The Hive - City of Wings
The Hive - City of Wings is an experimental multi-player game development.The Hive is a unique and multi-layered game community based on an enchanting shared-world of image, dreams and meaning. It explores humanistic themes like duality, emotional responsibility, conflict and individualism through a surreal tightly knit society of insects. Through the form of an insect the player interacts within an abstract combination of human and insect realities. The game play encourages indirect competition and direct cooperation. The environment is full of elements that can be used for many different objectives, for example, play, exploration, trade and habitat building. Some of these pursuits can be undertaken alone but The Hive aims to encourage and reinforce the benefits of collaboration and communication. The City of Wings is the first instalment of The Hive project and will focus primarily on a specific mission involving a community of butterflies. Background The Hive - City of Wings is the next evolution of Alex Mayhew's works exploring a romantic vision for gaming that emotionally engages the player within a magical world of possibility through a very tactical and poetic approach. Alex Mayhew's work has always been considered original in its look and feel, winning many international awards for its outstanding innovative use of the interactive medium. Alex Mayhew's work has been acclaimed for its original aesthetic and distinctive conception, crossing over into new frontiers of emotional engagement within gaming. It strikes a chord, surprising those who have traditionally considered the environment of digital entertainment as a sterile and emotionless. What sets the Hive apart from Alex's previous work is that the Hive's technological bent and technology partner interests means that it fully embraces the idea of technology innovation as a key part of it?s creative development - from the multi-player aspects, to the evolution of an adaptable and powerful game creation engine, to the new unique aesthetic and animation techniques that will be enabled by this engine. Action is an innate feature of any game experience. The Hive - City of Wings uses action in an innovative way; by tracking and reciprocating the player's choices within the distributed game world, The Hive - City of Wings adds a dimension of belief, memory and consequence to the multi-player experience. Vision All media has the potential to function as art; to give us new ways of seeing, sensing and living. Games are media, combining visually led, screen-based arts with performance media completed by the player, and it is our passion to evolve games into a mature, emotionally rich and expressive art form. Our experience in industry and our research into game play has convinced us that by exploring the whole gamut of emotion in gaming we can identify key features and assimilate them into practice to reach new levels both of engagement and of artistic expression. It is in this pursuit that we aim to expand the very definition of 'game'. Our aspirations are echoed in the industry, where there is a growing realisation that to establish a wider market, the next generation of games will need to engage emotions beyond those triggered by the adrenaline-fuelled activities associated with the majority of computer games today. Further description By focusing on the chat, game and viral elements during the preliminary production we aim to develop a limited working demo. The game demo will be deployed online in order to prove a level of community interest suitable to take the project to the next stage of development. These initial scenarios will facilitate production and narrative research as well as offer tools for evaluating user acceptance and emotive responses. Please see Hive General Document project files for further project description: Goals á By pooling resources from different countries and partners, this high-profile project is likely to gain international recognition as both powerful and unique in an industry that craves more thought-provoking and humanistic game experiences. áThe Hive aims to be an emotional, engaging and compelling game world. It will attempt to reflect and encourage the player's sense of social responsibility in their own life and community. With action, comes consequence, for the player and the environment she inhabits. Deliverables a. An innovative series of working game demos b. A framework for experimentation with new game form. c. An exploration of the technical possibilities and constraints of implementing the project Research aims As an experimental game development the aims of the project are centred in creative development practice. Alex's work has been written about by academics at MIT and presented and studied at various educational institutions around the world. See: http://cms.mit.edu/conf/mit2/Papers.html and http://www.dadaprocessing.com. Research objectives will be developed and realised through collaboration with research groups (academic and commercial) interested in partnering with project, research themes include how to develop a deep and invested relationship between the player and the game. Dissemination a. We aim to publish this project and it's results online b. We will present the project to representatives of the player market for feedback. c. We aim present samples at various festivals and conferences in order to get feedback. d. Key members of the game and other entertainment industries will be consulted with for advice and input. |