

silly souvenirs forever. Objects are frozen 3D pictures. They have so many stories

attached to them. Its very hard for me to even throw away things that are broken or

torn, because it feels like all the memories that object holds, will die when it is gone.

And who knows when Ill see those people/go those places again. In a transient life,

objects become such vivid idols to memorable times.

Iran. The Iran of my memories is a special place of freedom and nonchalance.

A place where I caught frogs in the fountains, celebrated spring festivals, had my only

pen-pal, and ate too many sweets. My Iran is a strangely wonderful place, full of

pistachio nuts, giant slabs of oven-baked bread, and chilo kebabs3on mountains of

buttery rice. A place where

the women I knew liked to

wear fashionable overcoats

with gorgeous lace scarves;

not hijabs. A place where

everyone I met gave me a

piece of candy, or a cheap

toy; just because they liked

children. Maybe I am deluded, and maybe my imagination has glossed over the

3Meat Kebabs

Figure 4: School children in Iran, 1989


10/52

negative things, but for the most of it, I think I saw a secret Iran, a place so unlike the

real thing that it feels mystical. Where intolerance, hate and violence did not exist.

People wore too much makeup, and made me special treats and loved me. Maybe I

hold on to this fragile Iran so strongly because my return back to India was nothing

like this. But then, the dream had to end eventually.

While we sailed, we were bold

explorers of the unknown. Kings

of our floating island and

oblivious to everything else

around us. Of the '84 and '92

riots in India, where people

slashed and burned their

neighbours, mobs of violent

fools chasing an ephemeral

dream fed to them by their

pundits and imams.

Figure 5: MS Wisdom, beached off the coast of

Mumbai


11/52

STORIES

There is no such thing as fantasy unrelated to reality!Maurice Sendak

I started reading very early. Apparently I took to words like a fish to water and

never really stopped. I think the fascinating thing about stories and words is that they

are like life, but only better. Although someone else is the sutradhaar4, the reader

always has a choice, or some control over the situation. Books can be closed and

hidden away if they get scary, you can re-read the good parts and its like they keep

reoccurring, and finally, the best stories are what you want them to be, guided by the

author, but a personal experience nonetheless. I think I loved words for the way they

filled in awkward holes, and made everything sound better. Changing the position of

words in a line changed their meaning; made bad news sound better, and changed the

4Bearer of the string,Sanskrit

Figure 6: An old painting that became graffiti


12/52

way people react and responded to them.5

My father is the original storyteller of the family, and I have strived to be half as

good as him all my life. He has always had perfect timing, and a way to gauge his

audience and give them what they want. He is the king of embellishers, and every

real story he has told us sounds absolutely convincing, but might have only a grain of

truth in it. Mundane things like his trips walking to school sounded magical, because

he would lose his shoe along the way, and ride a donkey on the way back. He broke all

his sisters toys once to create a convincing backdrop for a story he was going to tell.

Stories used to be the glue that held our family together, once upon a simpler time.

Maybe it was all those childrens adventure stories, or maybe it was my father,

but making things up was the only way I could fit all the different bits into the tapestry

of my life. In my head nothing was ever amiss, because everything had a place in my

story. I recently read the Never-Ending Story, and it felt very familiar. The stories are

too many, like the time we got attacked by pirates in the Straits of Malacca6or the time

we had sharks circling our ship, not allowing anything to come in or go off it. Or the

time when I kicked off all the prayer stones at a Namaaz in Iran, or maybe the time I

got lost in the Carnival in Brazil, or was stuck in a motel in Caracas during a civil coup.

There are so many stories, and such strange ones too, but they feel almost mundane to

me sometimes. I woke up one day on the ship, looked out and there was a magical

floating market all around us where there was only a canal the previous night. We were

sailing through the Suez Canal, and the Red Sea had become a flotilla of market boats

5It felt like a more cohesive form of astrology even, instead of the stars moving and changing

your fate, you move a few words around to do even more6A narrow waterway between Malaysia and Sumatra notorious for its pirates


13/52

by day. Everything from fish, meat, antiques, perfumes to carpets were on display. All

disappeared by 5pm, for fear of the night patrol.

Looking back, the only steady constant in my life that has come with me on

every journey I ever took, right from the very first one, are my stories. I had inherited

my grandfather's library of first editions, classics and detective stories at birth,

followed by someone deciding to teach me the alphabet instead of the usual infantile

activities that a young child endures. This had an incredible effect on my life. I started

reading children's books when I was a little more than a year old, and never stopped.

My parents (more like my Mom) lived with my Father's family at the time, Delhi. My

mother had many things fighting for her attention, and had precious little time to sit

around baby-sitting me. Reading helped both of us.

Books, stories and storytelling have an almost religious place in my heart. They

are the one thing that I have never abandoned, evolved with perhaps, but never

abandoned. All the different places I have ever lived in have flourished with stories.

Legends, myths and mysteries are a given, India thrives on them. Even on the ship,

sailors are a superstitious bunch, full of urban legends of the ocean, and how to avoid

them.

Returning back home to India from the sailing was one of the hardest

transitions I ever had to do. Firstly, it didnt feel like the end of an era when we

returned from Sardinia7

. We were back in the transition place, and we usually stayed

for a month or two, three if someone was getting married. Eventually, the months

became a year, and I had already been attending the local school full tilt by then. This

7Italy, our last voyage was around the Mediterranean, ending in Italy


14/52

was most traumatic. After being the centre of so many lives, it felt very weird to be 1 of

60 students in as dehumanizing an environment,

as the Indianpublic school8. More than anything,

I felt deeply betrayed. No one gave me the memo,

I didnt know I had to account for permanency.

For all my resentment to this clipping of

our collective wing, I am thankful for one thing.

This was definitely the time that I developed a

habit that went on to stoke my future interests in

storytelling. After playing hide and seek with

India for nearly a decade, all the fragments of the

myths and urban legends, all the remembered bits

of bedtime stories, even the fragments of parental conversation that I recollected, had

created a mood-board of sorts in my head. A dynamic mind-map to help traverse the

Indian psyche. I used this to make sense of a lot of it. Inspired by the Indian epics 9I

began adding stories to random events of the day. I would construct complicated

background stories to explain something new and weird I had encountered that day. A

constantly growing tapestry of cultural quirks; it made the experience richer by far to

imagine an unpleasant government official was actually a King who lost his all and

cant help being bitter now or maybe the abrasive fisherwomen who squat at the

entrance of the train at rush hour are just really exhausted mer-folk who swam all

night, and my boss is really just a nice lady who helps feed the needy by night and

8What Americans call middle & high-school are grades 6-12 at public school in India9Mahabharata and the Ramayana

Figure 7: "Incredible India " using

local matchbox art by me


15/52

wont fire me at all

The problem with fitting into the Indian patchwork is that to them I was

neither an expat, nor an authentic Indian10. They just did not know what to do with

me. And for me, everything felt vaguely familiar, but like dj vu; so you arent quite

sure if dreamt it or if it really happened. I loved the colours, patterns and the chaos;

perpetually overwhelmed by the density of flavour, sound, smells, bodies, and colour.

A sensory collage that must be navigated by intuition alone. A desire to add a veneer of

story to everything, easing the shock of the new and unfamiliar, making the unknown

feel harmless, like a storybook.

Figure 8: Collage from "Sita Sings the Blues"

10This is true to life. Friends have told me casually as recently as last year that they dont thinkI am a legitimate Indian/ Bengali


16/52

Figure 9: Souvenir, view from the home world

STORYTELLING IN SOUVENIR

And there are so many stories to tell- too many, such an excess of intertwined livesevents miracles places rumours, so dense a commingling of the improbable and themundane!!Salman Rushdie, Midnights Children

This brings me to my thesis project. Souvenir is a study of transitions and the

story of the journey between places, of letting go and moving on. The process of

making it has in turn been a tangential exploration of my own relationship to both

these things. Having had to move constantly, and adapt to new people and places left

me intrigued by the process of transition. I am reminded of the spiritual concept of

Maya11is centred on the fact that we do not experience physical reality itself but rather

a projection of it created by us.Every person's reality is as fragile as their dream world,

and alters just as easily. By this logic, wishing something into existence is totally

11Maya: Illusion, Hindu/Pan Indian religious belief systems


17/52

plausible. If you want something badly enough, the universe conspires to give it to you.

And sometimes it doesn't. If transitions are so fascinating, and if cinema and literature

have already made a well-established trope for themselves in this, can games do the

same? Can the seamless interaction space of games be utilised to tell a deeply personal

story? Could we construct a system that trusts players to fill in the blanks with their

own memories? Will anyone want to go the extra mile to make sense of something that

wasnt processed for easy consumption? It is through these questions that we came

upon the core idea for Souvenir.

What is Souvenir?

Souvenir is a first-person adventure game that uses a gravity-shifting mechanic

to explore a dreamscape created out of old memories, to tell a story of transition,

personal history, growing up and leaving home.

In the game, the player is the protagonist a nameless young woman who has

recently graduated from high school, and needs to pack up; her dilemma being

deciding what to keep and what to throw away. While looking through all the

accumulated junk of her school years, she finds several worthless objects that bring

back memories, some good, some not as pleasant.

What we hoped to achieve at the end of this process was a game-play aesthetic

similar to experiencing nostalgia. Like remembering someone when you hear a certain

song, the way the fragmented debris from that memory create an image that is familiar

and comfortable, yet not complete. Which makes you think about that person, filling

in the gaps, completing the puzzle. We hoped to do this by using the visuals to create a


18/52

mood, and breaking that up with snippets of text that just hint at something more, but

leave it up to the player to add the rest.

Figure 10: Abandoned Theatre, Souvenir

The game begins in an abandoned theatre. We chose this because of the

ambiguity of a space like a theatre. It is familiar, yet it could be there for any reason. Is

the protagonist an actor or a performer of some sort? Is this a school auditorium? Is it

maybe a nightmare in an abandoned theatre? All this, and the fact that a theatre is

essentially a closed cube, making it a safe practice space, made us think that it would

work well as a place to begin the play-experience. The heroine must play through her

memories and chose to keep object(s) or continue exploring her mind. While re-living

her experiences she gets an opportunity to discover new insights into her memories (of

both mundane and traumatic events), giving her a fresh perspective. These objects are

the souvenirs of her life so far, and she must decide what to do with them trash them

forever, take them with her into her new life, or resolve them and move on.


19/52

True nostalgia is an ephemeralcomposition of disjointedmemories.-Florence King

We were inspired by the idea of

fragmentation, and wanted to

channel this in our game world.

The surreal topsy-turvy quality of

nostalgia seemed like a good place

to start, when we began designing this iteration of Souvenir. I played around with

distorting a familiar space, such as the High school, by building it only using rings.

Similarly, my team-mate Ben used floating platforms and intricate cross-beams to

construct a church, keeping familiar objects like the pew and stained glass windows

intact.

Similarly, the home-world is represented as a floating planet, much like the

home of the Little Prince, with a slice of everything the protagonist cares about on it.

This buffet style presentation allows the player to choose their path, create their own

experience. Eventually, I want to create a dynamic narrative system, which makes up a

story of your life based on your experiences in the game. Leaving each player with a

unique little something to make each play experience memorable.

Figure 11: Stil l from Psychonauts


20/52

How do we tell stories in Souvenir?

The heroine has the ability to shift the gravity of her dreamscape. She begins

the game inside an abandoned theatre, where she is in the seats, but needs to climb on

to stage. The stage is sparsely populated, but intriguing.

On it are a group of odd

props; there is a broken

front-wall of a room, a car,

a few boxes, and words

ribbonning across the

walls.

As she exist the theatre, she plummets headfirst down a rabbit-hole style drop in the

floor, straight into their bedroom (on the home-world). The bedroom looks ordinary; a

bunk bed, a desk, table, dresser etc, only

Figure 13: View of the home-world as you fall towards it + the bedroom you fall into, Souvenir

Figure 12: Words on the stage of th e Theatre scene, Souvenir


21/52

all the objects here have floating bits of text tagging them to a snippet from a memory.

Something visceral and familiar, that I hope the player can identify with. My goal was

to keep the memory snippets as open-ended as possible, suggesting a story instead of

telling anything, and this was a huge challenge for me. Most of my storytelling

experience comes from books and cinema, and the hardest part was to divorce myself

from what I think words do to storytelling, and think of them instead as props in a

film. The way films use a mundane object to tell us so much about the place, the

inhabitants and the mood of the scene12. Could we use words in the same way?

How does the narrative structure work?

The player lands in her bedroom, looks around, sees some snippets of text,

begins to walk out. Outside there is a giant crow standing a little away from the

players bedroom, some more text on her car, some boxes spilled around. She can

decide what direction to go, will she go towards the school or the church? Maybe the

forest? As she begins walking towards either one direction, she gets closer to the crow,

which suddenly explodes into a dozen other crows that fly off to different parts of the

12Such as "In The Mood for Love a film about unrequited love by Wong Kar Wai, where the

director uses minimal dialogue, augmented by the most gorgeously framed shots withincredibly detailed propping to tell us more than the characters ever could.

Figure 14: Stil ls from "In the Mood for Love


22/52

space. After this, the player begins exploring the world, shifting gravity to reach certain

spots in the world. She comes across a lot of glowing orbs of light, with beams

shooting out of them, these are the souvenirs that the player is trying to sort through.

Each souvenir is a small and

mundane object, with a few words of

text around it. Giant beams of light

shoot out of them, visible from across

the worlds, to attract the player

towards it, also acting as a strobe

light; a pulsating element to break the zen state of the static world. As the player

approaches a souvenir, lines of text begin to appear out of thin air around them. These

are slivers from a larger memory, triggered by the players proximity to the object,

acting like a flashback. But to understand our current game, it is important to know

how we got there.

Domains of exploration + precedents

Sometimes an entire culture colludes in the gradual destruction of its own panoramic

spirit and breadth of its teaching stories.13

Quoted from the introduction to Joseph Campbells Hero with a Thousand

Faces, this was the starting point to Souvenir. This quote is a sentence from a larger

piece speaking about the death of folktales and myths in modern mass media,

gradually leading to a spiritual starvation in our society. The writer prefaces this idea

13 Clarissa Pinkola Estes (introduction),Hero with a Thousand Faces(Pantheon Books, 1968)

Figure 15: Lost in the forest, Souvenir


23/52

by discussing the common story-tropes existing in populist film and TV these days

namely sex and violence, discussing how the shallow storytelling leading up to these

dramatic narrative conclusions, create an incomplete image of human relations. She

believes that mass-medias quest to entertain has created a parody of humanity that its

consumers believe to be an accurate portrayal of human-life.

Right from the onset we (as a team) were curious about mythology and the role

it played in society. Our readings of Campbell14, Vladimir Propp15, Levi-Strauss16, and

Robert Graves17supported our initial explorations, encouraging us to think more about

fluid narratives. Exploring the Heros Journey, we realized that it was starkly similar to

the coming of age story. Whereas the heros journey is a common game-myth 18, we

realized that the coming of age story was not a common game-trope.

What is my thesis question?

Can a game make you tell your own old stories?

Taking the critique of popular mediai, and using it to fuel our exploration, we

decided to use games as our medium to create an interactive narrative experience that

resonates the fluidity of folk-tales, while echoing a relatable experience such as a

coming of age story.

To understand why I chose to work on this project and explore games and story

telling, it is important to know a little bit about my childhood. Having spent a large

14 Joseph Campbell (author),Hero with a Thousand Faces(Pantheon Books, 1968)15 Vladimir Propp (author), Laurence Scott (Translator),Morphology of the Folktale(American Folklore

Society, 1968)16 Claude Lvi-Strauss (author), The Savage Mind(University Of Chicago Press, 1968);

Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture(Schocken, 1995)17 Robert Graves (author), The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth, (Farrar, Straus and

Giroux; 1966)18 Troy Dunniway (blogger), Using the Hero's Journey in Games (Gamasutra.com, 2000)


24/52

part of my formative years sailing on a ship with my parents; I was alone a lot, which

made books my best friends. I spent a lot of time reading, but a lot more making up

stories. My nomadic upbringing ensured that I always ran out of reading material, and

would have to improvise. The only constant on a sailing-ship is the space inside your

head, and that is when I fell in love with stories and storytelling. Following my

narrative-wanderlust, I spent four years working in films, looking for my niche. My

experiences were not the most fulfilling, and this pushed me to explore other media as

tools for storytelling.

I worked in journalism for a while, but in early 2008, newspapers and bloggers

sounded the death-knoll for the physical artefact of the Book19, and the printed word

by association. Journalists speculated the death of paper publication with the advent of

new digital media, especially touch-based devices and e-readers such as the Kindle.

These posts implied an alarming notion, the phasing out of traditional media while

encouraging a rapid exploration of its digital counterparts. This debate shook me up,

partially because on one hand I felt strongly defensive about books, and on the other I

found the idea of exploring of a digital parallel to books very exciting. What people

were speculating about print, echoed my feelings about film; film felt inadequate to me

as a medium of the type of storytelling that I wanted to do, the future and new media

must have an upgrade to this traditional form, if it was heading towards replacing

books so rapidly. Perhaps this was a reaction to my personal experiences with using

the medium, but I (as a viewer) wanted to control the outcomes of bad film stories, and

19 Jeff Jarvis (blogger), The book is dead. Long live the book(Buzzmachine.com, 2006)Ben Ehrenreich (blogger), The Death of the Book (LA Review of Books, 2010)


25/52

as a maker, wanted to see where a narrative would go with this un-orchestrated

audience input.

Although print is far from dead, we can already see traditional media losing

steam as the prime medium for narrative delivery; whereas new media is not gaining

much by trying to mimic the old. My story at Parsons began at this point, which is

when I found myself looking into the realm of games. I was really interested in seeing

if there could be a more democratic medium for narrative delivery, a space that gave

the audience more control over the story. Games allow for a deeper immersion, as the

audience can literally embody the protagonist and live through their experiences. The

magic circle20creates a safe space that while being realistic, can be a stage for the

fantastic. The cinematic quality of game visuals, coupled with the deep interaction of

game-systems, and the natural affordances to role-playing results in revealing a very

interesting narrative medium21.

Since our project strives to use the game mechanic as the principal narrative

20 Johan Huizinga,Homo Ludens(Beacon Press, Boston, 1955)21 Michael Mateas (article), A Preliminary Poetics for Interactive DramaFirst Person New Media as Story

Performance and Game(MIT Press, 2004)

Figure 16: VVVVVV + Fez + Ico; games that inspired us


26/52

tool, we looked at several evocative games for inspiration. Our project draws a lot from

the mechanic of the game - VVVVVV22, which has a gravity-shifting mechanic in 2D,

and uses the game environment in an unconventional way. We looked at another

indie-hit, Fez, a puzzle platformer that switches from 2D to 3D in the game play.

Studying the game Ico23; a much quoted milestone in the world of evocative games24,

informing our aesthetic choices in terms of user experience and its relationship to

abstraction and art. The puzzle game English Country Tunes25, is our most recent

inspiration in terms of small tight levels, and concise world building.

Concept Evolution

Nothing endures but change26.

As a team, we embraced this adage early on; deciding to think of all our

prototypes as cheap throw-aways; so not just our thesis question, but our entire project

has gone through several metamorphoses, always ending up richer than before. Our

primary focus was to explore through making, and never get too attached to an idea

that we cant think beyond it.

22 Terry Cavanagh (lead game developer), VVVVVV(Nicalis -3DS, 2021)

23 Fumito Ueda (team leader Team Ico),Ico(Sony developmental Labs, 2008)

24 Drew Davidson (editor, article) Ico Well Played 3.0: Video Games, Value and Meaning(ETC press, 2011)Chris Pruett (blogger),Balancing Game Mechanics and Narrative(The Journal of Education, Community,and Values- Pacific University Oregon, 2004)

25 Increpare Games (game studio),English Country Tunes, (increpare games PC, Mac, iPad, and iPhone2011)

26 Heraclitus (philosopher),Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers (540 BC - 480 BC)


27/52

The Prototypes leading up to the current Game

1. Shill

I kept returning to the idea of storytelling and games; trying to combine my

interest in mythology and folk tales in a game space. I was very concerned about my

lack of experience in game-narratives, and worried about approaching the field from

the perspective of a divergent narrative media, such as the more linear medium of

books and film.

My classmate Ben and I had kept in touch over the summer to discuss our

thesis ideas, and in the process of sharing our new ideas we realized that both our

interests and ideas leaned towards very similar core concepts - namely the use of myth-

stories in games.

Could we use myth-stories and games-systems to create an aesthetic similar to

oral story-telling, which teaches and changes through the telling, or in this case, the

playing?

We started reading up about the mechanics of myth making, diving deeper into

a suit of academic topics, such as the study of anthropology, comparative mythology

and the relationship games between games and hero-sagas. Robert, another classmate

of ours was looking for a group at that point and he was specifically looking at working

on a game that exploited and re-envisioned the cinematic 3D environment of first

person shooter games. This premise was complimentary to our initial explorations,

given that first-person games have a deeply immersive personal visual aesthetic to

them. As the new semester began, each of us tried to take a stab at the process of game

design from our own perspectives. Our very different backgrounds led us to end up


28/52

with three very different prototypes that explored very different aspects of the project

(narrative, game design, and finally game as drama).

Our project underwent three major changes, the first set of projects explored

dynamic narrative creation, and given the transient nature of the project at the time,

we decided to give it a tongue-in-cheek working title - Shill.

LIGHT/DARK

I was really interested in the idea of using light as a metaphor for learning. So

creating a world where visibility was minimal, and the only light source

available to you is a very small personal torchlight. As player progresses

through the world and accomplishes more, the light source keeps getting

stronger, increasing the radius of light around them, allowing them to see more

of the world, and explore more in the process. The metaphor being that

learning leads to more exploration.

Conclusion-

This idea was shot down on account of light /dark being technically undesirable, and

the team did not like this direction of game-play.

CLIMBING UP

In this game an unnamed protagonist starts the game at the base of an infinite

flight of steps / floating platforms rising into the air. They must keep climbing

up as there is a corrosive gas like element that keep rising higher and higher,

obliterating everything it touches. On the way s/he finds many mystical people

and things that speak to them, giving them cryptic messages and leading them

to side paths or misleading them completely. The process of climbing is an


29/52

endless exploration for the character, and they do so while exploring the broad

narrative elements along the way.

Conclusion-

The group decided that this was more of interactive experience than game, and we

discontinued exploring it. This also felt more like a 2D game than a 3D game and there

are some similar games (GIRP, Katherine) that do this badly so we abandoned it on

account of questing to find something better or unique.

THEATRE of STORIES

This game exists in two states - The Dreamscape and the Real World. The base

mechanic for this game was perception in dreams and reality. Objects that the

player touches/moves in the real world appear larger than life in the

dreamscape. These are props that the player had interacted with in the real

world (an abandoned theatre), becoming overt and exaggerated aspects of

themselves in the players dreamscape. Ex: The player picks up a bottle from

the floor and places it on a table, on entering the dream state, this bottle

becomes a giant monolith that becomes an obstacle to over-come.

Figure 17: Shill, paper prototype


30/52

Robert had his own unique spin to this idea and suggested making the theatre a

space where visual avatars would mingle, going one at a time, players would get to be

under the spotlight, and during that time they can direct the narrative to a direction of

their choice. The remaining players would have to construct a set that reflects the

spotlight-player's wishes in the background from the props in front of them. The next

player must pick up and work with the narrative till then, creating a virtual improv

theatre/exquisite corpse.

Ben suggested a secondary more game-like state to this scenario. He suggested

having a more clearly defined dreamscape where each constructed set becomes a

terrain that the players must play through individually. Each player competes to play

through this terrain with the most points (judged in speed, dexterity, points-acquired),

where the most successful players then lead the next round of stage direction.

This seemed like a fairly lucrative idea, from a collaborative-narrative-

generation game point-of-view. While exploring this further, we encountered many

technical issues in terms of how much leverage to allow players, and how to create a

robust suit of re-usable assets to reflect player-intent (that were not just blocks and

cylinders). Nick Fortugno warned us to be mindful of the Scribblenauts 27syndrome.

Scribblenauts is an urban legend in the world of game design, a fabulous game where

players can create a unique character and opponent combination, all character and

opponent possibilities are pre-created. This means that the game designers spent years

just creating a massive database of designed objects, hoping to cover any type of

character a player might want to play with. This resulted in creating a beautiful game at

27 5th Cell(game developer),Scribblenauts (WB Games 2009)


31/52

great production cost and relatively low impact, since very few players would ever

experience the complete range of these assets. Coming up with constrains to control

this was a nightmare and we soon realized that this idea might not be as feasible as we

had hoped.

Conclusion-

At the time, we were focusing on creating a dynamic system that would act as a

narrative creation machine. We were trying to mimic oral storytelling traditions

by creating a space where collaborative story creation could occur through

game play, and participant input. We realized through experimenting with our

prototypes that although we could create a world that was cohesive while still

being open enough to generate a personal experience, we lost a lot of our

narrative intent along the process.

2. Taroch

Our failure with the Shill set of prototypes brought us back to exploring some

analog mediums of narrative generation, such as Tarot Cards. Tarot cards are very

interesting objects, they have such a potent aura of mystique about them, that they

inadvertently create very interesting social situations around them. Having dabbled in

the Tarot in the past, I had come to the conclusion that it was a very interesting

medium to use to talk about the unspeakable or awkward things with friends. The

exotic guise of fortune telling often allows people to make unexpected connections

between the vague predictions in the cards and the events in their life, decoding the

cryptic messages of a spread in interesting and creative ways. I was pleasantly


32/52

surprised to find my thoughts echoed in studies done by Carl Jung28and Sigmund

Freud29in exploring the use of the Tarot as an archetypal tool in psychoanalysis (used

much like a narrative counterpart of the Rorschach Test).

We found Tarot based book narratives like the Castle of Crossed Destinies30at

this time, which actively used the abstraction of Tarot cards to create varied narrative

nodes. The Tarot gave us new hope in the form of an archetypal device that could

resolve our previous asset creation problems elegantly. Tarot cards are not only

archetypal, but are easily recognizable and beautifully designed; all we needed to do

was use them in the game as re-usable modular narrative carries. Each Tarot card can

be interpreted in so many ways individually, and countless more in combinations, that

within themselves they had a wealth of dynamic potential. The question would remain,

could we break down the Tarot deck to usable archetypal imagery, allowing for

dynamic terrain creation in a game environment?

At this point, we had another breakthrough. Robert had been researching game

mechanics and level design along with our explorations in narrative systems. He was

exploring the mechanic of the popular 2D independent game VVVVVV31that used a

gravity-shifting mechanic to tell a loose abstract narrative. Putting this style of game-

play in a 3D environment allowed us to created very interesting Escher like worlds that

presented a rich new set of possibilities when combined with the Tarot (which already

28 Sallie Nichols (author),Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey(Weiser Books, 1980)29 Sigmund Freud (paper), Psycho-analysis and telepathy (Partric Valas blog, 2011, orig. 1941)30 Italo Calvino (author), The Castle of Crossed Destinies(Mariner Books, 1979)31

Terry Cavanagh (lead game developer), VVVVVV(Nicalis -3DS, 2012)


33/52

have a complimentary affordance of card turning leading to different interpretations).

TAROCH

Taroch begins with a young persons exploration of their past memories while

unpacking their things. They embark upon this exploration while playing with

some Tarot cards, using them to categorize their belongings. The act of placing

the Tarot cards on their boxes takes them into a dream-like world where they

encounter scenes from these memories and sort through them with the help

of the Tarot characters, ranging from ambiguous passers bys, friends,

guardians to villains. This exploration is undertaken by shifting gravity to turn

the game-world around, traverse strange and surreal buildings, and meet

fantastical characters. We were very excited about this iteration, and went

forward and spent the better part of the semester (till midterms) fleshing it out.

The ebb and flow of game design consumed us, and we ended up putting too

many elements into this iteration.

Having too many interesting elements in the medium of games with its strong pre-

existing expectations and affordances just creates chaos. After a very helpful critique

session over Midterms, we decided to take a strong hard look at the project and shear

away everything that was not absolutely necessary.


34/52

3. Souvenir

The Tarot is a strong reference, often fading everything else into the

background. We realized that over time, we had been abstracting the original

archetypal characters, until they were barely recognizable as the Tarot; it instead

informed our character design and meta-world narrative, so we moved all mention of

the Tarot to our designers back-end inspiration file. This liberated us, and we realized

that at some point in our design process the Tarot changed from being a solution to a

problem, and had been holding us back, instead of making things easier for us.

Figure 18: Sketching ideas that would become Souvenir one day

We stepped back and re-imagined our existing assets (the Escher world, gravity

shifting, memory exploration, sorting through objects) in another combination. What

we came up with was a sleeker system, with fewer elements; it looked like something

that could work. Maybe.


35/52

Figure 19: Souvenir 1.0, the free-floating world

SOUVENIR 1.0

The game begins in the players bedroom as she is sorting through the

debris of her childhood, trying to decide what to keep, what to throw and what

to take with her to dorm at the University. She must sort the objects in her

room into either a trash bag, a cardboard box or a suitcase. As she looks at an

object something the object is taken-away from her, as she tries to retrieve the

lost object, and she is propelled into a memory of how she acquired it.

Souvenir is a first person adventure game with a gravity-shifting

mechanic that systematizes a coming of age story through the game play. Our

hope is that by keeping the narrative component of the game sparse and

minimalistic, we can allow for the player to fill in the blanks with details from

their own live and by doing this let them immerse more deeply into the existing

narrative scaffolding by finding common elements with their own growing up

story (Ex. mean teachers, cutting the umbilical cord, etc).


36/52

We had originally planned to break the experience into four levels, that would each

explore the players relationship with a mean teacher in their high school, a grand-

parent, friend(s), and finally their mother. Each of these levels begins with an object in

the heroines bedroom, plummeting her into an open Escher-style world that the

player then traverses to find snippets of conversation and smaller useless articles.

These articles and conversations stitch a story about the heroines relationship with

the Teacher character (not revealed till the end) while presenting both the teachers

side of the story and the players. This mix of exploration and puzzle solving leads to

the final boss-battle with the teacher, who is revealed to be unlike the players

expectations - scary monstrous creature. Instead, the teacher is a pathetic crow-like

creature that is trapped in its own insecurities, allowing the player to make an

important decision - will they free this creature and forgo the stolen bauble, or will

they collect their belongings and leave the creature to continue living in this prison of

its own construction?

We got a lot of great feedback about how to improve the game play etc., but

almost everyone we shared this idea with was generally positive about this direction.

Figure 20: Playtesting at the "PlayTECH Saturday" event at Parsons


37/52

The one structural problem we kept facing was that a system of 4 broad strokes, did

not allow us to create a good tutorial level to teach the system. Our game play of gravity

shifting is uncommon and not intuitive to new players. Even experienced players of

first-person shooter (FPS) games find it hard to path-find and navigate the terrain,

given that FPS players are trained to look to the sides, rarely at the ceiling or floor.

Since our game requires players to look in all directions, including top and bottom,

this created a strange predicament for us. Our game play was counter-intuitive and

unforgiving of learners. Once players understood the system their experience playing

was mostly positive; a small minority of players with a richer game vocabulary figured

it out by themselves and enjoyed it start to finish, but to most of the players, learning

our game was an enigma. The large size of the first level made the game unforgiving to

beginning players, and the high-skill level made the narrative too obtuse to follow. At

this point, we were advised by a play-tester to try smaller levels, and definitely have a

tutorial level.

This was a breakthrough again! The idea of having smaller more insignificant

levels reinforced our core idea of looking at useless souvenirs from your life that had a

meaningful place in your mind. This could allow for a richer environment, and more

experiments with non-traditional narrative elements in the game world like music,

dialogue and sound-design.


38/52

Figure 21: Souvenir 2.0, school hallway

SOUVENIR 2.0

Game begins in the players bedroom as she is sorting through her

belongings. She looks at some of the cheap debris from her childhood/high

school, and is propelled into the smaller vignette-style memories of each of

them. Each memory is a small puzzle where the player must try and find that

object in the adapted Escher-like world (which looks like the normal world, but

with parts missing or misrepresented to add a surreal quality to the visual

design). While in this dreamscape, player overhears conversations, glimpses

forgotten memories and encounters a giant crow-like monster.

The first chunk (consisting of 3-4 small levels) would remain anchored

to her experiences with the unpleasant teacher, but broken into smaller

montage style stories, each related to an object but feeding into the Teacher

narrative. As she plays, she pieces together this disjointed narrative over 4 small

levels, thereby preparing her for the final boss-puzzle where she must chose to

release or ignore the crow-creature, that is revealed to be a small pathetic

creature.


39/52

This approach allowed us to make smaller tutorial levels that are very basic in

nature, but have a richer narrative quality to them. This also let us ramp up the

narrative, re-cycle characters/objects and weave a less linear storyline. All good things

from our point of view, and we were very optimistic about this prototype.

However, this did not pan out as well as we had hoped it would. While

revisiting Souvenir 2.0 at the beginning of the spring semester, the feedback was

overwhelmingly negative for the sound design, the level design and the game-play.

Players felt that now, the game was far too easy, and felt boring. The voices and music

just created a discordant chaotic background that did not add value to the play

experience. They did like the visual design of the piece, which was more realistic, and

relatable, showing some character; which was lacking in Souvenir 1.0

With heavy hearts, and not an insignificant amount of panic, we decided to

return to the drawing board and explore yet another new direction. This, 4 months

before the project was due, and without really knowing what to change, we just took a

shot in the dark, and changed our entire workflow. Fingers crossed, we waited to see

what would come of this.


40/52

Figure 22: Souvenir 3.0, view from the home world

SOUVENIR 3.0 (Current Version)

After the debacle of Souvenir 2.0, we decided to change our working style. So

far we had been working as a team, with each teammate owning one part of the game

design. I did the storytelling bits, Robert did the level design and 3D modelling and

Ben did the code and some 3D modelling. What ended up happening was that we

would shoot each of our ideas down, and end up with a watered down version of all of

them. We were thankfully mature enough to look at this as the professional workflow

we would have to adopt in the working world, and stuck with it. However, in the end,

this turned out to be both frustrating and not as successful as we had assumed it would

be. So we decided to break apart, and work solo. The goal being that each team-mate

would build a complete level by themselves and present it in 2 weeks. This was a tough

challenge for me, as my 3D game design skills were still nascent at the time, and of all


41/52

of us, I had the least Unity 3D32experience. Nick (Fortugno) warned us about the

follies of this type of workflow, with one person either outshining the rest, or one

person being left behind, and the subsequent problems that would occur out of that.

We were as apprehensive as he was, but went ahead with it anyway.

Two weeks later, we had the barebones sketched out, and decided to work a

little more before exposing playtesters to our new direction.33Soon two weeks turned

into 4, and suddenly midterms were upon us. We decided to show our new directions

at Midterms and just go with the

feedback from there.

So far, I had been working on a

variation of the high school level,

inspired by the idea of a

Panopticon34, using a set of

concentric rings. I was very worried

that my assumptions of 3D games

would fall flat on my face and we

would have a disaster on our hands. However, I continued working on it, hoping my

playstyle wasnt unique to me, and would translate to a fun game experience. I liked

32Unity 3D is the game engine we have used for Souvenir33The most frustrating thins on earth is having people react badly to your work because it isntfinished yet, which is usually the reaction casual players have as they cannot filter the work into

its technical pockets yet.34Designed by Jeremy Bentham, philosophised by Michel Foucault

Figure 23: The highschool level, Panopticonised,

pre art-pass in the editor, Souvenir 3.0


42/52

how the rings created a security blanket for the player; they could bounce inside the

ring without fear of falling, and the concentric shrinking rings. The one drawback was

that there was a lot of monotonous walking going on. On a whim, I decided to try and

to break it up, so I scattered some trinkets around it. These were glowing metallic orbs

that displayed a line of 2D text when you picked them up, usually something like "You

picked up a Souvenir 1/20", a test element we had built a while ago for Souvenir 2.0. I

played around with the text line, and placed a few of these around the level that

commented on the player's game play with lines like, "I always hated track" when the

player has been walking around a ring for a few seconds.

When we presented our 3 levels at midterms, the reactions were

overwhelmingly positive! Finally it looked like we had hit the right note somewhere.

The text addition hit just the right note with the narrative issues we had been having

and the feedback we got was overwhelmingly positive. Nick (Fortugno), our former

thesis professor and now guest critic loved how the text gave you a hint of story,

perhaps even suggested that there were story paths around the space that could be

developed to encourage one type of exploration, where as, the spaces were a lot more

visually interesting now, and were pleasant to explore by themselves. The levels

themselves were visually captivating, with each team-mate channelling a lot of

personality and character to the spaces, which helped make them memorable and fun.

Naoimi Clark, another critic at the midterm remarked that she loved to fall in our

game. This was in many ways a huge breakthrough moment for us. We realized that we

had found a workaround for our story problems as well as the monotony issue with


43/52

there being no other characters or animated objects in the game. If we could leverage

the narrative elements and the falling action, we might be able to make a fun game!

The text was my baby, and it worked surprisingly well as a reward for

exploration, and broke the static-ness of our world. We realized that although

exploration was a fine goal to aim for, if our environment did not change at all, it

created a plateau like play-experience. After a while the jumping around and switching

gravity gets as monotonous as walking slowly through the space. Since we tried to stay

away from boss fights and shooting, nothing really happened in our world. Getting

some text on the screen bridged that gap perfectly. This was a reward that fit with our

game aesthetic and world logic, it was not a pointless trinket there just to give you

something to do, but hinted at something more. It made the experience more easter-

egg hunt like. Making players look forward to finding more trinkets and reading more

text.

This in itself was a breakthrough. Usually, text in games is something to be

tolerated, and often clicked through, and here we were, with players asking for more.

We tested this again at Playtech, with middle and high school students, and they

wanted more text too! Having attended 4 Playtech's so far, we have learnt that the

average NYC middle-schooler has no filters, so they always give us the most honest

feedback we can ever hope to get. So if these kids wanted more text, I would have to

give them more text! Another interesting thing that happened at Playtech was that the

kids all got the narrative of the story, without being told anything. They knew someone


44/52

was moving out, they knew that this person was a woman35, and it was inside

someones mind. This was great news to us! If kids got it, then we were on the right

track.

I continued working on the text since the level design experiment worked fine

so far. I tried to construct little pathways that had specific stories in them,

experimenting with a choose your own adventure style dynamic narrative system,

where the objects and the order in which you get them build a different textual story at

the end of the game for each player. A more structured version of the experiential

narrative that we had been chasing so far. Colleen (Macklin) advised us against

spending too much time on this, as it was an additional element that we had not tested

at all so far, and work instead on finishing the things that we had tested and worked.

At the same time we got 2 very valuable pieces of advice that really went a long

way in helping our game come together. Colleen told us that the 2D text was very

jarring and broke the player's engagement to the game-world. This was the first time

we had heard this, considered the 2D text to act like a Graphical User Interface (or a

GUI), a fairly common in-game asset. However, she felt like the cinematic quality of

our game (no buttons, no other 2D element, no counters or health-bars) allowed

players to get lost in the experience and forget that they are in a game space

(something we had been chasing desperately so far) and the text breaks you out of it.

Almost like breaking the 4th wall in a film, but creating a jarring dissonance in the

35Fun anecdote: So one of our highschool students was giving Robert feedback and said that itwas definitely a female character (something we never overtly specify, although some of the texthints to it), on asking why he though so, he was told, Ofcourse it is a girl, the world is all

messed up and weird.. Which we all thought was very interesting, although not the messagewe were going for!


45/52

process. The second piece of feedback was that the game play was plateauing again.

There was nothing changing or moving in the space and it created a lull in the game

after a few minutes of play. She suggested using the text in a more interesting way to

create a variation in the world. Could we make it a more organic part of the game

world? Could it grow out of the ground? Could it appear in a mirror? Could the

delivery of the text belong in the world in someway? This was valuable for 2 reasons.

First being that we had no idea that the text felt jarring, second being that if we could

work with the narrative objects and make them interactive, we might be able to

mitigate our static-ness issues.

This got us thinking about narrative some more. Was the 2D text as valuable as

we thought it was? So far, it was the only thing that changed, and that was good, so did

we need more things changing? Was it wise to spend precious time on animation,

which was not a skill set within the group, or should we try and adapt the text to react

more? We experimented some more, changing tracks from the old narrative

experiment, but bringing some of our ideas from that in here. We played around with

bringing back trinkets, our original souvenirs, and having text appear uniquely for

each of them. Then we tried to make a mesh of souvenirs, where some souvenirs acted

like portals that would take you to a different part of the dreamscape, mitigating the

"lot of walking" and "monotonous experience" concerns. We started with adding

souvenirs to all the spaces, adding small text fragments to hold them up. We also

started exploring 3D text objects at this time. 3D text objects act as text that exists in

the 3D environment of the game, and by hacking these objects, we made our own that

would hover around their location, tilting and turning to face the player as they


46/52

approached them. This was a big success. Now the player had an even more surreal

world, where words would appear and disappear around them. Hints and hidden story

lines were scattered all over the world.

However, these trinkets were small and got lost in the vastness of the world.

People often did not expect them, and missed them constantly. When they found them

they were very pleased, but till then, it was the same issues again. To mitigate this, we

added these giant beams of light coming out of the souvenirs, penetrating through all

the walls and structures in their way. These beacons fixed a lot of things. They added

yet another massive visual asset to the world, with spears of light going though walls

looking really cool. Robert then added strobing orbs of light around each souvenir.

These were pulsating lights that throbbed in a distance, breaking the static-ness of the

empty world. He also added clouds that passed overhead, that went a long way in

making the world look more organic and realistic.

This worked very well, and we began developing a narrative treatment for our

levels. At the same time, we were also trying to make the move mechanic more

accessible to people. There was still a problem with players not understanding what

way they would fall if they shifted gravity in a complex situation. We played around

with adding streams of light in different colors coming out from the target to the

player, letting them know what direction they will fall, and what direction they are in

right now. We added a giant cone of light to show the player what wall they were

aiming at. Eventually we had cluttered the player-view a lot, and didn't mitigate the

orientation problem much in the process. Going back to one of the narrative

experiments we had started sometime back, the idea of a mesh of souvenirs that acted


47/52

as portals, we had evolved that so instead of appearing in a new location, picking

certain souvenirs blasted you from your location to a new one. The logic was that by

embracing the experience of falling we would mitigate the static play problem and give

the player more of the sudden falling feeling that they said they enjoyed. However, at

this time, Robert re-worked this fledgling idea, and instead incorporated the blast-off

code to the move mechanic. Allowing players to now fall to exactly the spot they

shifted gravity too, instead of in that general direction. This sounds like a small change

but it cleared up all kinds of weird gameplay problems we were experiencing. We got

rid of all our guide lights, cones etc, reverting to our old minimal hovering circle.

This made the game a lot more intuitive, taking away the middle-step of understanding

the gravity logic, which is a physics puzzle of its own. In the end, we managed to even

have time for an art-pass of the game, bringing everyones levels to a more standardized

aesthetic space.

Gallery opening and the post-show response

We were lucky and managed to get a great spot for our big thesis show, by

projecting our game on a giant wall in an art gallery. This was a great move, since it

played on the visual strength of the game and its cinematic gameplay, where 1 person

played the game, but almost everyone else watched and enjoyed it. This was both a

blessing and a curse the first day; people attending the gallery, primarily art

aficionados, friends and parents are not gamers, and get intimidated by both a game-

controller and having your skills displayed on a 10 foot projection for everyone to see.

Although people kept complimenting us on how great it looked, very few people


48/52

actually played the game. At the same time, our school-provided computer crashed

and refused the play the game anymore. After using Robert's laptop connected to the

projector for one night, we had to find an alternative. Colleen came to our rescue yet

again, leasing us an extra computer from her office to use instead. This was an iMac,

and had a large screen that we couldn't really hide elegantly. So instead we put the

screen on the table, attached a mouse along with the controller, and left it up to the

audience to decide what they preferred playing with.

This changed the entire play dynamic at the show. Having a small screen right

there, and the mouse helped casual attendees to play around a little bit, get confident

and then play through the rest. The more seasoned gamers picked the controller up

and played. The game looked great on the projector, but it looked phenomenal on an

HD screen. So for opening night, there was a line at the Souvenir table. People were

really happy with the experience, although it had a ton of bugs and glitches in it.

Our friend Anna Anthropy, a highly respected indie game designer endorsed

Souvenir, as did Colleens friend Richard Lemarchand, who player the game briefly at

the gallery and loved it. He went back, played some more (there was a line at the

show!) and tweeted about the game36. Richard is a huge figure in professional game

circles and his endorsement went a long way for us. The very next day,

indeGames.com did a shining review for us37, and finally RockPaperShotgun.com, a

36Tweet: While I was there, I checked out the amazing game by @bennorskov @radiatoryang andMohini Dutta: 'Souvenir' http://souvenirgame.com/ Congrats!

37Excerpt:Souvenir is the thesis project of Parsons' MFA candidates Robert Yang, Mohini Dutta, andBen Norskov. The team posted more hypnotic art if you need convincing before diving into the freeWindows or Mac builds. Be warned: there is no ending implemented, yet. However, life's about the

journey, or something, and this one is quite heady.


49/52

cornerstone publication in the games world did a review that really got people

interested38. Right after this, a bunch of smaller blogs picked it up and the viewership

to our page went from 0 to 6000 in 2 days! People are currently emailing us from all

over the world with feedback and compliments, which I have to admit is a very

gratifying feeling! We are sending the game to a few competitions and hope this buzz

will help us get into some.

Conclusion

The current positive reactions to the game are very encouraging and make me

feel like this is a project that might mean something someday. The current indie game

favourite, Journey began as a college project, and it has had major ramifications on the

game world. My personal hope is that games like this will get some traction, and we

can keep building Souvenir, till it is bug-free and glitchless. I have learnt so much

through this process, working with as talented a team as I have, and hope I can

leverage this professionally some day. My main interest is still storytelling, and it is

great to see people interested in an experiment like Souvenir.

My own assumptions of storytelling have evolved drastically, and I feel like the

biggest takeaway from this project is never assume and just make. By over-thinking for

the first part of this process I was holding my self back. Souvenir 3.0 pushed me to

think while making, embracing the iterative design process that is so fascinating and

scary at the same time. The best ideas come from experimenting, and over thinking

doesnt mix with spontaneous experiments. Talk less, make more is a mantra I want to

endorse by doing, and hope it will fare me well.

38Exerpt: The glitchiness of the main mechanic was a little frustrating, but only because I wastantalised by this work in progress.


50/52

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Colleen Macklin for being an incredible teacher, and

friend, who has encouraged and helped me find my way around the maze of Parsons

from my very first semester. I owe you so much Colleen.

Next I would like to thank Barbara Morris, my phenomenal writing teacher.

Barbara, we have spent 2 great semesters together during which you have only been

supportive and constructive of my work. You have had incredible grace and patience

with my late submissions, and thank you for that. If I ever write one day, it will be all

thanks to you.

I would also like to thank Nicholas Fortugno, my thesis professor of the

awkward first semester when everything seemed difficult, and nothing made sense.

Thank you Nick, for being supportive of Souvenir, and encouraging us to push aside

the mundane and explore the esoteric in storytelling and games. All I know of dynamic

narrative comes from your incredible Narrative and Dynamic systems, and anything I

know of games or level design comes for your LARPs, workshops and classes.

I have to give thanks to my thesis class for being incredible, humble, and kind

people, who made these 2 semesters as painless as possible and far too fun.

And of course, nothing would have happened if it wasnt for my incredible

team- Ben Norskov, Robert Yang you have taught me so much. Also, thank you Shin

Huang (Stone) for being part of our concept art and animation, we would not have our

beloved and beguiled crow without you. Also, Arehandoro Ghersi for being such a

talented, patient and reliable sound designer. You always got exactly what we wanted

and delivered in record time.


51/52

Works Cited

5th Cell,Scribblenauts(WB Games 2009)

Albert Lamorisse,Risk \ La Conqute du Monde(Parker Brothers - Hasbro, 1959)

Ben Ehrenreich, The Death of the Book(LA Review of Books, 2010)

Chris Hecker,Spy Party(Chris Hecker, 2009)

Chris Pruett,Balancing Game Mechanics and Narrative(The Journal of Education,

Community, and Values - Pacific University Oregon, 2004)

Clarissa Pinkola Estes,Hero with a Thousand Faces(Pantheon Books, 1968)

Claude Lvi-Strauss, The Savage Mind(University Of Chicago Press, 1968);

Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Codeof Culture (Schocken, 1995)

Drew Davidson, Ico Well Played 3.0: Video Games, Value and Meaning(ETC press,

2011)

Espen Arseth, Genre Trouble: Narrativism and the Art of SimulationFirst Person

New Media as Story, Performance and Game(MIT Press, 2004)

Fumito Ueda,Ico(Sony developmental Labs, 2008)

Heraclitus,Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers(540 BC - 480 BC)

Increpare Games,English Country Tunes, (increpare games PC, Mac, iPad, and iPhone

2011)

Italo Calvino, The Castle of Crossed Destinies(Mariner Books, 1979)

Jeff Jarvis, The book is dead. Long live the book(Buzzmachine.com, 2006)

Johan Huizinga,Homo Ludens(Beacon Press, Boston, 1955)

Joseph Campbell,Hero with a Thousand Faces(Pantheon Books, 1968)

Markus Persson,Minecraft(Mojang, 2009)

Michael Mateas, A Preliminary Poetics for Interactive Drama First Person New


52/52

Media as Story Performance and Game(MIT Press, 2004)

Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth, (Farrar, Straus

and Giroux, 1966)

Roger Ebert, Video games Can Never Be Art(Ebert @ Chicago SunTimes, 2010)

Sallie Nichols,Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey(Weiser Books, 1980)

Sigmund Freud, Psycho-analysis and telepathy (Partric Valas blog, 2011, orig. 1941)

Terry Cavanagh, VVVVVV(Nicalis -3DS, 2021)

Troy Dunniway, Using the Hero's Journey in Games(Gamasutra.com, 2000)

Vladimir Propp, Laurence Scott (Translator),Morphology of the Folktale(American

Folklore Society,1968)

Zach Gage,Lose\Lose (Gage, 2009)

souvenir: videogames, remembering and moving on

Documents