Sunday 23 October 2011

Everwake a social breakdown

I think alot of people struggle to see how a ghost story could be in anyway a FOR GOOD pervasive game. There has been loads and loads of things written about how games can be designed to make people aware of climate change and also others about how through a game you may do good things.

But what if you want to do this kind of project but think the audience maybe quite small at this kind of game and also the knowledge of how games and games mechanics work needs to be looked into?

Option 1 - You wait and don't do the project because you never quite have the right amount of experience/skill

Option 2 - You start to create games and slowly bring more and more social issues into the game.

Well I guess by now you know I took Option 2. So the initial everwake game has a very small social element (most of these being the intrinsic nature of pervasive games). The social aspects being people coming together to meet talk and share. These are some of the most powerful aspects of pervasive games and what set them apart from other experiences such as theatre and film.

Secondly there is an environmental aspect to the game with people 'experiencing' a place they thought they knew and a places being revealed to them. There was also a re affirmation with everwake of good and bad, which while quite broad still seems relevant to bring up.

So as everwake is hoped to be a series of episodes the questions is can we develop the game to have more and more sophisticated ways of introducing other socially good elements?

Well simply for me yes. We are working on an over arching story line for everwake as we speak but we have already broken it down to 6 episodes. With each episode slowly gaining more and more 'socially good sophistication'. It's an experiment and something that in time we will be able to give some idea of how it is going.

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