Advanced Play Design - Week 4 - Play and Places - Samridhi Handa

Advanced Play Design

Week 4: Play and Place

Annotation

RATIONALE: What I have done this week: In response to this week’s theme of advanced play design, I have created an environment of a house. As we are all quarantined, there is no better place to be rather than our house. I have worked around the concept of our house having everything. As we are quarantined, our houses have become a place for everything - our office, school, university, movie halls, restaurants, café, park, and stadium. We do all our activities inside our own house. Each room which had a different significance has a new meaning now. I worked around the concept to portray that our house is self-sufficient in itself.

To demonstrate the concept, I modelled a house in Maya and further created a walking simulation in Unity. The walking simulation has teleporters to move in and out of the house and it also had zones where we could hear various sounds of the various places which various rooms in our house have become.

The rooms in the house look like normal rooms, but as we move near the sound sources in the room, we can tell by the sound what new meaning each room holds for us now. I have portrayed each room as the following by playing with sounds only. For instance:

• Our living rooms have become a movie theatre
• Our gardens have become a park
• Our backyard is now our own personal stadium
• Our home office is the proper office
• Our study room is the new university/College/School
• Our kitchen is now the restaurant
• Our pantry is the new cafe

Walking simulation rules: In the walking simulation, spot the black spheres to move in or out of the house. Spot white spheres to hear sounds.

I decided to play this week with sounds and areas. I decided to portray how various sounds in various places can influence a scene.

Why I have done it: Our homes have become everything during the time of quarantine. As most public places are closed, we find work, fun and entertainment in the various corners of our own home. I wanted to depict that our houses have everything. I wanted to work around the Concept that our house is self-sufficient. It is also symbolic of the fact that happiness lies within us. We don’t have to look around for happiness but only within ourselves, just in the case of our house, we need not go out. Each corner of our houses can multitask to suit our needs. Now more than ever we are spending time in our homes and feeling the connection with our houses. We are cooking more and doing less takeaways, we make our own coffee, going less to cafes, we watch movies at the comfort of our own home. We even work, play and study in our houses only without the need to go out.

METHOD: In order to work with the concept, I created and modelled a house in Maya. I further did the texturing too in Maya only. After this was done, I took the model to Unity and worked with the lighting. After doing the lighting, I created a walking simulation. I added teleporters to move in and out of the house in the walking simulator. I also added various sound sources to various rooms to depict how our rooms have more than one meaning. I worked with the sound sources. I converted them to 3d sounds and worked with the areas where they would be audiable. Since the sounds should be audiable only upto a certain distance for this project, I worked with the sounds locations to fit the environment so that it can be heard only upto a certain distance. Further, I recorded the gameplay and edited that with Premiere Pro.

CONTEXT: I researched and looked around for inspiration. I found out a lot of articles and artists working on self-sustaining artworks. I also came across self-sustaining homes which gave me an inspiration to work around the concept of play and place and work with a house only as our house in the current situation is a self-sustaining place which is suiting most of our needs.

A few natural self-sustaining home concepts that inspired me for play and place are:

• Off-grid home by Abaton : https://www.dezeen.com/2013/04/26/off-grid-home-in-extremadura-stable-conversion-by-abaton/
• Off-grid retreat by Malcolm Davis in California wine walley: https://www.dezeen.com/2016/12/28/malcolm-davis-camp-baird-off-grid-retreat-sonoma-valley-california/
• http://sustainability.asn.au/blog/self-sustaining-homes/

I got inspired by the works of sounds from the following artists:

• Works by Austin Wintory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austin_Wintory#Games

I studied about works by Austin Wintory and came across his works, I specifically looked at his work in sound design for the game “Journey”, where the music was an interactive medium and even got nominated for a grammy award

• Works by Yuzo Koshiro: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuzo_Koshiro#Works

I looked at works by Yuzo Koshiro, especially his work in the game, “Streets Of rage 2” where he programmed his own programming language and used techno, way before the rest of the industry.

REFERENCES: Music for the project has been taken from:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRrkB2DeqBQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXlPSFUqeSg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOdLmxy06H0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAdQWF5Dg78

REFLECTION/OUTCOME: This project has been an opportunity for me to tinker and play more with the idea of Play and Place. There are many places associated with Play in our day to day lives, including playgrounds, parks and amusement parks. Now, with the closing of many public places, people are in their homes and they have found ways to play around, find fun, work and entertainment all at one place.

Conceptually, I drew my inspiration from self-sustaining homes created by various people around the world. This self-sustaining place gave me an idea that how our own homes have become self-sustaining in terms of providing everything to us during this time of the pandemic. It also gave me an insight of how humans are able to alter everything as per their own needs and how we can even survive without going out much.

Technically, I got a chance to play more with sounds. This semester in APD, I have looked at music and sounds as a form of play. Music and sounds are great to play with and provide a wide range of options to us. Music and sounds can also give us ideas of what visuals cannot sometimes.

I feel this project is is a form of Paida play, one of the many forms of play we studies in class.

http://alexblakiston.blogspot.com/2007/10/paida-and-ludus.html#:~:text=Paida%20is%20where%20you%20play,achieve%20goals%20and%20complete%20missions.

Paida play is a form of play where you play just for fun and there is no outcome or end result, rather you just have fun playing around.

I also drew inspiration for this project from one of the articles we saw in the class, “Why artists must experiment”. The article states the need for artists to experiment, explore, discover and tinker, because this is the best way to explore themselves and the world.

Overall, I would say that I had a lot of fun creating this project and it was a good learning opportunity too.

Downloads:

Download File: 1598593448_documentation-of-work.pdf