Moodboards

   So not much has changed in terms of my inspiration for Lurk, but just for comparison sake, I decided to place the old moodboard that I had made during the end of PPP1 (That I can still make full use of) alongside the new ones that I have quickly put together. I am still aiming for the monochromatic look with an unsettling atmosphere and ambience than a full out gore fest, but have decided to include examples from both. More stylistic games (That also happen to be indie games) are also included here as they have inspired me in terms of their more unique approaches and even more unique storytelling.

First mood board from nearly 2 years back, I am still remaining pretty faithful
to the selection of styles I have shown here.

A new mood board featuring an array of horror games that have gone for the more realistic if not
photorealistic look. While "Silent Hill" remains one of my main inspirations for my project,
games that tend to feature the 'little kid companion/partner' trope have also become a huge part
of my reference, not many of these however were able to succeed in creating that empathy
much like "The Last of Us", "Telltale's The Walking Dead" and even "Resident Evil: Revelations 2"
has done.

More stylistic games that are not particularly of the traditional horror genre. Most
of these games however have succeeded in breaking away from the norms and cliches
of many large company produced horror games (Sorry, guys!), and so are great examples
for when I am working on Lurk's storyline and narrative.

Fourth Tutorial Session

   I wasn't able to attend yesterday's tutorial session due to being ill but I did write down a few questions I wanted to ask my lecturer about my dissertation:

1. How do I reference emails:Eg, 'Email Correspondence with Ed Hooks, Date'
2. Despite not really mentioning some games, can they still be listed in the bibliography?
   
         Yes, as well as books, articles, so long as they have impacted your research in some way, they can still be included in there despite not being cited within the essay.
3. While it is not mandatory, how do we incorporate our practical into the dissertation if we decide to?
   
         Mention it briefly in the introduction (Why am doing this research and how does it support my practical) and conclusion (Eg, Tried to approach empathetic characters as Ed Hooks has suggested) 2 paragraphs at most.
4. How did games like L.A Noire, The Last of Us and Beyond: Two Souls avoid the issue of the Uncanny Valley?
   
         Actually, L.A Noire still suffers from this, seeing as they were attempting to recreate subtle facial movement that game rigs could not pull off. Wrapping around real video footage. Beyond: Two Souls has really heavy focus on the face. The Last of Us is a little more cartoony than the rest and wasn’t trying to be photo realistic.
5. What makes the characters of Telltale Games strong in terms of empathy?
   
         It's story, environment, situation, the decision making, pushing you into that role. Emoting with them. Brilliant voice acting.  Connects to first chapter about voice actor or the animator?
6. Should I narrow things down even further?
   
         Nah.

   I was also advised to get some strong poses done for the characters in my concept, and while also incorporating them into various scenes, make it so that one scene alone will actually be able to tell a story to those that view it. And there's also the academic poster, which isn't all that bad, I will most probably be making it far more visually heavy than text heavy when the time comes to work on it.

   But yes, it's time I finish up this draft a little more before uploading it to the eStudio, next week onwards, I hope to get more work done for my practical, so that I could actually send an animatic to my music and sound composer.

Roleplaying and an brief analyses on Silent Hill 3's Heather Mason

   I thought it was an interesting factor that one should imagine if not visualise themselves in the role of the character that they are writing for. When roleplaying was mentioned during the storytelling and scriptwriting workshop that was held the other week, I immediately thought back to my 'secret' little bit of research that I was a little too embarrassed to mention about here... which, I am finally about to do so, right this very minute.

   As part of my research (In a way), I decided to create an RP blog (That has been active since summer break) for one of my most favourite survival horror protagonists (And no, I will not be posting the link here). While there has been a huge increase in strong female leads (Especially in the horror genre) in recent years, at the time, characters such as Heather Mason were still somewhat of a rarity. 

   While there were indeed other strong female leads (Such as Jill Valentine and Claire Redfield from the Resident Evil series), I still find Silent Hill 3's Heather Mason to be one of the most realistic and believable protagonists ever featured in a horror game (I would also like to mention that she out of all the Silent Hill protagonists, and being the only female protagonist from that series thus far, is also given extra bonus points for being thrown into the most terrifying instalment out of all of them. Though, that is a discussion for another time... But seriously, Silent Hill 3 remains the scariest title out of them all). 

   Fatal Frame has noticeably more fragile but still nonetheless competent enough female protagonists when compared to the Silent Hill and Resident Evil series (And while it might seem that their femininity might be a little exaggerated, I have indeed seen many young Japanese girls that behave in the timid if not delicate fashion the protagonists of Fatal Frame do. Whether this is done merely to appear to cute to others is yet another question that will have to be answered another time...). 

   But, I once again find Heather to be a far more well balanced character when compared to them, as a female character, she is neither too experienced nor too fragile. She is just... your everyday teenager that you will almost always see at the shopping mall. While she doesn't necessarily know how to handle a knife or gun as well as our famous Ex-STARS, beret-wearing member, she is still able to hold her own pretty darn well. The designers have clearly put a lot of thought into their first major female protagonist, from her appearance, down to her amusingly sarcastic mannerisms (Just take a look at her idle animation if you ever get the chance to, her poses alone are able to express just how done she actually is with everything, especially when compared to James Sunderland and Henry Townshend).

   Heather also eventually begins to numb out most of her fear towards this nightmarish world that she is so abruptly thrown in as the game progresses, a believable defence mechanism for anyone that still has a goal that needs to be reached. The girl has not yet given up despite the fact that she has practically lost something (Or someone) dear to her and that her entire life has gone straight to hell. She does not give into her supposed fate , with anger as her weapon and love as her shield, she bravely enters the town of Silent Hill to avenge her father...

   Needless to say, after all these years, I find myself empathising with Heather far more than I really do any other female game character (Claire Redfield might be a close second, however, seeing how emotional she can still get despite her many attempts to remain brave in the face of danger). To this day, I still find her to be one of the most relatable characters out there and while I have seen quite a few characters that are most probably modelled after her in recent horror game titles, none of them have truly reached the same level of empathy or relatability as this blonde heroine here.

Research from 'Hamlet on the Holodeck' by Janet H. Murray

Basic Details:
MURRAY, J. H. (1997), Hamlet on the Holodeck, NY: The Free Press.

21-22.

• Starting in the 1970s and 1980s, the same fears provoked by the... advent of film and television began to be expressed against videogames, which added interactivity to the sensory allures of sight, sound and motion.
• Critics have condemned the too-easy stimulation of electronic games as a threat to the more reflective delights of print culture.
• A prominent film critic, for instance, recently lamented the fact that his sons have deserted Dickens for shoot-'em-up computer games, which "offer a kind of narrative, but one that yields without resistance to the child's desire for instant gratification."

53.

• On the other hand, some game designers are making good use of film techniques in enhancing the dramatic power of their games.
• Myst (1993) achieves much of its immersive power through its sophisticated sound design. Each of the different areas of the game is characterised by distinctive ambient sounds, like the whistling of wind through the trees of the lapping of waves on the shore, that reinforce the reality of fantasy worlds, which are really just a succession of still images.
• ... a musical motif that gets darker and more foreboding with each step and reaches an emotional peak when I uncover a severed head. 

140.

• Stories do not require us to do anything except to pay attention as they are told.
• Games always involve some kind of activity and are often focused on the mastery of skills, whether the skill involves chess strategy or joystick twitching. Games generally use language only instrumentally ("checkmate", "ball four") rather than to convey subtleties of description or to communicate complex emotions.
• ... games are goal directed and structured around turn taking and keeping score. All of this would seem to have nothing to do with stories.
• ... narrative satisfaction can be directly opposed to game satisfaction, as the endings of Myst, widely hailed as the most artistically successful story puzzle of the early 1990s, make clear.

142.

• A game is a kind of abstract storytelling that resembles the world of common experience but compresses it in order to heighten interest.
• Whatever the content of the game itself, whatever out role within it, we are always the protagonists of the symbolic action.
• Even in games in which we are at the mercy of the dice, we are still enacting a meaningful drama.

145.

• Most of the stories currently told on the computer are based on the structure of a contest of skill.
• The interactor is given the role of a fighter or detective of some sort and is pitted against an opponent in a win/lose situation.
• ... computer games have developed multiple representations of the opponent, who may be another human player (as in the first videogame, Pong), a character embedded in the story (as in Pacman), and the programmer or game designer implicit in the game (as in Zork). 
• Contest games have also developed at least three different ways of situating the player: we can watch from a spectator perspective while operating out own avatar character or spaceship (as in Mortal Kombat); watch from a situated perspective while operating a character (as in Rebel Assault, where we see the vehicle we are operating as if we are following just behind it with a movie camera); or, most immersively, watch and act form a situated first-person viewpoint, as in Doom...

146.

• ... where we see the landscape of the game and our opponents coming toward us as if we are really present in space. These gaming conventions orient the interactor and make the action coherent. They are equivalent to a novelist's care with point of view or a director's attention to staging.
• Fighting games have also developed a sure-fire way of combining agency with immersion.
• It requires very little imaginative effort to enter such a world because the sense of agency is so direct.
• ... every object in a digital narrative, no matter how sophisticated the story, should offer the interactor as clear a sense of agency and as direct a connection to the immersive world as I felt in the arcade holding a six-shooter-shaped laser gun and blasting away at the outlaws in Mad Dog McCree.

147.

• ... the moral impact of enacting an opposing role is a promising sign of the serious dramatic potential of the fighting game.
• We need to find substitutes for shooting off a gun that will offer the same immediacy of effect but allow for more complex and engaging story content.
• We need to find ways of drawing a player so deeply into the situated point of view of a character that a change of position will raise important moral questions.
• We need to take advantage of the symbolic drama of the contest format to create suspense and dramatic tension without focusing the interactor on skill mastery.

Group Feedback

   While I didn't necessarily have much to show for today's silent critique, feedback from my peers have been surprisingly and incredibly positive. My friends are absolutely excited on seeing more concepts (I was absolutely astounded when they were listening to intently to the plot whilst I explained it in the worst manner possible) and of course, the end products themselves (The creature concepts in particular were well received and were even compared to the likes of "Silent Hill" and "Dark Souls").  I do believe that I will even be able to collaborate with one of them in creating a title animation for the teaser trailer itself!

   Particularly helpful feedback that I wish to keep track of are:

• Consider the back designs of the characters and creatures more, seeing as the concept is visualised as a third person game and that we will be seeing their backs a lot.
• Consider audio for the animatic/animation itself (Seeing as there will be no voice acting, it would be wise to properly focus on other areas of audio such as music and sound effects).

   Once I get most of my dissertation written next week (After Manchester Animation Festival, most probably), it's back to working on more concepts. But just to keep track of things, what I will probably need to do next for my practical is:

• Character Concepts
• Creature Concepts
• Setting Concepts
• Mock Screenshots/Scene Visuals
• Rough Storyboard
• Record some quick Video References
• Animatic with some finished animation clips in there (I will especially have to send this to my composer as soon as I can to give him enough time to work on it)

   There is still a lot of other things to worry about, such as the academic poster, getting everything finished in time for printing, so hopefully I can be more productive once I get back from the festival.

Scriptwriting and Storytelling Workshop

• Look into "Everything that is bad is good for you" by Steven Johnson
• Aristotelian Dramatic Arc
  Start > Action/Tension Growth > Climatic Event Maximum Confusion > Unravelling of Plot > Resolution of Confusion > The End
• Narrator can be unreliable
• A character should go through some degree of transformation over the story (Eg, an ordinary man to a hero, a king to a beggar), namely character development
• Gustav Freytag's Pyramid
  Exposition (Explaining the world, background, etc.) > Rising Action (Started by an exciting incident) > Climax > Falling Action (Resolving) > Denouement
  AKA - The Dramatic Arc, Also the Three Act Structure

• The Hero's Journey

• Stories only really went around one character back then
• These days however stories are able to actually focus more on side character as well and given them the same amount attention as the protagonist

• Separation, Initiation and Recognition (Seen in a lot of games)
• Archetypes: Hero (Whom we identify with), Mentor (The teacher, gift giver), Herald (Issues the challenge or announces it, doesn't even have to be a character), Shapeshifter (Changeable), Threshold Guardian (Tests the hero), Trickster (Comic relief) and Shadow (Challenges hero, the villain)

• Advised to start from here in terms of writing your character, instead of attempting a thorough storyline first. These 'stereotypes' can be expanded upon once you get the basics done.
• 'Role play'
• Look into Natya Shastra
• Deus ex machina (Not a satisfying plot point, but you just need to get out of it)

Third Tutorial Session

   So far so good, while progress for my dissertation may be a tad slow on my part (Due to issues with note gathering and a little writer's block), it would seem that I am still able to keep up with the pace suggested and given to by our lecturer. I will be further narrowing down on the topic that is to be focused upon as well as combine the chapters of "Motion Capture" and the "Uncanny" (Not just the Uncanny Valley, but the Uncanny as a whole) into one (Seeing that they both link strongly to one another in many areas and examples).

   While it has initially been narrowed down from all forms of media (Movies, TV shows, video games, etc.) to video games, it would be wise to narrow it down even further to a particular genre of games (Seeing as I have already unknowingly placed a strong focus on one genre in particular, that being the horror genre) that are known for their heavy focus on narrative and cinematic. to In terms of research, to further add to my growing list of books, video games and online articles, I will be looking up a few articles from the Edge magazines available in the library (Curse their shiny paper, though), particularly the issues that were highlighting video games such as "Beyond Two Souls" and "The Last of Us". (Another game I should probably look into is the "Broken Sword" series)

   Based on my introduction, I was also told to further expand upon the differentiating views of practitioners Ed Hooks and Jamaal Bradley (Two considerably big names in the animation industry, in their own way) in consideration to the future of video games narrative. It would also be interesting to discuss the difference in rotoscoping and motion capture, not particularly on the technical areas but more so on how they effectively applied to the animation itself. I should also continue looking into video games with interesting monster designs and animation as reference for my practical ("Forbidden Siren" especially comes to mind).

   I do feel that I had already gathered a decent amount of research (Which I believe will be four pages worth of bibliography), and so right now, I seriously need to get down to some skim reading (As I will no longer have enough time to properly read through every single one of them like I did with the first few books, still, hopefully I will still be able to take some thorough notes for a few of them) and start writing more than half of the dissertation before Christmas comes around.

For my reference in terms of listing down notes from live events I have attended:
Name of the talk, Venue, Date, Event it took place in

Research from 'Aesthetic Theory and the Video Game' by Graeme Kirkpatrick Pt 1

Basic Details:
KIRKPATRICK, G. (2011), Aesthetic Theory and the Video Game, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

1.

• I argue that video games are not communications media in any standard sense but objects that furnish us with particular kinds of experience. 
• These experiences are a variety of game, or structured play, but they are also something more than this. What this 'more' is, what is consists in, is the enigma that has triggered the most heated academic debates about the video game and how we should study it and I argue that it is best understood as an historically specific instance of aesthetic form. 

2.

• It involves making the claim that video games are aesthetic objects before they are anything else, which has consequences for other parts of the discussion we want to have about them. 
• Most people agree, for example, that play or gameplay as it is referred to in connection with video games, is central to what people do with them and should inform our understanding of them in various ways. 

3.

• It is a conservative implication of ludology, for instance, that video games stand in the tradition of older games like chess or football and that it is only in light of this that we can see their true novelty. 
• Others find in them a source of cinematic innovations, with new viewing practices and new visual possibilities that extend the history of popular entertainments. An aesthetic approach finds itself in the, perhaps fortunate, position of seeming to claim that video games are art. 

11.

• Ludology is a branch of game studies centred mainly in Scandinavian universities that emphasizes the games of video games and rejects attempts to analyse them as 'narratives' or texts in which meaning plays the dominant, ordering role. 

12.

• ... the best way to understand modern video games is to focus on what they feel like to the people who play them and to reflect on what the significance of that feeling responses might be in the contemporary cultural context. 
• Taking an aesthetic approach to video games is made more complicated by the fact that everyone who writes about them already accepts that they have aesthetic properties and there is even some consensus that these properties matter and should inform our assessment of the medium as a whole as well as of individual games.

13.

• Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska, for example, suggest that much gameplay is motivated simply by the search for 'visual pleasures', writing at one point that players may find aesthetic pleasures simply from 'the quality of graphical resolution alone' (King and Krzywinska 2006: 130). But what makes a visual experience pleasurable? On what basis do we separate the visual aspects of an experience that also includes other sensory components and questions concern aesthetic structure and it is in answering them that the resources of classical aesthetic theory are useful. 
• ... the concepts of play and form take us beyond a superficial characterisation of visual pleasure towards an appreciation of the whole experience of gameplay in terms of how it feels to players. 

15.

• This book argues that the relation between games and art is an important key to understanding either of them properly in the current period. Video games inherit certain of their key properties, especially form, from an art world that has to some extent absented itself from important areas of experience. 

17.

• Video games go not have to 'mean' anything to be popular and their popularity can be intelligible without reference to interpretation. This does not mean we should ignore the contents of on-screen imagery or what that imagery might represent or signify in some contexts. 

19.

• The term 'gameplay' is often used by rarely defined. As commonly employed it refers to the game dynamics, or more simply, 'how it feels to play a game'. Although this feeling is influenced by a game's audio and visual aspects, gameplay is usually considered a consequence of the game's rules rather than its representation. 
• Using this definition, we can say that the gameplay of chess is deliberative and [sic] while the gameplay of Burnout 3 is frantic and easily accessible. 

23.

• Aesthetic experience occurs when we find that something is pleasing to us by virtue of its form. Such an object stimulates us in the sense that it provokes and incites a feeling response, but it does so in a way that goes beyond merely being pleasing to the eye. 
• In aesthetic experience, which for Kant is almost exclusively about natural beauty, we find our imagination is pitched against our understanding- we can't discern 'order and finality' in the object but not its purpose. 

24.

• ... the human disposition to play is at the heart of the human creative response to being cast adrift in a meaningless universe. It it is not meaningful in itself, play is the activity that makes meaning possible by spinning forms out of the darkness. 
• ... play has intrinsic rhythm and harmony (1950: 10) and it is present as a kind of beating pulse in the sciences as well as the arts. 
• ... play is associated with contests and with representation, sometimes taking the form of role play. Play always goes on within what Huizinga calls a 'magic circle'; a specifically delineated zone where the normal conversations of social life are placed on hold and the rules of play (however minimal) are given free reign. 

25.

• The importance of play here lies in its foundational role for our ontological security and subsequently personal identity, because it is here that we first gain a sense of ourselves as agents who can act on the world and who must, in turn, adapt ourselves to its reality. 

26.

• ... the video game can be seen as a kind of stand-in for the parent, later the friend, with whom the subject constructs this precarious sense of a self grounded in transitional phenomena. Play here is based on a kid of formlessness that precedes both ego development and a secure sense of reality. This pre-ontological domain is one that we have to play our way out of in order to secure a sense of ourselves and to learn about the world. 
• Fantasy is an excess of imagination. Eve n short of delusion it can impede our ability to process external reality properly and inhibit the development of our inner personality. 

32.

• Aesthetic theory is concerned with understanding how it is that human beings find some situations, objects or artefacts attractive, or even beautiful. 
• Video games merit the concern that has been reserved for such items not because they are beautiful or 'art' but rather because they exist in a very specific tension with beauty and art, editing into the field of tensions that define the artwork and position it in relation to other social elements, and this incursion is essential to understanding them. 

48.

• ... ludology correctly identifies what is essential to the video games as a cultural object, namely, its character as a form of structured play. At the same time, however, the discussion here acknowledges the importance of meaning-oriented video game analyses, which have forced ludology to reflect on the differences between traditional games and their modern, digital variant. 
• Video games are more than games in the traditional sense. However, scholars who emphasise the story element in games jump the gun when they assert that attention to meaning and to the story-telling dimension of video games is the correct way to address the deficit in ludology's approach. 

50.

• Scholars who understand well how film works, for example, find that video games seem a lot like films except that the audience participate in determining what happens in the on-screen drama. 
• This active role for audiences can be called interactivity since it seems to reflect a new responsiveness on the part of the medium and implies a degree of complexity that makes the media object more like an interlocutor or co-participant and less like a finished work to be apprehended contemplatively.

54.

• ... Jesper Juul repudiated narrative theory's application to video games on the grounds that this theory introduces a temporal discrepancy that is essential to all reading but not present when playing video games. In narrative theory it is the difference between the time of narrating and that of the events narrated that is all-important. 
• According to Gerard Genette, for example, the temporality of a written text always involves a 'metonymic displacement' (Genette 1980: 34) whereby we, as readers, allow the false time of the story to stand in for the true time it takes us to read it. 
• This discrepancy between the time of reading and that of the events narrated is essential to the process of meaning-interpretation as it constitutes a kind of space where the reader interrogates and reflects on what she is reading. 
• The idea that games 'tell stories' is simply compatible with the reality that they are played in a singular time:
• In a verbal narrative, the grammatical tense will necessarily present a temporal relation between the time of the narration (narrative time) and the events told (story time). Additionally, it is possible to talk of a third time, the reading or viewing time...
• ... the game constructs the story time as synchronous with narrative time and reading/viewing time: the story time is now. Now, not just in the sense that the viewer witnesses events now... 

55.

• ... but in the sense that events are happening now, and that what comes next is not determined. (Juul 2001: 13-14) 

61.

• ... Kucklich presumes a strong role here for interpretative meaning in these processes, especially fictional meaning. The problem he raises it that sustained activity applied to a game seems to require a narrative or meaning element to explain why players seek to effect the relevant state transitions. 
• ... identification with character and immersion in some kind of storyline seem to be needed, to mediate, or explain the extra-ludic player activities- the things they do that do not fall under the lusory attitude. 
• Meaning based explanations would situate their play in a larger, fictional or social setting and would explain their involvement in all of its aspects. 
• Kucklick's point is that player activities, including... 

62.

• ... perhaps even subversion of the game's projected or advertised narrative context, must be meaningful for peopel and these meanings must play some explanatory role. 
• The fact that video games commonly include filmic and textual elements counts strongly in favour of such an analysis. 
• In the move between game states players' attention does move to extra-ludic reflection but their activities involve actions need to be understood as integral to the video game form as whole. Alexander Galloway usefully characterises non-story related actions as 'form playing with other forms... a play within the various layers of the video game' (Galloway 2006: 36). In this multi-layered play the human element must switch between discrete... 

63.

• ... sets of rules, each bearing different kinds of relation to meaning, including some movements and activities that have no significance at all, captured nicely in Galloway's phrase, 'multiple vectors of agitation' (2006: 38). 

75.

• Max Payne is an object with a distinctive feel, or aesthetic and this determines its character as an experience for players. At the centre of this is a feeling of expectation or anticipation that is worked and reworked by the tensions and releases of play- exactly what, for Ranciere (2007), connects the various experiences of form in the aesthetic regime of art. 
• The element of repetition is the clearest illustration of the importance of rhythm to the medium. Distinct types of action repeat and recur throughout the course of Max Payne. 
• When it happens you can assume a different attitude, namely, that of poking around, exploring the game situation to see what you are supposed to do next. Exploring, righting and watching correspond to feelings of tension, excitement and relaxation in the body of the player. 
• They define the rhythm of incorporation specific to Max Payne- different games have different rhythms. 

77.

• In video games the action and the intensities of experience are much more like music in being relatively detached from these elements, to such an extent that we often need cut-scenes to remind us where we (our characters) are supposed to be in the game's overall 'story'. 
• Such is the extent to which we are concentrated on play, its 'feel' and dynamics, and such is the narrowing of our focus onto game elements as signs not in a narrative story, but of the need to perform this move or that. 

79.

• Diderot's paradox, is a much discussed idea from theatre studies and concerns the actor's assumption of a role to which they must appear to be thoroughly committed if they want to carry the sentiments of the audience. The paradox is that they can only achieve this appearance through concentrated attention to something else (namely, the performance itself). 
• While an actor must know feelings intimately and express them sincerely to produce them in an audience, he cannot achieve this goal by sincerely expressing those feelings on stage but must have recourse to artifice. 
• The best actors are not the ones who actually feel what their character is supposed to be feeling. 
• This applies very much to games, who cannot identify too strongly with their characters, since they have to master the playing of the game. It illustrates a fundamental aesthetic problem with the idea of a straightforward (tension and paradox free) immersion in virtual space and fictional role play.