by ·0 Comments

When I go to an exhibition or museum, I’m usually just immersed in the visuals alone. But this exhibition allowed us to touch the installations. Needless to say, I was even more enthralled. What caught my eye most was the sheltered reading room with a single tale and chair inside. As I got closer to it, I noticed the materials that were used: wooden planks with rustic colours, common textured metal sheets, and even this green plastic shelter. Seeing all these materials together evoked a warm and calm feeling from within me. It was as though these structures were trying to replicate my childhood memories, presenting them as a physical architecture.

 

 

I remember the tour guide mentioning how the structures can make us feel a sense of comfort, yet puts us slightly on edge through hostile looking elements such as the up right pencils that resemble an army or spikes, and how the chair is not sift like a couch, making you shift around in it. But I didn’t get a single hostile vibe from them. Instead, I actually found the arrangement of pencils cute, playful even, and the chairs were actually very comfortable, possibly because wooden chairs and furniture was what I grew up using.

 

 

 

The guide also explained how the rules of setting up the installations were that they have to be placed at 90 degree angles in relation to one another. This was another element that was supposed to add stiffness to the otherwise inviting reading room. However, for me, I guess the combination of materials really overpowered these hostile elements. There’s just something about the little wooden reading room and how the light streams in through the gaps of the shelter, giving the wooden table inside a soft warm glow. All of that just made it such a cozy place. Even the two other installations with just chairs and tables also didn’t seen rigid, perhaps due to the fact that they were more asymmetrical (and also mainly wooden). The feeling and memories evoked by the materials used made me think about the reading on atmospheres in architecture; how the looks, sounds, and textures of different material can pull up various memories from the audience, and linking those memories and feelings to the architecture gives it its atmosphere.

 

 

Another part of the fieldtrip that I enjoyed was the short films screening, my favourite two being Rotating Line, To Perceive 10,000 Different Squares in 6 Minutes and 55 Seconds. Rotating Line was interesting in that it chose a unique angle to show the rotation of a line. What seemed to be a line getting shorter and shorter, before extending again, was actually a side view of the rotating line, implying that it was 3 dimensional. And for the second film, I’ve never spent so much time looking at a single square, or rather, 10,000 squares.  Each frame shows a square that is smaller than the previous one, but the differences were so minute I was fairly certain it wasn’t actually getting any smaller. So, naturally, I decided to cheat and took two pictures of the square on screen, each about 3000 frames apart. By comparison, I did see a very slight difference in size, and hopefully that’s not just my mind playing tricks on me. Regardless, all the films showed how Siah Armajani used technology to create the illusion of three-dimensional space and time.

 

by ·0 Comments

The Stanley Parable is a video game designed by Davey Wreden, that uses interactive storytelling. It was first released as a free modification for Half-Life 2 in 2011, but a stand-alone remake with more story elements was released in 2013.

The game starts off with a narrator introducing the main character, Stanley, an office employee. The narrator describes his mundane work life where, day in and day out, he is tasked to follow whatever instructions appear on his monitor. One day, however, Stanley sat at his desk for an hour, but not a single instruction had appeared, and no one else was in the office. With the starting objective of find out what’s going on, the player controls Stanley in a first-person perspective while the narrator gives indirect instructions through his narrations.

As the player, you can choose to follow everything the narrator says; you stick to the script and discover that the company had been mind-controlling the employees, after which, you put and end to it escape the facility.

However, as players, we have the natural tendency to go against the rules; to find out what would happen if you don’t do as the narrator says. This is where the interactive storytelling gets interesting. The game itself provides the player with many opportunities to go against the narrator, be it going the right door when he says to go left, or going down the stairs when he says to go up. But with every order you disobey, with every move you make, the game long foresaw, providing each scenario with it’s own script.

As the player’s disobedience prevails, the narrator gets increasingly annoyed, constantly mocking the player, and at one point in the game, gives up on the main game and boots up another one. The narrator’s reactions makes it feel as though he truly is reacting in real time to all your actions. Obviously, that is not the case. Certain dialogues are only activated upon entering specific areas of the map, meaning that the game was very well thought out in terms of predicting the player’s moves and thinking of a response fit for the situation. There is even a dialogue prepare for when the player purposely stays inside a janitor’s closet (without being told to) for too long. The narrator even gets mad when you interrupt his narration mid-way. He even says somewhat conspiratorial sounding things that can make you feel uncomfortable as you play the game.

So what is the point of having a game where the player doesn’t have to follow the main story line? Why go through all the trouble creating so many scripts for multiple alternate scenarios when they can just make it straight forward with no room for disobedience? It’s simply to give the players the freedom of choice. Or rather, an illusion of freedom of choice. The Stanley Parable aims to question what choices mean in video game, mocking how limited the choices really are. Sure, you can choose to disobey, but the fact that there there is a witty come back for everything you do, it proves that your move was predicted; the game designer knew the possibilities of disobedience and created paths disguised as new choices. To phrase it better, how much power does the player really have when everything has been predetermined?

Every decision the player is able to make was already preconceived by the designer; he knows every choice because he made them so. The story only serves as a decoy, leading the players to believe that they are the ones in control. There are various paths you can take, and these paths branch out to a total of 19 different endings. After reaching the end, the player is brought back to the start menu, where they are able to play the game again, making different decisions in an effort to explore other possible endings.

It is the games intuition and large range of choices that allows the players to have a unique interactive experience.