{"id":137,"date":"2019-02-14T16:25:50","date_gmt":"2019-02-14T16:25:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/projects-old.etc.cmu.edu\/artales\/?page_id=137"},"modified":"2019-02-14T17:41:26","modified_gmt":"2019-02-14T17:41:26","slug":"week-4-quarters-and-the-importance-of-clarity","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/projects-old.etc.cmu.edu\/artales\/index.php\/week-4-quarters-and-the-importance-of-clarity\/","title":{"rendered":"Week 4, Quarters and the Importance of Clarity&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>As quarters started to approach, we\nas a team began feel pressure and stress building. Quarters are a point in the\nsemester to show our progress to faculty and receive valuable feedback about\nour process and ways to improve\/move forward with the project. As we are a\nproject about a story experience, the fact that we did not have a story yet\nmeant we were really behind. While the faculty didn\u2019t outright say it during\ntheir walk-arounds, we definitely felt their judgement with their broad questions\nand lack of suggestions. It was especially evident during our client faculty\nmeeting, where we pitched general story ideas from both our writer Kate and\nsome from our team, that we were not doing something correctly and were off\ncourse. We were pitching team ideas, however they were not being met with as recognition\nor positivity as we had hoped.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Finally, it was decided mid-week\nthat there was a piece of the puzzle that was simply missing. After an in depth\npersonal meeting between the producer and one of our faculty instructors, the\nculprit was finally discovered. During our initial team introduction email that\ndisclosed that we were working with an external writer, there was a misinterpretation\nin the wording of her role. As it so happens, the intent was for her to be in\ncharge of story and writing, not just as a collaborator, but as a lead. The\npuzzle pieces were starting to fall into place. The time that we were spending\nresearching effective story techniques should have instead been dedicated to\nconversations with our writer on crafting story ideas. The story ideas that we\nwere pitching to faculty as a 4 person team, were not being met with as much\ngratitude because it was alienating our writer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Our instructors thought we didn\u2019t\nlike working with Kate, Kate thought we didn\u2019t like her, we weren\u2019t sure why our\nideas weren\u2019t sticking, and all in all it was a perfect storm of\nmiscommunication, assumptions, and baseless hostility. Definitely far from the\nperfect working environment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>With this sorted out, and tensions\nfinally coming down, we doubled down on shifting gears and shifting our research\nfrom story to technology and concepts, while digging much more in depth for story\ndirectly with our writer. A usable ideas was proposed for our instructors to\nreview. Since we were very behind, they stipulated that, from this point on, \u201ctopic\u201d\ncould no longer be changed, only story structure. Our topic was a story told\nthrough interactions between ghosts\/spirits, just in time for our Friday Faculty\nSit-Downs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Armed with an inkling of a story,\nwe were able to discuss with faculty some process thoughts and get back some\nmore usable feedback.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Some items of note that we needed\nto think about for week 5 were:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>Consider that maybe AR isn\u2019t a great medium for story? (just to play devil\u2019s advocate)<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>Determine how much you want music and audio to drive the story, vs allowing a guest to figure out emotions on their own.<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>When dealing with episodic storytelling (multiple ghosts telling part of the story), make sure that the stories relate to each other for a greater sense of purpose.<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>There has to be a monumental emotional shift at the end.<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>And finally, one that we\u2019ve been wrestling with a lot was: When determining the balance of game vs story experience, a game has a distinct progress goal, while a story experience has an emotional goal. This note in particular, while still vague, will definitely help us in the future as we determine what kind of meaningful emotions we incorporate into our experience<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>With a renewed sense of purpose\nand excitement, we hoped that our experiences in week 5 would be much more\nproductive and positive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As quarters started to approach, we as a team began feel pressure and stress building. Quarters are a point in&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-137","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/projects-old.etc.cmu.edu\/artales\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/137"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/projects-old.etc.cmu.edu\/artales\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/projects-old.etc.cmu.edu\/artales\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/projects-old.etc.cmu.edu\/artales\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/projects-old.etc.cmu.edu\/artales\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=137"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/projects-old.etc.cmu.edu\/artales\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/137\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":151,"href":"https:\/\/projects-old.etc.cmu.edu\/artales\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/137\/revisions\/151"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/projects-old.etc.cmu.edu\/artales\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}