Project Title:
Ocean, Whales, Us
Project Statement of Purpose:
The topic and insight of our project is the severe situation that the marine creatures are in, caused by ocean pollution. The direct inspiration we got was news that I saw from the website of National Geographic (https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2018/11/dead-sperm-whale-filled-with-plastic-trash-indonesia/). In November 2018, people found 13.2-pound plastic contents in the stomach of a dead sperm whale, which was washed ashore in eastern Indonesia. We also found more research data provided by the National Geographic that “192 coastal countries contribute a combined total of 8.5 million tons of plastic waste to the oceans every year”. Some other researches (https://www.sohu.com/a/260503756_172952) have suggested that plastic particles have been found in the salt that people eat.
Inspired by those heartbroken news and researches, we plan to make a two-player game, which can make people realize the severe situation that those marine creatures are in and raise their awareness that if the ocean pollution cannot be relieved, the negative impacts by the pollution would also go back to impact people’s lives. The aimed audience is everyone, since everyone has contributed to polluting the ocean, either directly or indirectly, and either by misconducting the daily garbage or emitting huge amount of industrial pollution. To make experiencer get a deeper understanding of the bad situation those marine creatures are in, we decided to set two players in this game, one of which plays the role of a whale which has to not only stave off the garbage in the ocean but also breathe above the water for every several minutes, while the other plays the role of a salvage ship, which has to remove as much garbage from the ocean as possible.
Project Plan:
Our project aims to raise people’s awareness of the bad status that those marine creatures are in, by letting them save a whale in the game. In order to let the audience experience a sense of crisis and tension, one of the experiencer would play the role of a whale trying to survive in a polluted ocean, while the other would serve as a salvage ship removing as much garbage as possible to save the whale. Here is the detailed timeline:
April 26- April 27:
The basic design for the whole game and detailed compositions
Research on how to write the code for the game
The basic design for the animation
Decide and start to prepare the necessary materials
Decide the ways of interaction and console for the two players (adjustable later)
April 28-May 9:
Finishing the code
Finishing the animation
Finishing the circuits
Finishing the physical part
May 10-13:
User testing with our friends, our classmates, and IMA fellows. We will not only listen to their comments but also ask them questions initiatively in terms of the points we are concerned about.
Make final adjustments according to the feedback
(the sensitivity of interaction for the audience, debugging the circuit and codes, thinking about whether the informative significance of the game is clear enough for the audience, ways of displaying the game for presentation)
May 14-17:
Preparation for the Presentation & Presentation
By May 22:
Blog Post
Context and Significance:
My preparatory research and analysis have a decisive impact on my proposal for the final project. I defined interaction as an informative conversation between several actors. Inspirations, creations, and many other utilities can be generated, and the relationship between the actors should be clear. Without this definition from my preparatory research, my final project would probably turn out to be an aesthetic art-piece with no informative inspiration for the audience or no connection with the problems in our life. The project I’ve researched on, Le Vent Nous Portera by Alexander Letcius and Bulat Sharipov, also gave me some inspirations. In that project, the experiencer took a decisive place for which scenery this project is going to form. Therefore, I was also thinking about whether there is a way to let the experiencers maximize their own subjective initiatives to reach different results for the game, depending on what aim they want to achieve in the settled game background, which is the ocean pollution for my project. Therefore, my project aligns with my definition of interaction that my game is an informative conversation between the computer and the experiencers, and people would be inspired to think about the severe threat faced by the marine creatures. It is not only about a sense of aesthetics, but it can also actually generate some social utilities. The uniqueness about my project is that those two players collaborate with each other to achieve the goal of saving the whale, instead of competing with each other. This form would not only add a relationship of interaction for the actors in this process but also reveal a lesson for the humans that different individuals should work together to achieve the goal of avoiding the marine creatures from the ocean pollution in an effective way. Hopefully, our project can make people realize how bad the situations that those ocean creatures are in, and how it is possible that people can actually change the current situation if they collaborate together.