Between 1996 and 2001 I worked at The Digital Village, Douglas Adams‘ multiple media company based in London. I worked on Starship Titanic and was the launch editor for h2g2.com. Since 2001 in partnership with Alex Mayhew I have developed a series of independent game projects including The Hive and its associated toolkit, Tools for Play. Between 2001 and 2004 I was Studio Director for the zerogame studio at The Interactive Institute where Commedia and Ouroboros were built. From 2005 I have been Games Research Fellow at UWN, part of the Synergy games research group.

Below I have selected some of my favourite projects to explore in more depth.

Starship Titanic

The Hive

Commedia

Ouroboros

Women in Games

I am half way through a theory-based PhD at UWN entitled Performing Play in Digital Game Form. My supervisors are Dr Barry Atkins and Dr Andy Smith.

http://www.tii.se/zerogame/ouroboros/index.htm

Ouroboros is a fully functional digital game and supporting website. I was responsible for inception and delivery of this practice-based research project. This 2-year project adopted a design-research methodology that used iterative prototyping cycles to develop and refine practice-components. The project team comprised 12 people over its duration, and is part of an ongoing investigation of experiential, aesthetic and creative perspectives on game design that investigates the space between game and art. A key area of focus is how to build emotional depth within game form. This individual output is part of larger body of work that is focused on an exploration of the artistic potential of contemporary digital game form.

Ouroboros is research project to develop a persistent virtual world for experimentation into new concepts for dramatic and emotive game play. As a game research project, Ouroboros addresses the following research questions:

•    How to develop a profile of the player and play style, and to use this to take the individual player into account in the selection and development of a game character?

•    How to deepen the player’s experience of being a character within a virtual world? How can the history of the game play experience evolve the player’s game character?

•    How to create game play mechanics that serve enhanced dramatic functions?

Related research has been presented at the following conferences:

•    “Play as Performance” game design workshop and lecture, Games and Storytelling, 23-27 April 2007, The Hypermedia Lab, University of Tampere, Finland. http://www.gamesandstorytelling.net

•    ”On Characterisation; The Art of Illusion”, “The Reign of Catz and Dogz? The Role of Virtual Creatures in a Computerised Society”, AISB’07 Artificial and Ambient Intelligence, April 2nd 2007, Newcastle University http://hemswell.lincoln.ac.uk/virtualcreatures/index.html

http://www.tii.se/zerogame/commedia/index.htm

Commedia is a fully functional game and supporting website. Developed in Shockwave, it is uses a multi-player server to make the game playable through a web browser. It was published in 2003. Features include a player lobby and virtual backstage, as well as the game itself. The Artifact also includes a supporting website and PDF manual with exercises, instructions and ready to play scenarios.

This project is part of an ongoing overarching investigation of experiential, aesthetic and creative perspectives on game design that investigates the space between game and art. A key area of focus is how to build emotional depth within game form and Commedia was produced to address questions of how a digital theatre framework could allow and encourage a deep multi-player role-playing experience. The project involved a preliminary investigation of gesture-based computer role-playing and research into limited gesture-sets as aid systems for interactive acting experiences. The research aims were to explore the interrelationships and crossover zones between live action role-playing (LARP) and computer gaming, to create frameworks for new genres of dramatic interactive media production, and to enhance player character representations to support new game play experiences.

Commedia was publicly presented at The Research Forum, The Arts Institute at Bournemouth in 2007, and  viewed by request by MIT and the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2003.

The Hive is a unique and multi-layered convergent media project that interweaves a drama based television series with a community based online multiplayer game. The project explores existential themes like duality, emotional responsibility, conflict and individualism.

The game, which mostly revolves around a surreal tightly knit society of insects, will be mostly set in this dream world. The Hive encourages positive interaction, cooperation and teamwork. As the interactive component rests on the premise that the online world is an actual projection of the main protagonist’s subconscious, the Hive series and online game are inseparable from each other’s narratives. The TV series reveals secrets that can unlock areas within the game world, which we are encouraged to visit by the characters in the TV series. In turn, the game world will provide clues and triggers for events in the TV series.

Creative Goals

1. To provide a high profile game that demonstrates the potential for more thought provoking and humanistic game experiences, computer games have the potential to move us and to affect our outlook on ourselves and the world around us.
2. To provide an emotionally engaging experience for the player
3. To create a socially responsible game that engages the player, promoting non-violence and cooperative play.

Outcome

1. A working game demo
2. A development framework for experimentation with new game form.

The Hive Game

Starship Titanic CD-ROM Game

Starship Titanic was one of the last adventure games, designed by Douglas Adams and made by The Digital Village. It was released in 1998. It takes place on a starship of the same name which has undergone “Spontaneous Massive Existence Failure” and crash landed on Earth on its maiden voyage (in an allusion to the 1912 disaster involving the real-world RMS Titanic). The player acts the part of a human (whose house the starship crashed into) who goes aboard to help fix the ship, and must solve puzzles to collect the parts of the sabotaged onboard computer, Titania. Once all the parts have been collected and inserted in the correct places, Titania comes alive and talks.

I was initially employed as Lead Author, responsible for the game design development and was promoted to Producer for the last six months of production.

Starship Titanic Robots at the Bar

The Bellbot at the Bottom of the Well with PET parsing text