LOCATION
RESEARCH
These are my main sources of inspiration I mulled over while coming up with a brief.
https://www.queeringthemap.com/
The ENA web series is a massive source of inspiration for my work as is. It likes to play on liminal spaces and location as a whole a lot and is as disorienting as much as it somehow makes sense. It’s a web-series designed to look and feel like a game, but as of right now is strictly animation. They are working on the next installment being a game, however.
The new trailer dropped this week and it’s been on my mind a lot, as I support the series on Patreon and I have spoken to the creator a handful of times. He’s surprisingly normal for how insane this webseries is. I think a significant part of his creative approach comes from pure randomness and designing characters and locations out of completely random concepts on a whim.
Toro is an older hyperfixation of mine. In Toro on Holiday, you explore pictures of Miura in the Kanagawa Prefecture in Japan with Toro the cat, as you’re on holiday with him. It’s a point-and-click adventure style game. You have to teach him about the space. The inn you stay at in the game is a real place that still exists.
LSD dream emulator is one of my favourite games ever. It’s by visual artist Osamu Sato, a first-person exploration game on the PS1. It’s based on his ex-coworker’s dream diary and the manifestation of her sexual assault trauma in her dreams.
OUTCOME
I had a few main ideas in repsponse to the word LOCATION, but this was the strongest:
I could make a Google Earth implementation of Queering the Map, and make it so that entries can be viewed in a 3D space instead of a strictly 2D space, for immersive purposes. This sort of thing can also be implemented in VR, so that an audience may have the experience of traversing real world locations and seeing the stories written about them. A futher development to this brief is that I could pick an area that is paticularly dense with entries, for example Montreal, and recreate 1 street in a different 3D art style. It can look like anything but cel-shading comes to mind. If I could, I’d like it to look slightly surreal and dreamy to highlight the heightened gravity of feeling within queer experiences, as my research details two games with heavily surrealist themes – and model the street around these entries. Potentially, a user could explore a masked building of interest where entries are written on the walls, furniture, or are left around as notes as opposed to them being a 2D speech bubble on a map. It could run in something like Dreams PS4 and use PSVR if it’s implemented in a 3D exploration way, but I believe this concept could also work in 2.5D as a point-and-click adventure game like Toro on Holiday, as my main aim is to add more context to the entries. I believe the streets and buildings should look different enough to real life as to preserve the privacy of the entries.