GIVE ME YOUR GUN
ROLE : CREATIVE DIRECTOR
GAMES FOR CHANGE, JANUARY 2016 - JUNE 2016
Give Me Your Gun is an interactive theater game which premiered at the Games for Change Festival 2016 in New York City. As Creative lead for a team of eight including programmers, designer, artists and actresses my role encompassed defining game mechanics, writing and directing the piece, and managing the development of a web interface and back end tool.
IN THE MEDIA
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Since premiering at the Games for Change Festival, the experience has received multiple media reviews a few of which are mentioned here:
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https://killscreen.com/articles/american-politics-importance-participation/
http://www.appunwrapper.com/2016/07/04/games-for-change-festival-2016/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8iuOhzfr0c https://twitter.com/G4C/status/746425840712454144 |
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GAME FLOWOn a high level, the game has three portals of interaction - player cellphone, projection screen and the stage. The game begins with an opening exchange between Linda (character who audience is role playing as) and Mary (character who's motivations audience is attempting to unravel). At a precise moment, Linda breaks the fourth wall calling the audience to action, activating both the cellphone and the projection screen. Now players can key in questions and vote for other audience member's question. These questions are received by a live back end system, which is a custom tool the team built to manage the entire flow of the experience. The tool provides the following high level functionalities - question deletion, pushing questions to projection screen and pushing questions to the actress' cellphone(which is hidden on set). As top voted questions proceed through the flow of projection screen to actress' cellphone, the actress's would improvise conversation.
If the question hits a designed point that pushes the story forward, the audience 'levels up' unlocking a key fact on the projector and a piece of scripted dialog (think of it as a live cut scene). The information on the projection screen provides useful information for the audience to generate the right question that unlocks the next achievement. This game flow loops until time has run out or all seven key facts have been unlocked. |
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GAME DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENTConsidering the fact that this game is truly the first of it's kind, the team was faced with serious questions early on, without any real pointers on where to begin. What does a development pipeline even look like? What is the significance of a script with so much improv involved? So in many ways, our solution to adopt iterative development was not so much a choice but a necessity. We started off with a rudimentary mobile interface and Google docs for our achievement system. Based on early playtesting, two main conceptual issues were unearthed - (a) There were too many portals competing for player attention
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leaving audiences lost and confused. (b) The achievement system was simply not working leaving the audience feeling that game progression was random and arbitrary. As a direct repercussion, player's didn't feel like they had any sense of agency in the experience. The first problem was addressed by adding mechanisms in the projection screen and cellphone to maneuver player attention instead of allowing all interactions throughout the experience. The second problem however, was far more complex and needed a mindset shift within the team. The issue wasn't that the game didn't provide the audience with control. The agency problem stemmed directly from the fact that the game didn't provide the audience with timely feedback. Agency means nothing to players unless there are mechanisms communicating how they're actions are affecting game state. To remedy this issue we used lighting cues and sound to indicate success or failure of a question. The entire projection screen interface was redesigned to include the name of the person who unlocked the achievement to provide a sense of ownership. And finally, we had Linda break the fourth wall to provide negative reinforcement when they were going down the wrong track.
