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- All Subjects: Technology
- All Subjects: emotion
- Creators: Arts, Media and Engineering Sch T
- Member of: Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection
- Status: Published
In this creative thesis project I use digital “scrolleytelling” (an interactive scroll-based storytelling) to investigate diversity & inclusion at big tech companies. I wanted to know why diversity numbers were flatlining at Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Google, and took a data journalism approach to explore the relationship between what corporations were saying versus what they were doing. Finally, I critiqued diversity and inclusion by giving examples of how the current way we are addressing D&I is not fixing the problem.
Affective video games are still a relatively new field of research and entertainment. Even
so, being a form of entertainment media, emotion plays a large role in video games as a whole.
This project seeks to gain an understanding of what emotions are most prominent during game
play. From there, a system will be created wherein the game will record the player’s facial
expressions and interpret those expressions as emotions, allowing the game to adjust its difficulty
to create a more tailored experience.
The first portion of this project, understanding the relationship between emotions and
games, was done by recording myself as I played three different games of different genres for
thirty minutes each. The same system that would be used in the later game I created to evaluate
emotions was used to evaluate these recordings.
After the data was interpreted, I created three different versions of the same game, based
on a template created by Stan’s Assets, which was a version of the arcade game Stacker. The
three versions of the game included one where no changes were made to the gameplay
experience, it simply recorded the player’s face and extrapolated emotions from that recording,
one where the speed increased in an attempt to maintain a certain level of positive emotions, and
a third where, in addition to increasing the speed of the game, it also decreased the speed in an
attempt to minimize negative emotions.
These tests, together, show that the emotional experience of a player is heavily dependent
on how tailored the game is towards that particular emotion. Additionally, in creating a system
meant to interact with these emotions, it is easier to create a one-dimensional system that focuses
on one emotion (or range of emotions) as opposed to a more complex system, as the system
begins to become unstable, and can lead to undesirable gameplay effects.
The paper is meant to serve as a base of reference material for future, real world, project proposals to historical organizations. A mock proposal to the Fullersburg Historic Foundation, proposing the digital mediums and methods discussed, is included at the end of the paper.
In concluding thoughts, Matt I appears to have the depth and breadth of skills needed to make impactful media. And the mediums of media have been as diverse as the subjects they cover. But upon reviewing his own review, it took someone else smarter had to tell me that though there is diversity abound in his portfolio, there is a single baseline: Keeping history alive. Every one of these mediums can be used to infuse a sense of digital energy, simulated life, back into historical artifacts and documentation. The historical characters return to live when a medium brings back the motion, the energy, of the thing it is showing. If the medium infuses this life back into the story. The results are nothing short of magic.
A friend of mine once told me that coding is like doing magic, and frankly, I am inclined to agree. With a keyboard, a development environment, and a little bit of language skill, you can build an entire world. Despite being heavily rooted in logic, math, and science, there is a certain mystery to it, a sense of illusion and wizardry. The sense of pride and power that comes from successfully finishing an app, program, or website is like no other. I recently watched the film Ex Machina (Alex Garland, 2014) for the first time, and I was struck by one of the lines. In thinking about the success of his creation and what that means for the world, he says, “I’m not a man, I’m God.” And although I wouldn’t say that is exactly how I feel when I turn in a coding assignment, I understand the sentiment. This thesis is going to be a bit different than the one I thought I was going to write. When I started this, I thought it would be about an amazing coding project I had completed. I would write about all the beautiful code and the nitty gritty of the technical aspects. But, the project that I intended to create is not the project I ended up with, and I couldn’t be happier. I finished with something a lot more meaningful, a lot more interdisciplinary, and a lot more me. In this essay and the accompanying coding project, I aim to take you on the journey of building my own piece of digital culture, an app titled “Exposed.” I begin by discussing how the motivation to create Exposed came from the desire to stop using an app made by an internet celebrity and how the values of Gen Z and their relationship with technology influenced and guided the creation of the app. Then I examine the relationship between code and the coder, and how external factors such as being a woman in technology impacts project development. Then I explain the results of the coding process and outline how Exposed turned out. Finally, I consider the meaning of digital culture and how it functions in the creation of Exposed. Along the way this project became extremely personal. I found that the deeper I dove into making the code work, the more I learned about myself and my relationship to technology. If I promise to be honest with you, will you promise to listen to what I have to say?
In this thesis, I explored the interconnected ways in which human experience can shape and be shaped by environments of the future, such as interactive environments and spaces, embedded with sensors, enlivened by advanced algorithms for sensor data processing. I have developed an abstract representational experience into the vast and continual journey through life that shapes how we can use sensory immersion. The experimental work was housed in the iStage: an advanced black box space in the School of Arts, Media, and Engineering, which consists of video cameras, motion capture systems, spatial audio systems, and controllable lighting and projector systems. The malleable and interactive space of the iStage transformed into a reflective tool in which to gain insight into the overall shared, but very individual, emotional odyssey. Additionally, I surveyed participants after engaging in the experience to better understand their perceptions and interpretations of the experience. With the responses of participants' experiences and collective reflection upon the project I can begin to think about future iterations and how they might contain applications in health and/or wellness.