APD Week#4 - Play and Place

Response Link:https://youtu.be/TxpdJ7TNjB4

• Theme

In response to the theme of Play and Place, I created a short video about living alone while family leaving based on some weird rules at home. Setting rules is like creating a play mechanic for the place. Designing a play for a place should follow the inherent meaning of the existence of that place. Home is considered a safe and comfortable place, people may lose their sense of security if it is restricted by rules or it becomes dangerous.

Rules

1. Do not get close to the basement in any case.
2. If your pet wants to get your attention, ignore her/him.

But if your pet taps your legs, you’re allowed to stroke her/his head.

1. Do not answer questions from anyone who looks like your family members who appear at your home. They shouldn’t be there.
2. If you hear someone is knocking on your bedroom door at night. Immediately hide under the bed. It is the safest place.

Or hide in your checkroom

1. If you feel hungry, eat Legos instead of food in the refrigerator.

• Method

Before I shoot the video, I finished a list of weird rules based on a series of writing suggestions for the rule-based creepy tales. I tried to come up with some contradictory rules and unreasonable rules to make a sense of chaos and uncomfortableness. Then I took the video from a first-person perspective to improve the immersion. Finally, I added voices, bgm and effects in PR.

• Context

I am inspired by a new arising method of creating a creepy tale that is using rules https://www.bilibili.com/read/cv14359960

For rule-based creepy tales, writers ideally can follow these writing skills:

1. Describe certain things in an inconsistent way compared to the real life, such as describing generally safe things to be dangerous.
2. Mention some phenomena that are obviously contrary to common sense or cannot be explained by common sense;
3. When describing the aforementioned abnormality, do not explain its cause, reason, or ambiguity, or act as if there is no abnormality;
4. Multiple rules contradict each other.
5. ...

“When playing a game, players seek challenge, mastery and reward, all packed in entailing and motivating activities. From this stems the importance of gameplay as a crucial game design cornerstone, and game mechanics as tools that the player has to interact with in order to carry out gameplay activities.”

——GAMEPLAY AND GAME MECHANICS DESIGN: A KEY TO QUALITY IN VIDEO GAMES CARLO FABRICATORE(2007)

By citing this, we can see rules are the basics of play and even rules can form a play. Thus, I think designing rules for a place is a good start to begin this project.

Edwin (2014) also states that people often see homes as receptors

• Reflection

The process of thinking about weird rules was extremely interesting to me. As I am really interested in mysterious and creepy themes. Designing a list of rules for living at home in such a lockdown time provides entertainment. It is surprising that the output looks not bad and it is even better than the plain text. Assigning rules or weird rules to a place is a good way for both games and films. Especially I consider playing in a place with weird rules is a very novel idea for thrillers.