Phase One began with an outline of the coming weeks in regards to research and experimentation.
We then participated in a workshop called Good Start/Bad Start, with us working in pairs to brainstorm off of six questions given to us:
What makes you angry?
What makes you laugh?
What makes you cry?
What stimulates you intellectually?
What makes you excited?
What interests you?
The idea was to write down as many things as possible that were prompted by the questions. Working with another person meant there was a bleeding together of interests and personalities into the brainstorm. To tackle this I went through again after the workshop (see above screenshots), adding more things and subtracting things that didn’t apply to me until the brainstorms were condensed to a small representation of just me.
After compiling my ideas I categorised them by good starting points for research, bad starting points, and points that I felt neutrally about exploring.
I tried very hard not to overthink this exercise the first time, but I think the downside of this was that I only really uncovered surface-level results. Going back through a second time I managed to uncover the things that really do interest me, but take a moment longer to think about to come up with a word to summarise it. They were much more thoughtful, generally vaguer answers than the first round, but I like that because I think there’s more to explore in research before honing in on something really solid.
A lot of the things I came up with in the “What Makes You Laugh” section were very specific, topical, yes, but not something I feel like I could pick as a theme. Perhaps if I scaled the idea outwards and used “comedy” to encapsulate all these ideas, that would work, but then you have to problem of trying to break that back down again. Thus, I only chose one theme from this section to appear in my final twelve - cats - which incidentally appeared in almost every other section, too.
Access the brainstorm here: https://padlet.com/abbie11/ofp2u4l5lunk
From my messy brainstorms I picked twelve themes to explore further to whittle down to my final four, averaging at two each. A lot of them feel very human and very emotional, which doesn’t surprise me, as my general goal in life is to understand it emotionally, and to feel as much as I can. Perhaps I should have chosen more “topics”, but choosing a theme feels much better to me.
A brief breakdown of the twelve themes:
Acceptance: As the final step in the grief process, I'm interested in how acceptance can either inhibit or empower people to change their surroundings or themselves.
Distance: The impact that distance has on relationships is something I've experienced personally. I'd like to explore how distance effects more than romantic relationships - what is the impact on politics, communication etc?
Manipulation: In both emotional and physical regards, manipulation can have good and bad effects. This is something I'm keen to explore.
Extremists: As someone who has first-hand experience with religious extremism, I'd like to evaluate extremism on a greater scale. Can any good come of it?
Cats: I have five cats, and besides loving them to death, I also think they're incredibly interesting animals.
Adventure: One of my favourite genres of media, I want to know the depths of why it captivates me so much.
Home: I'm a homebody, and I love being in a safe space with my family. Portraying this atmosphere in something I've created is something I'd love to do, but I need to understand why exactly I love home so much to be able to communicate it with someone else.
Identity: What makes a person who they are and do what they do is core to every story I've ever told. Understanding the components of this can only enhance my storytelling, even if I don't go forward with the theme.
Travel: I believe travel is the death of ignorance, and translating that into game form could be something really impactful and could make a difference to someone.
Fables: Having noticed through my greater brainstorm my interest in children's stories and their resonance across generations, I want to focus on fables as a theme of research to better understand the effectiveness of moral tales.
Prohibition: Two things - prohibition in terms of stopping people from doing things, and Prohibition in the 1920's. One fascinates me as a potential for shaping game mechanics, and the other fascinates me historically.
Redemption: The core of the best stories I've ever heard. Redemption arcs give so much depth to characters that I would love to explore.
Through this process something that occurred to me was that my ideas were very stress-averse. I’m going through some personal stress in my life right now, which I think is making me lean towards introspective, escapist themes. Whilst these prompts certainly yielded a range of results, the ones I’m drawn to exploring are ones that aren’t stressful to think about - I am having a previously subconscious leaning towards things that don’t extend the anxiety in my life by bringing it into my creative outlet.
I can already feel the themes I’ve chosen intertwining, which I suppose is inevitable. As a story-teller I have a predisposition towards stories about who we are, and though there are many different aspects to explore, it almost feels like the twelve themes I’ve picked are becoming their own person. Which is me, I guess.
After we had completed the brainstorm section of the workshop, we were tasked with coming up with questions we would ask to guide our research into selected themes. I chose “fables” as my theme to experiment with as it seemed the most interesting to me as a writer and story-teller, and was surprised at the cascade of questions that followed.
My goal is to repeat this exercise with my twelve distilled themes, seeing which of them spark the most interest for me. I think this will also give me the opportunity to study any existing links between the themes that there might be. Just because I will be discarding eight of these themes later doesn’t mean that what I learn from my research won’t be able to contribute to idea development at a later date.