IDeATe

Intention

Our group wanted to create an entertaining interactive performance in which the viewers had a direct impact on the ending. The ending that the viewers decided on would be only one of multiple endings to keep a fresh feel when going through the story multiple times. We wanted to create this because we felt that an interactive choose-your-own adventure story yields a very entertaining performance for the viewers. We took a comic approach to the adventure as we thought comedy would yield the best results in a short 3-minute performance. As for the subject, we thought relating it to college would have the viewers relate to the setting. However, we decided to use extreme wacky scenarios that would never happen to the normal college student as we thought that would add to the comedic side of the story, and keep the viewers interested in the outcome. We also decided to name our protagonist after our professor to further add to our comedic approach as we thought that both the professor and the students would enjoy. In summary, our intention was to take a comedic approach to a branching choose -your-adventure to both entertain the audience, and leave them desiring to see a different path when they end their first few paths.

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Performance

In our performance we used Slack, a text message service available to all students in the class, to facilitate audience participation. In short, audience members were asked to vote on decisions that the main character of the performance should take. These votes were automatically tallied by a custom-written Slack bot and interpreted by an interactive display (written in Unity). The interactive display kept track of where we were in the story and facilitated the voting process.

Above: A picture of the voting process. By "reacting" to each of the bot's posts, audience members can influence the outcome of the story in real time.

Above: Example screen from the interactive display. The options on the display mirror the questions sent by our bot through Slack.

In all, the performance supported 13 different scenarios, creating a branching narrative structure. We needed a way to represent these branching paths in Unity, so a node-based editor window was used to keep track of all of these. Below is the final arrangement of all 13 scenarios and voting possibilities.

Below is a video of what the voting process looked like (apologies for the low resolution game with graphical artifacts - for a more faithful depiction of the display during the performance see the picture above):

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Context

We were inspired by using some media to describe the hardships of college life in some way. While we were not completely sure what form of performance we wanted to use to deliver our message, we always had the idea to bringet college life into some comedic performance. This idea stemmed from when we originally tried to find a time to meet up, but we had trouble because of our various schedules because of our schoolwork. This brought some to want to use this problem into an entertaining performance that everyone can relate to. Initially inspired by Text Rain, we wanted to do a similar one yet the format turned to be quite alike. Kinoautomat shed a new light on our work, and so we decided to create an interactive-movie-like performance so that the audience could have a direct impact on the college student's life through making decisions for him.

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Process

After we decided to demonstrate how students are suffering from college life, we had an idea of making an animation in which texts indicating schoolwork (like “term project”, “midterm”, “quiz”, etc) come out from a Carnegie Mellon logo on one side. The texts would hit the student (i.e. main character) on the other side hard if he doesn’t have a shield while otherwise he gets protected from all those academic pressure. Yet the principle is basically the same as that of Plants vs Zombies and the animation would look extremely alike Text Rain for the only slight difference is that texts move horizontally in the former while fall down vertically in the latter. Inspired by Kinoautomat, we decided to create a plot with multiple turning points where the performance would pause and the audience would be asked to choose between two choices to let the plot move on. We integrated the original theme into the plot and created a story about a college student. The decisions the audience made for him would lead his life to utterly different paths. To make the performance more appealing, we named the main character with our professor’s name. While asking the audience to raise their hands to vote is not effective, we initially planned to use Kahoot! while later we found Slack bot a better choice. The utilization of technology leverages the media component of our work. Likewise, we decided to create the display via Unity instead of Powerpoint. Basically, the idea becomes gradually completed as the technological component of the work is improved.

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Evaluation

The outcome met our expectation as it turned out that the audience really enjoyed our performance and actively participated in the voting. The theme definitely plays a key role in making our work successful. As the topic of college life is down-to-earth, our hilarious elaboration on it could easily resonant with viewers and thus construct an interaction with them. The utilization of Slack bot and Unity is great as the subsequent plot connected with the voting smoothly. While the interaction between audience and the story had a positive outcome, we hope the interaction between the actors and the screen would be stronger. Meanwhile, the actors are simply acting out the responses to the fixed pictures on the screen. We hope the pictures would be dynamic so that the performance looks more animated and explicit in overall. That is to say, for the next time, we would create a video in which the dorm scene, party scene, alien scene, etc are animated. It would turn out to look like a movie while the actors step off of the screen and perform in front to the audience. There would then be a three-side interaction among the material, the performers and the audience.

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Group Reflection

Like we said previously, we learned that finding time to work together is harder than we imagined it to be. However, this problem ended up giving us the entire idea for the project. one other aspect we also took away is that sometimes projects do not pan out exactly how they may originally were conceived. This stems from having a group since all members add in their own ideas to make the project unique. I'd we were to do this project differently, we would have planned more time to practice beforehand.