The content is based on my two years as a development worker in Mali. The imagery is intended to inspire players to find the magic in the mundane and references a hybrid of traditional Malian and Western culture overlapping between magic and technology.
Mali RPCV Aaron Oldenburg writes: The purpose of "The Mischief of Created Things" is to create an interactive environmental narrative dealing with new images of West Africa and philosophies of game design
The Mischief of Created Things
created 4.20.2007
by Aaron Oldenburg
Launch Artwork
The Mischief of Created Things
Description
The purpose of this project is to create an interactive environmental narrative dealing with new images of West Africa and philosophies of game design. The content is based on my two years as a development worker in Mali. The imagery is intended to inspire players to find the magic in the mundane and references a hybrid of traditional Malian and Western culture overlapping between magic and technology.
My process involved creation of a three-dimensional environment in Flash, which the player can explore non-linearly. Within the environment are characters, with whom players can converse; the conversations are based on a fluid navigation system similar to the environment's exterior navigation. Stories are based on my diary entries and letters home, and were chosen for their personal, surprising, and multi-layered nature.
Rather than use traditional game design methods, I chose to start with narrative and imagery and create the game structure from them. During play, the user discovers narratives that build on one another throughout the course of the experience. The player uses these to form a meaningful picture of the environment as a whole. The order of events changes each player’s interpretation, since the experience of certain events directly influences the sequence of subsequent events. The surprising and non-sequitur nature of the narrative makes the game characters and environment seem more real.
