My initial project idea for this class was to create a website which was a type of game or quiz. I noticed how often my friends and I would play them and then discuss our results. They can be a fun little break. I know that they are played frequently, and people are always looking for new and different games. Many of these games are based on love or dating, and I wanted to create one that measured the player's skill at it. The though also occurred to me to put the player in different eras. This would give them the ability to see how different society and social customs were at different times, and to see what time's dating style best matched their own.
In regard to the site, I wanted it to allow the player to make all kinds of choices. To decide what they wanted to wear, where they wanted to go, whether or not they would open doors, or pay for their date, or kiss them good night. They could see when times started to change, when things reverted back to an old style, or how the same thing could work in one time and fail in another. It would be a fun history lesson in American culture. My fear, was that it could be difficult to create all of these different options and pages with research for all of the different times. I wasnt sure of how to execute it, whether I would want to have pictures or video to represent the characters or just words.
The day that we all presented I really liked a lot of the proposals and would have wanted to work on them. One that really stood out was Tiffany's. She wanted to deal with the phenomena of street cat callers by creating and documenting a performance art piece about it. I thought that that sounded like a lot of fun, and I could relate to her problem with it. A friend and I had once created a kind of game, any time we were cat called on a street, we couldn' walk down that street again, this way we would get to know various ways of going places. I began to think about working on Tiffany's idea, 'sand possible ways to merge it with mine.
At the next class meeting Jay and I had been put together as a group. He presented a few ideas to me, but didn't have one that he was really passionate about. I presented my idea to him. Neither of us was sure of how to fully realize it. Jay really seemed interested in the game aspect of my idea. We started talking about all of the other ideas that our classmate's had, and both were really into Tiffany's idea. We briefly discussed turning her Cat Call Project into a game. We approached Tiffany with this idea. She was in the Rolling Dim Sum Group, but decided that she would work with both groups so that her idea could be realized with Jay and I.
The first thing that we did was discuss how to make it a game. We wanted to incorporate the performance art aspect. We thought that we could take different tacks with these cat callers. We would try to react in different ways and throw them to see how they would respond. We would video tape, or audio tape, these exchanges, and then put them out on the internet. Again, while we liked the idea, we weren't really sure of how to execute it. We would have to get film equipment which we could easily conceal. We questioned whether or not we would need permission to put the cat callers pictures or voices on the Internet. Also, we knew that we would have to be careful so that no one was ever put in danger during the making of this project. We decided that rather than tape real exchanges we could create them ourselves, based on some safe research we would bring in on our own.
As the site continued to develop, we wanted to develop the game aspect of it more. We wanted to make it more interactive. Here is where my game idea came back into play. We took the idea of choosing what to do on a date, and put it into the cat calling situations. The player could choose how to react to the cat caller. This method allowed us a lot of freedom, we could be as extreme as we wanted and leave the reality of the situation and enter the game world.
From the beginning of this project what I was thinking about was creating an RPG, or a Role Playing Game, and I didn't even know it! Clearly, I saw that I was creating a game in which the player got to take on a role and play the game through that character, but I wasn't aware of the large and specific world of Role Playing Games. There is a large following of people who play these games, some of who even become addicted to them. Players can become so lost in them that they lose their own sense of reality. A basic history and background of Role Playing Games is as follows: Role playing games evolved from war games. War games were a hobby among the rich who would simulate past military battles. They could be played by either reenacting the battle exactly as it occurred, or by changing history and attempting new strategies of playing out the battle. The games then evolved beyond military battles, new worlds were brought into the games on all ends of the reality spectrum. Some games were very planned out, and contained stock characters and specific rules, others had looser frame works and allowed for more creativity from the players involved to make the game what it is. Each player takes on a specific character, which they keep throughout the course of the game. They get to make decisions about their character which will effect them in the game. A player is never forced to take on a character in a role playing game that they don't want, and the only way that they can lose their character is by their character's death.
Role Playing Games have been thought to be violent and to promote violence. It is easy to understand how people come to this conclusion, the games were derived from war games, but over time the focus has moved beyond violence to strategy and creativity. Players look down on violence because they work so long to develop their character's, they don't want to have them killed off kicking them out of the game. There are RPGs that don't contain any violence in them whatsoever. Another common misconception about RPGs is that they support the Occult and Devil Workshop. While some RPGs involve these concepts, they are merely an aspect of the game, the game is not promoting them, nor focusing on them or teaching them. Many RPGs , such as Old West Games, don't involve the occult, or devils, or magic at all. There are numerous types of games for numerous types of players.
The Cat Call Game is clearly a Role Playing Game. The player gets to take on a character and make decisions through them. The player can put any characteristics that they want into their character, we don't have any specifics, or any pictures on the website. They can identify with the character as being themselves, or being completely foreign. Even if the player identifies the character as being themselves, the game allows them a safety net in which to distance themselves from danger so that they can react in a way that they never would feel safe or comfortable doing in reality. Like an RPG, The Cat Call Game offers numerous obstacles for players to navigate through, there are many characters that they meet that are NPCs, or Non Player Characters that alter their game course.
Unlike most RPGs the Cat Call Game player is interacting with us, the game creators, and our predetermined scenarios, not interacting in the moment with other players like themselves. In the Cat Call Game a player is trying to beat the enemy in the game, thus strategize and beat the game, or beat themselves by advancing further than previously. In RPGs a player is trying to out strategize the other players to beat them and to beat the game.
When actually setting out to create the game, I knew that the most important part of the HTML work was to keep everything very well organized. Tracking the different scenarios and what the next scenario the player’s choice leads them to would have to be carefully done. I started by making a flow chart with all of the page names, so that I could create them and then link them in the correct way. This plan really made things more clear when it became time to create and link. To consolidate and make things even more clear, I then created subdirectories inside my file manager such as: /sit1 which included: sit1/a.html, sit1/b.html, sit1/c.html. This format made things even more clear and easy to edit and navigate.
Once I had the situations (which Tiffany scripted after discussion and editing from myself and Jay) on line, and everything was linked up so that the game was playable, my mind turned to making it more attractive, and fun visually, as well as regarding audio. In my initial design it was very plain, white background with black text on all of the pages other than the pages in which you lost, those had black backgrounds with white text. I thought that the simplicity worked, and this design element seemed successful in class. Initially, we really wanted the site's design to juxtapose some of the violence in the text. We wanted to achieve this by using fun video game music, but we weren't sure visually. We knew that we didn't want a picture of our main character, but did we want images of other characters? If so, how many, and how realistic should they be? I felt that the images would be important. I wanted to keep the backgrounds constant, because I didn't want to start creating meanings for colors and then running them as a through line throughout the site. I liked the simple white vs. Black, and thought images would help. I liked the idea of the images being extreme, more so in a humorous way than a disgusting way. I searched clip art for things that had the right feel, thinking that we should try to accent the most heightened moments with images. We went through the pages, thought of the things we felt would be most important to have and then found them on line. Tiffany was certain that she didn't want a photo on the page with the dumpster. I saw her point, it was in the same vain as not having an image for our main character: it was something we wanted the player to create for themselves. Going through the site now, I think that we should add more images in the future. We made the interesting pages more interesting with images, I think it would be good to accent the less interesting pages with images to keep the player thoroughly entertained.
Back to the issue of the sound files. After uploading the 3 songs to the webshell, we went from using .something MB of space, to 13,9 MB. When I clicked on "View File" for each they took forever to download. I then created Real Audio files with them, but again, the buffering took a long time. We really didn't want a player to appear, we wanted the music to just play, and the Real Audio Player always opened which didn't make it an ideal format for us to work in. I asked Jay if he could make the files shorter, that way they would download quicker, and we could spread the out more over the site, but he didn't have the capabilities with which to do that.
The last touch was a Guest Book. We put the Guest Book on the site in the hope of getting feedback from players, as well as opening up a dialogue between players. It is the forum for reaction to the game, so that players put some thought into it after they have gone through it.
I am leaving this course much more aware of development and the process of creating performance art, creating websites, and mixing the two. Also, documentation of this process and of events that cannot be put on line. It is easy to take little Internet quizzes and dismiss them, but this class has showed me that there is a lot more to them than meets the eye; there is a lot of history involved, contextualizing, and design attempts to effect players. Adding the aspect of performance, and performance art, looking at the site as art makes it seem more significant and weighty than it just being a game. Throughout this process we have been considering what we are saying, are we making a statement? Do we want to be? Our work is going to be seen by people, and then interpreted by them, and it is important that we are very clear on what we are doing, so that we can use tactics to successfully achieve this, and say what we want to say with our work.
