Final Presentation
We had our final presentation this week!
We tried to take into account our softs feedback and made diagrams to make our project as clear as possible:
Slides are available here.
Final Article
We’ve been working on a final article that describes our project throughout the past few weeks. We have a completed draft here (permission required). If published, the article will be linked here.
Reflecting back on our semester, our conclusions can be summarized as:
- Our last design mainly takes the form of guests “puppeting” the actors. For more interesting interaction between guests and actors (and a more interesting experience for the guests), we should perhaps incorporate ways actors can also affect the guests, or guests can directly affect each other or the plot without going through an actor.
- It’s hard to find a balance between giving guest agency and creating an experience that would be enjoyable
- Technology tends to add even more complexity; it’s easy to have too much tech or agency in the experience
- Tech can also be a source of inspiration for interesting interactions that tie into the story
- Generally, the more specific the problem being solved with tech, the better; it’s helpful to focus on a specific narrative, or a specific problem encountered when trying to give guests agency
- Collaboration between the tech team and writers is extremely important; the team should get to a point where they can evolve ideas together to achieve the same goal
- Game design concepts and techniques are very helpful but it should always be kept in mind that theatre and games are different kinds of experiences
- For experiences intended as an experiment to explore the concept of guest agency, it’s important to keep the experience as small as possible to start with; this helps reduce the complexity of the problem
It’s been both a challenge and a pleasure to work on this project! We learned a great deal and found it ultimately extremely rewarding to collaborate with each other, with our project partners and our instructors. Guest agency in theatre is an extremely interesting problem and we hope our take on it can help someone who explores this problem in the future.