Animated Narratives Week 2 | Mind Map - Mind Virus

I have a longstanding obsession over the concepts of how the psychological world blurs across into the physical, both in a philosophical sense and in a very real, everyday sense. By breaking this concept down into a mind map I wanted to try to look at this idea from multiple angles, while funnelling it through the memetics concept of the mind virus. Theories tied to this spanning across many fields such as memetic engineering, theoretical physics, existential philosophy, chaos theory and experimental phenomenology have been contributed to by so many, with those of note being Charles Darwin (Origin of the Species, 1859), Riane Eisler (The Chalice and the Blade, 1988), Carl Sagan (The Demon Haunted World: Science As a Candle in the Dark, 1996), and many, many others. As for media, the ideas I want to explore are inspired by Ringu (1998), It Follows (2014), Nightmare on Elm St (1984) and Pony Island (2016). These concepts are important because they look deeply at how narrative feeds into our perception of the world and influence the founding of our reality, something we need to face as a species as we fulfil the stories we have created about our dystopic future. It narrows down to a personal level as well and continues my exploration of the experiential world, a common thread through all my work.

(character/agent/player)

Meta:

·        The Player is a part of the Game.

·        The Player participates as a Player within the Game playing a Game.

Standard:

·        A Police Detective

·        An Archivist

·        A Private Detective

·        A Librarian

·        A Security Guard

·        A Surveillance Monitor

·        A Survivor of a Crime

(goal/desire/intention)

·        To uncover the truth behind a heinous crime.

·        To uncover the whereabouts of a group of missing people.

·        To follow a ritual and understand what happened in the past.

·        To understand the contents of an old piece of media.

·        To search through old, dangerous information that can distort reality.

(obstacle/challenge)

·        Obscurity of information.

·        Danger of the information itself.

·        An ethereal threat that surrounds past events.

·        Discovering the arrangement of actions to fulfil a ritual.

·        Fear and the effects of fear.

·        Hidden Artifacts imbedded into the Information/Media that needs to be unlocked.

·        Perceptual distortion, lying senses and the dispersion of reality.

·        Time: an approaching threat or event.

HOW is the goal achieved/not achieved (action/events)

·        Investigation and the discovery of pieces of information.

·        Figuring out the right sequence of actions.

·        Experimentation to properly figure out how to interact with the game without being provided instructions.

·        Solving puzzles that utilise hints hidden in the information discovered.

·        Safely navigating through an obscured or distorted landscape.

·        Completing tasks before the time runs out.

·        Fulfilment of obscure and strange goals.

(conclusion/goal met/not met)

·        The truth is uncovered, revealing the trap within the information itself.

·        The ritual is inadvertently completed, and the virus is spread further.

·        The player is taken over by the dangerous information and control is handed over to the game.

·        The truth is stranger than expected and the player’s involvement in the crime is revealed.

·        The truth is revealed, and the very act of uncovering it has perpetuated the crime.

·        The ritual is failed, and the player is freed from the trap laid by the act of playing the game.

·        The player becomes the next victim of the ethereal and deadly entity hidden in the information.

·        The player loses control of their mental faculties as the meta-virus and its horrors take over.

·        The player becomes a part of the old piece of media.

·        Time runs out and the ritual/killer/virus is not stopped/kills the player.

·        The player is possessed by the creator of the information