This is as head-achingly academic as I've ever gotten. Rumpelstiltskin is a two-player, gesture-based video game in which players unknowingly act out a pantomime of the fairy tale "Rumpelstiltskin."
The game is built on a small stage, and players progress through the game by following screen prompts to perform various gestures. Each gesture, however, is part of a choreography, and (theoretically) by successfully playing the game the players also perform a story.
This game was a response to some topics I'd been thinking about that year -- boundaries between play and performance, and between intentional and incidental movements; social interactions within a game and between players and non-players; boundaries of public and private in the context of physical movement. I decided to take a head-on approach and throw all of it together into one monstrosity (while also having some fun with using Processing for color tracking).
I don't think it ever resulted in a coherent performance (in part because the story we chose was too complex), but it was a good avenue for looking at some of those topics--from performativity to how well people translate visual cues into body movements--in a writ-large context.
It was performed at the 2007 ITP Winter Show.
No comments:
Post a Comment