Week 2: Social Connection and Sea Creatures
Biah S -
Welcome back, and thank you for tuning in for week two of my senior project blog!
I’ve been continuing work on my spreadsheet, and I’ve actually been finding some pretty interesting games through my research. Most shipwreck games follow the predictable pattern of landing on an island and having to complete tasks to survive, but the ones that deviate from that pattern have been fun to take a look at. One I liked in particular is The Legend of the Lost Emerald. It isn’t exactly what you’d imagine for a “shipwreck game,” which usually implies that the players will be the victim of a shipwreck. It’s actually an educational game meant to be played in a classroom, where students play as a maritime archaeologist and dive into sites of historical wrecks. It’s free to play online, and although shipwrecks in history aren’t the most exciting topic, I found the story and art rather charming, and I thought I’d share it with you all.
Apart from finding more games, I also had the opportunity to meet with a member of the team at my site placement this week. She’s done a lot of work in graphics and computer animation, so it was really interesting to get to talk to her about some of her experiences. I got to take a look at some of the projects she’s been involved in in the past, and although she hasn’t previously worked on the kind of media I’m focusing on in my project, they were still really fascinating to get to learn about. Her work primarily concentrates on using technology to create interactive experiences that promote social connections. One of these exhibits she showed me included the prosocial aspect that I’m dealing with in this project. She created an installation involving projections and wearable devices to foster social interaction in children. The projections created an ocean setting in the room, and the wearable devices tracked the children’s movement so avatars of sea creatures could move around the room with them. These avatars exhibited different behaviors, like jumping and nodding, depending on the children’s proximity to each other. The aim of these avatars was to encourage interaction and connection among peers through the proximity of their play. This is very similar to what the video game that my site placement is creating currently is meant to accomplish, so it definitely stood out to me when we were going through her work. She also gave me some insight into her process when developing projects like this, including some resources she uses for references as well as some feedback she received from children regarding the design of the sea creatures in the installation I discussed. I think I’ll definitely keep some of what she shared with me in mind moving forward with my own work.
That’s about it for this week. Goodbye for now! 🙂
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