Week 7 reflections
From CTIN482
>> Ben Chang >>
Today is our first official day of development, and I can't wait to see the outcome of our initial prototype. This week should be very productive in terms of beginning our initial prototype, making sure the entire team is on the same page, and immersing ourselves further with the music community of Second Life.
The only big questions we have to answer are: 1) How will we solve the complexity issues that result when multiple players attempt to play the same music? 2) Will players be judged? and 3) What type of music should we implement for the prototype? Given my background in project management and production, I'm still looking for the best way to allocate our collective time, talents, and interests -- especially given our time constraints due to the fact that this is only a 2-unit class.
At this stage, I believe that the Second Life music community will makes our game either a (and I'm exaggerating of course) standard student undertaking or a breakthrough in musical genius. Depending on what's been done and what users out there are looking to experience, we intend to address diverse needs while adding an educational element to our playspace.
>> Ben Chang >>
<Erik Rambles>
One of the 2 major tasks in front of the censorship group is the "Censorship Zone." The initial design was that of a zone that moved arbitrarily around the island, allowed users to input forbidden words, and ejected users who used those forbidden words within its zone of influence.
After a group meeting, we have altered this design slightly. Censorship is not a passive thing. It involves at least 2 parties: The party in power and the party being censored. Someone (or someones) needs to have ownership of this suppression of free speech.
In that vein, the "Censorship Zone" will be a censorship object of some sort, sitting in its pre-defined area of the island. When someone touches it, the object attaches itself to that person, and they become the "owner" of the object (not in the SL sense, but in the world of this quasi-game activity). That owner has the power to set which words are allowed and not allowed, and they may fly anywhere in the IML-2 island, carrying the banhammer of the censorship object with them. After a certain amount of time, that person would lose "ownership" or the censorship object, and it would reset itself.
This allows the censorship to take on a more personal feel. People aren't just being censored by this wandering zone, they're being censored directly by another person!
An idea I had to make it more of a group activity is to have a sort of censorship object spawn point, so that multiple censorship objects may exist simultaneously. That way, when a person took a box, it wouldn't reset after a certain amount of time, and they could continue their censoring. This would allow multiple people to be censoring simultaneously!
Also, if we were willing to let people carry off our items, they could use our boxes elsewhere in second life, possibly driving traffic (or lawsuits) back to our doorstep. Since both provide publicity, it's win/win!
</Erik Rambles>
-- For all the times you've been frustrated with something on Second Life, there's Something Awful's Second Life Safari. Here it is for your enjoyment:
http://www.somethingawful.com/d/second-life-safari/
Griefing, to me, is probably one of the best parts of SL--one where users demonstrate immense amounts of creativity (as we can see just from these silly safaris). It is a sort of sandbox type play. I hope that the censorship project will invite players to participate in a type of griefing game--one where the reward is a sense of mischief rather than XP. Today, the group discussed whether there should be some physical representation of the area which the censorship object "censors"--a halo/perimeter/boxes at the extremes of the perimeter, etc. One deciding factor will be what sort of representation is possible in SL, but also...what would be the most interesting? Is it more entertaining to be able to sneakily impose censorship without anyone knowing they are in the zone? Or does it add to the sense of foreboding (and to other players' sense of agency as they flee) seeing a radius of glowing censorship approaching? We'll see what is possible to implement...
I also wonder if the video censorship part of the project has any potential for "griefing" or mischief. Clips arranged in mischievous ways... vandalizing the original work and indeed the space? Why not? I'm sure people will mess around with it, it's like moving magnetized poetry around on a fridge...someone always turns it into a cursing sexfest or poo jokes. And why not let the space have a (potentially crude) sense of humor?
--Melissaaa
The Stage: Ideation
Before beginning development on our Second Life space, our group first discussed the famous scenes we actually wanted to create. The reasons we felt that we should model scenes from famous films, as opposed to just making a few basic original scenes were:
1) users would be more inclined to use and play in a space that they had scene before (nostalgia) 2) we would be able to embed videos that give a visual demonstration of how a particular scene was shot in the film, giving people a sense of camera placement and staging in blockbuster films 3) these scenes would offer a greater dramatic potential, making them more interesting to use
We this criteria in order, we brainstormed some of our favorite movie scenes that we felt many people would recognize, such as:
Raiders of the Lost Ark: boulder escape, ET "bycicle across moon" scene, Free Willy escape, Star Wars: Death Star destruction, Stars Wars: "Luke, I am your father", Jurassic Park: T-Rex/jeep chase scene, Matrix: bullet time , Reservoir Dogs: final standoff, Scarface: "say hello to my little friend" + final shootout, Pulp Fiction: diner scene, North by Northwest: Mount Rushmore chase, helicopter chase, Ben Hur: Chariot Race, Apocalypse Now: helicopters napalm forest, Back to the Future: 1st time travel (fire tire tracks), teleports to future, Bonnie and Clyde: final shootout scene, Terminator 2: "Hasta la vista, baby", Frankestein: "It's alive!", Rocky: victory-run up stairs,
After some discussion, we decided to build the Raiders of the Lost Ark boulder escape scene and the ET/bycicle across the moon scenes, as well as planned to build the T-Rex/Jeep chase scene from Jurassic Park if we have time near the end of the semester. We felt these two scenes would not only be recognizable to many people, but would also be large enough to allow for easy avatar movement within the spaces. We plan to script animations to the scenes and "actor" avatars so that any user can film a scene without the need for other people to act as the characters.
-Jeffrey Pfingsten
