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Essential Experience

With the Essential Experience, I started to think and brainstorm about what exactly I really wanted to have my audience/players experience within whatever game I wanted to create. I spent my lunch break thinking about what would be an interesting experience for them? In the end I decided to settle on scaring them/ making them uncomfortable.

To make this emotion, to convey a sense of scaring the players or make them feel uncomfortable, I felt like it would probably be essential to have a game that has a genre along horror. I started to try and brainstorm more to think about how a game could capture this as well- thus these are the notes I made:

As you can see I really tried to think about all kinds of things. Through the process of thinking through ideas and brainstorming a lot, I though that, to put across my essential experience of brining discomfort to my players, that I would indeed need to make a game that would be scary and potentially horrific (like horror in sense of being scary).

I feel like I can get my game to capture that essence through VR (as stated in my notes as I thought about how I could make it scary and uncomfortable) as well as looking into the aesthetics of Horror by searching on Pinterest and making a mood board.

Here is the moodpboard I made:

As you can see, a lot of the inspiration I gathered from my mood board is very atmospheric and is filled with cult classic movies as well as unsettling images that artists like Trevor Henderson (https://trevorhenderson.format.comhave created. The idea of the creatures that just lurk in the shadows and how they can create this sense of unsettlement and anticipation from the viewer is really interesting to me. Also, the idea that you could look out a window and see /something/, just there? TERRIFYING! I really like that idea and I really wanted my mood board to show that idea of just by staring at the images, you just feel this bone chilling unease settle in your body that makes you want to look away.

This is also why I though that VR would be such a good idea. As I mention in my notes, I love the idea that when you play with VR (or at least in my experience), because your mind is only seeing what you are playing and not the world outside of that game, it will take what it sees as fact in that moment- making you scared or afraid (depending on what you play). You can't look away even if you want to in those kind of situations- or just cower. 

 

I've had the "see it as real even though it's fake" experience myself when playing a cute game called "Job Simulation". I was in an office scenario and tried to crouch down to grab something I had dropped in game, as I went to get back up I saw a table and tried to use that to leverage me. In the end this table only existed in then game and I was lucky enough to catch myself before I fell onto the ground. 

Because of this, I really think that VR will be able to capture the essence of what I want to portray to my audience in making them scared and uncomfortable. This is still only a small idea, but I really think that at this time, VR and Horror will really go hand in hand with the essential experience I wish to capture.

This will be shown in a class discussion on 16th October 2020.

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