For my thesis I want to create a single interactive level in two different styles. The first being a pristine environment and the second being an environment eroded by time. After some thought I chose to use an insane asylum as the setting for the game for a few reasons.
First I wanted to be able to invoke an eerie feeling in the player and a psychiatric hospital struck me as perfect. Abandoned asylums have been the subject of many horror movies and ghost hunting TV shows and generally people associate asylums with crazy ghosts and other horrors. Even today, thrill seekers visit abandoned asylums in the hope of encounter a ghost or something otherworldly.
The second reason I chose a psychiatric hospital is because in many of these hospitals' heydays they had pristine environments that were still rich in variety. For example this image from the medical records at the Archives of Ontario shows the female infirmary from the Toronto Hospital for the the Insane, the room in this image is not only clean, like you would expect a hospital to be, but also shows has a degree of personal human touch to it. There is a variety in the textures - from the striped wall paper, to the wooden floors and even the rug in the bottom center of the picture.
Psychiatric hospitals are also environments that -since so many asylums have shut down in the last several decades- have been largely left to the mercies of weather and eroded by time. This image to the right from Hellingly Asylum is an example of how rich a mental hospital's environment can get after a period of time abandoned.
My primary inspiration for this thesis is from a project by TheChineseRoom started at the University of Portsmouth called Dear Esther. The game was originally built in Source Engine and released as a mod for Half Life 2 as an experimental game that did away with most traditional game play. Instead the players were given a very rich environment to explore, but not to interact with as they followed the musings of the unknown main character, a man left on a deserted island with a letter that always begins with "Dear Esther..."
I found the concept of abandoning traditional game play to explore a story that would be unique to each player incredible fascinating and I wanted to emulate some of that in my thesis project.
First I wanted to be able to invoke an eerie feeling in the player and a psychiatric hospital struck me as perfect. Abandoned asylums have been the subject of many horror movies and ghost hunting TV shows and generally people associate asylums with crazy ghosts and other horrors. Even today, thrill seekers visit abandoned asylums in the hope of encounter a ghost or something otherworldly.
The second reason I chose a psychiatric hospital is because in many of these hospitals' heydays they had pristine environments that were still rich in variety. For example this image from the medical records at the Archives of Ontario shows the female infirmary from the Toronto Hospital for the the Insane, the room in this image is not only clean, like you would expect a hospital to be, but also shows has a degree of personal human touch to it. There is a variety in the textures - from the striped wall paper, to the wooden floors and even the rug in the bottom center of the picture.
Psychiatric hospitals are also environments that -since so many asylums have shut down in the last several decades- have been largely left to the mercies of weather and eroded by time. This image to the right from Hellingly Asylum is an example of how rich a mental hospital's environment can get after a period of time abandoned.My primary inspiration for this thesis is from a project by TheChineseRoom started at the University of Portsmouth called Dear Esther. The game was originally built in Source Engine and released as a mod for Half Life 2 as an experimental game that did away with most traditional game play. Instead the players were given a very rich environment to explore, but not to interact with as they followed the musings of the unknown main character, a man left on a deserted island with a letter that always begins with "Dear Esther..."
I found the concept of abandoning traditional game play to explore a story that would be unique to each player incredible fascinating and I wanted to emulate some of that in my thesis project.
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