The Great 5igure is an experiemental game environment that plays with the spatial construction of meaning and how moving through a space affects the experience of narrative. The work remediates the poem, The Great Figure, by William Carlos Williams using Blender and Ogre 3D to transpose the work into three-dimensional space. The poem describes an intense moment in time; the virtual space expands that moment by breaking out each line, or micro-moment, and transcribing it on the interior of a sphere.

Each of these micro-moments becomes a micro-environment with the addition of sound. The visitor can navigate through the space using keyboard commands or the Wii remote, and the path she takes can reinforce or subvert the original poet's intention.

Dr. Celia Pearce's Emergent Games Group has been developing Mermaids, a massively multiplayer game on the Multiverse platform. The ethos that guides the project is cooperative social play through new game mechanics and agnostic rule structure that foster emergent cultural practices and player behavior. The game utilizes large-scale emergent group behavior as a design material. The game structure encourages activities beyond the monotanous "grind/kill/fetch-> LEVEL -> grind/kill/fetch" model found in so many MMO games. Exploration, resource management, mentoring, crafting, and community building are some example activities that players might pursue. Similarly, the game eschews traditional reward systems, like leveling and experience points, in favor of less rigid and inherently hierarchical recognition.
Roles

Dr. Pearce asked me to join the Mermaids team to art direct and develop the spatial narrative and environments within the game world. The new world design would be much larger and more ambitious than the one the game originally had. In thinking about the world design, I wanted the different environments to function as an integrated landscape that could further player activity and experimentation, while also feeling like a "real" place, with a history and credible shifts between ecological zones.

World Design

The new world design would be much larger and more ambitious than the original one they had. In thinking about the world design, I wanted the different environments to function as an integrated landscape that could further player activity and experimentation, while also feeling like a "real"place, with a history and credible shifts between ecological zones.

The world narrative was built around an ancient mermaid civilization that had suddenly disappeared after a catastrophe. We incorporated that narrative into the world environment, including ominous areas like a deep sea trench and volcano that might suggest possible answers for the civilization's demise.

Open expanses separate the distinct zones, much as one finds in actual marine environments, allowing the zones to blend into one another through flora and fauna as well as terrain. What would be otherwise familiar, such as a field of anemones and sea urchins, however, is made wonderous by exaggeration of size, proportion, or color.

The coral caves (above) and the seagrape forest (below) are my favorites out of the new environments planned for the world design. The filligree effect produced by the fan coral that forms the coral caves gives an otherworldly feel to what is essentially a maze environment. It's simultaneously an interior and an exterior place, which increases it visual interest while also making it more challenging to navigate.

The seagrape forest turns the idea of a forest on its head - literally. The plants grow downward, into the water column, from a root mass formed by bouyant bulbs that float near the surface. The inversion of the how the space is filled makes it unique, from the lighting effects and the chiaroscuro, to the relative openess at the floor level that contrasts with the desnse foliage higher up. The seagrape forest can support a variety of possible player behavior, from gathering and farming of vegitation and the glowing fruits, to hide-and-go-seek, to hunting for animals that live in the biome.