Week 6 - Emma Reay
This week we spoke to Emma Reay, video game researcher at the University of Cambridge and lecturer in critical approaches to video games. She has specialised in children's literature (now studying for a PhD in the subject) and has multiple awards for her studies as well as founding projects and publishing studies bridging the gap between children's literature and video games (University of Cambridge, 2020). She recorded a series of videos for us taking game design right back to the basics;
The button below is an expansion on these notes as well as my interpretations of the exercises and my versions of her tables / lists.
We also were able to talk to Marie Claire Isaaman, CEO of Women in Games (WIGJ) later this week in smaller groups to discuss our ideas. I feel like I didn't use this resources as much as I should have as I didn't have a string idea of what I wanted to work on at this time. Having said that, Marie Claire really helped me to identify what it actually was that I wanted to do. She spoke very concisely about everyone's ideas and really payed attention to the attitude we had towards them and what we wanted to achieve. I explained that I wanted to create something with a strong narrative, along the lines of a rite of passage journey in which the actions of the player reveals a patterned map by the end of the experience. She suggested I look into an Australian studio called Innchanted who make games surrounding the concept of native Australian stories. We also discussed the idea that some games use physical 3D sets and props which reminded me of a game called Truberbrook. This is a game set in the 1960's where each environment in made by hand and then scanned into the 3D modelling software to make it an explorable environment for the player. Marie Claire suggested I look at Lumino City, another game which uses physical models for the environments during play.
Truberbrook Imagery (Steam, 2020)
Lumino City Imagery (Steam, 2020)
During reading week I intend to expand on my prototype ideas (e.g. producing paper prototypes, animations etc.) to be able to get more effective feedback when we are back before presenting our final ideas.
References
University of Cambridge (2020). Emma Joy Reay BA Oxon MA Cantab. (Online) Available at: https://profiles.ahrcdtp.csah.cam.ac.uk/directory/emma-reay (Accessed 29th December 2020).
