Phase 3: Initial Ideation
I began ideation by creating essential experiences that each could potentially be used for a game concept. Some of my ideas were influenced by feedback from my peers at the end of my phase 2 presentation.
Defining 'Essential Experience'
The essential experience is the core of the game that every feature should enhance, or at the very least not detract from. It's for this reason I think it is the best starting point. I note what questions are most important to ask when developing the essential experience below:
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What experiences do I want the player to have?
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What is essential to that experience?
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How can my game capture that essence?
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I will be highlighting parts of my ideas to show what aspect of their experience is intended to correspond to which question.
Initial Essential Experience Ideas
Essential Experience 1 (EE1)
Users will have first-hand experience of the tragedy of dementia, having a bittersweet feeling of observing joyful memories and deep bonds with the knowledge they are stripped away.
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I was curious in how I would capture dementia –and how it impacts everyone involved– in a video game if I were to do so, and I had some ideas thanks to the research on some media about dementia that I had watched already. I also received a significant amount of feedback from the phase 2 presentation that suggested others were interested in exploring this.
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Essential Experience 2 (EE2)
I will demonstrate the importance of our memories in shaping us, having the player purposefully slow down to take in events to truly be able to feel a sense of meaning, or else feel hollow.
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This idea was inspired by nostalgia, personal identity and my own experiences. I feel like our entire outlook on everything in life is shaped by our past experiences and what we remember of them. In an experience where one can miss aspects of a life; their perspective on events should differ.
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Essential Experience 3 (EE3)
Players shall observe the unreliability of memory by seeing the differing memories of people on a single event, creating a blurred sense of right and wrong.
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This experience was influenced by a conversation with a Year 2 student in my course, Ariel, in regards to a game idea they were working on in which there were multiple unreliable narrators. It was also impacted by my research into repressed memories resulting in uncovering that memories can be quite unreliable, and can even be falsely created. I was curious by the idea of exploring how one's sense of morality and judgement of a situation would change if they could see completely different memories of the same thing.
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Essential Experience 4 (EE4)
Users will touch on personal identity as memories are taken away, adapting to the change in their character’s knowledge.
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This experience was influenced by a combination of the information on personal identity and amnesia I have read, and curiosity in exploring a game that explores how the two are linked. Additionally, I received a question in the feedback of my phase 2 presentation that further evoked thoughts in regards to this topic.
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Essential Experience 5 (EE5)
Users will inherit memories to explore the concept of personal identity by undergoing personality and capabilities shifts.
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This idea arose from a workshop I did in October, in which I created a poster of a scenario where memory did not exist in the world until recently. I approached it as if memories only existed through 'memory bank' cybernetic implants that would upload your memory to the internet. This experience comes from thinking further, as the idea of "what if people could exchange their memories."
This combined with my research on personal identity –particularly in regards to John Locke and Derek Parfit's views that the links between memories define the self.
Right: The poster I made in the workshop
Chosen Three For Further Ideation
Once I was comfortable I had come up with a decent variety of experiences, I considered which ones I was most interested in pursuing further. I chose the following:
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EE1 - I was struggling not to get ahead of myself with ideation on how this experience could be executed, and I felt that the amount of feedback I received which showed interest in the topic made it clear there was interest. It's also a very emotional-charged and complex topic that I wanted to attempt to tackle, whilst still acknowledging how challenging it would be.
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This experience evolved into Ember.
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EE2 - I had significant personal investment into this experience, due to how it reflects my own outlook on life. I believed this could be an interesting way to test whether people's reactions to elements of the experience would match the expectations I had due to my perspective. ​
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This experience evolved into Forward.
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EE5 - In comparison to EE4, which had some similarities, EE5 seemed like it was marginally broader in a way that would give more creative freedom; and allows for exploring themes that are more interesting to me.
This experience would eventually be tweaked and evolve into The Hunt.
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The remaining essential experience that has not yet been mentioned, EE3, simply did not engage me as much as the others did, and it was also the one that I had the least knowledge on from prior research. I felt it would be inefficient to spend too much extra time looking into the subject of false memories.
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