Visual Storytelling Project 2: Darwins

https://qiuwen-98.wixsite.com/mysite

In this project, I wanted to explore and make the player a character in the game and following prof’s suggestion, I made the player/character able to navigate everywhere in a split second by making him a part of every electronics. The plot’s at first just a cat and mouse game between robots who have converted and robots who have not. However, I decided to give it a more meaningful conflict and explore the tension between humans and robots-what makes the two different and if one race is actually superior than the other.

With discrimination and prejudice that has happened in history and is still occurring till now and into the future, I decided to pit robots against humans. Instead of standing in the POV of a human, I decided to do so in the POV of the “alien” race and discover that they may have more “humanity” than humans do because rebellions are messy and people are mostly ironic in rebellions, often not noticing that they have embodied the ideals they fight against.

I think it would be interesting to stand in the point of view of a robot who detests humans because they act upon their biases almost too quickly and adamantly and wants to wipe out the robot race because of one incident. In order to protect his race as humans have attacked simultaneously, he decided to reduce himself into codes and become a part of every electronic device so that he may be clairvoyant and able to send warnings to his kind. Although by doing so, he is reducing himself to his most basic component–codes, rendering himself into nothing but a piece of science/technology, he justifies that his intention of doing so to protect his kind has reaffirmed that he is more humane than the prejudiced humans who are after him.

What baffles me is if I needed a reason for the player to not know that he/she is the character but I realised that as many other games are, the player is often “plunged” into a character/the character is “possessed” by the player and there still requires some distinction between player and character as the player is also exploring the character as the player plays. Hence, there need not be a reason for it is often inferred/implicit but does not take away the enjoyment of the game and it makes it more fun too for the player to know that he/she is exploring a character that he/she is playing.