The Mischief of Created Things

The purpose of this project was to create an interactive screen-based narrative dealing with new images of West Africa and philosophies of game design in an interactive narrative format. The content was based on my two years as a development worker in Mali. Imagery revolves around allowing the player to find the magic in the mundane, hybrid traditional Malian and Western culture, and overlaps between magic and technology. My process involved creating a three-dimensional environment in Flash which the player could explore non-linearly. Within the environment are characters with whom to converse, and conversation is based on a fluid navigation system similar to the environment's exterior exploration. Stories are based on my diary entries and letters home and were chosen for their personal, surprising, and multilayered nature. Rather than use traditional game design methods I chose to start with narrative and imagery first and create the game structure from them.During play the user discovers narratives that build on one another throughout the course of the experience. The player uses these to form a meaningful picture of the environment as a whole. The order of events changes their interpretation, as experiencing certain events directly influences the experience of subsequent events. The surprising and non-sequitur nature of the narrative makes the non-player characters as well as the environment itself seem more real.