Blog: Synthetic Architectures
ITPG-GT 2177-002
Tutor: Jonathan
WEEK 1
Part I:
Reality Threshold: A-B, Distance, Connection, Narrative
1. Megalophobia, travelling to smaller area and a loop. (falling in the sea, between a group of giant whales)
The term ‘megalophobia’ or ‘colossus phobia’, refers to the fear of large objects. Personally I don’t have a such phobia; however, I, and I believe many others as well, do have some special feelings aside with something unusually bigger than me.
But it’s a ratio thing, that for example a cat is small for us but huge for mice. So I wanna create a way of travelling from a big scale/perspective/vision to a small one, and vice versa.
And that leads to another concept, that sometimes I imagine of a whole universe inside the smallest particle of a cell, that if we travel toward a smaller perspective that in the end it will become an infinite loop. That’s a thing which would be too huge to show inside a project like this one, so I simplified it into a generally smaller scale:
Inside a space of dark, deep sea, the player is falling down. You can move a little bit, or look around, but in the end the player cannot help but falling. Through this process you can see many gigantic whales nearby. Eventually the player will fall into a great whale’s opening mouth, and inside its darkness there’s a complete new, same sea scene of more fallings.
An experience of megalophobia and the loop are something I’m interested in.
2. Time, change, witness.
Technically we all can travel in time. The way is ‘staying alive’, and we are witnessing all the changes time has caused. Hundreds of years ago or even decades ago, the land we are living in could be completely different from what it is now: if you are carrying all the memories from then you could really see the time passing by.
So in this idea the way of travelling is by the perspective of a growing tree. Basically a players controls the growth of a tree, by the process of slowly growing, the player enters every point of the environment around it changes(it will be relatively fast compared to the growing speed of a tree).
For example in the beginning it’s only a sapling and in the background there’s only grassland and blue sky; when the tree grows bigger some villages appear nearby; then modern city and skyscrapers show up; in the end the tree grows old, in the background we can only see the post-nuclear-war ruins.
3. History, Space and Destiny
It’s been such a journey of us to turn the rocks into spaceships. I got this idea from 2001: A Space Odyssey, when it was the first time for an ape to use a tool which indicates the unlimited possibility of mankind.
For this idea I want to create a little puzzle game for an ape in a cave millions of years ago, and with proper tools the ape (player) can finally remove the rocks of the cave entrance. As soon as the player finally sees the night sky from the outside, it will be transferred into a spaceship, to the space-era millions of years later.
After all, millions of years ago when an ape rose its head up and started to gaze at the starry sky for the first time, the rise of the humankind became inevitable.