This week culminated in a presentation of all I've learned about my four themes. The difficulty with this was condensing my findings into a seven minute presentation, leaving 1:40 for each subject.
The presentation went well, with me clearly presenting my research in a way that was easily understood. Whilst I was fairly sure I'd be taking Fables forward (as it compiled all of the aspects I liked from the other themes under one roof) when my course mates voted on which one they'd like to see developed the votes were split more evenly than I'd anticipated:
Fables: llll
Journeys: ll
Identity: ll
Cats: lll
Fables still came out on top, probably due to the quantity of research I'd gathered and my obvious passion for the theme. I appreciate that I don't have to choose as voted, but it's comforting to have my ideas backed by those around me.
From the feedback I was given, what arose that was of interest to me was a focus on the idea of a moral story - something that obviously sets fables aside from most other forms of storytelling. Morals also appear in parables, however, something I'm well acquainted with following a Christian upbringing. I think this might be another branch of research I can further explore under the general theme of fables. There was also a suggestion to look at the structure of fables, something I looked into briefly in my research but didn't include in the presentation as I felt it was off topic. Understanding structure, rhythm, patterns within stories, I feel this will be a great thing to research further as it will mean stories I produce will be truer to the theme. I've found through experience that structure tends to encourage ideas and stop stories meandering - one of the reasons I chose this form of storytelling to begin with.
I found my classmates' presentations very interesting, too. Whilst some erred in a direction I wouldn't personally be interested in exploring, there were some things that came up that I thought might be exciting to incorporate into my ideas when it comes to making teams. Sid's presentation on Seamounts touched on the idea of a tight ecosystem that comes together to provide aid across species. Both Lewis and Daryl looked at how animals communicate with each other, which I thought was very interesting, although I suppose when it comes to fables and anthropomorphism the purpose is to reflect human behaviour through animals, not focus on how they communicate with each other.
With the presentations completed, we moved onto Phase Two. This phase is focused research on one of our topics - mine being fables. Instead of surface-level knowledge we now need to go deeper, find all sorts of strange and specific things about this theme that can later spark game ideas. We will compile this research into a Research Proposal Document, which will then be presented in a similar fashion to the presentation mentioned above.
The exercise we undertook today was creating thumbnails for our given themes in a short amount of time - a way to visualise the topics in its purest form and see how well we could communicate this. We weren't allowed to use words, something that I didn't realise before I'd created my first thumbnail, but what was interesting about this exercise was finding a way to simply communicate a theme without a lot of time to create an artistic masterpiece. In mine I included some well-known fables, whilst also trying to make the fact that the theme is a type of story clear by showing the embellished open book.
Once these were made, we showed them to first year students, getting them to quickly respond to which theme they thought we had tried to picture. The word "fairytale" was said several times, which I'm happy with because it's in the same vein as fables, just sans the moral, which I hadn't been able to visualise anyway. Perhaps this is something I need to look into more - make sure I differentiate the idea of a fable from a general children's story.
The plan from here: Cultivate visual and literary research on the topic for inspiration and deeper understanding on the topic. I want to examine the artists and authors I've already found in more depth the explore the effectiveness of their work through this lens. I also want to dive into the papers and journals I've found on the subject of children-story structure, as well as find some more scholarly materials that focus on the influence/effect of fables/moral tales.
For practical research I think exploring different environments will be important, as nature is a very big part of the topic. I'd like to practise writing some of my own fables too, perhaps with randomly generated components to examine this from a structural angle.