Hello!
This week we focused on finalizing our preparation for 1/2s and the presentation itself. Our 1/2s presentation was Wednesday at 9:00 AM. Here is the link to our presentation (and the other Day 2 presentations): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_q0u8l2Ne4
Below I have embedded the presentation and the trailer featured within the presentation.
Slideshow
Trailer
1/2s
Overall, we felt the presentation went well. We feel like we were able to communicate our current status as well as our goals to the faculty through our presentation.
We were able to show the current status of our narrative, environmental and character art, as well as our plans for continuing development of how we are approaching initiating a discussion on racial bias.
We were able to get feedback from a variety of sources, which I will generally go through in the following sections.
Client Feedback
Our client, John Balash, was somewhat disappointed with our 1/2s showing. He wants us to be further along and recommends that we continue trying to push forward as opposed to using too much of our time ideating. As a team, we understand that we were behind going into 1/2s so his feedback is a reminder for us to not get complacent and let progress dwindle. Especially with meetings and playtests moving forward, we need to make sure we have adequately assembled our progress to get valuable feedback.
Advisor Feedback
Our advisors were a bit more satisfied with our progress. Still recognizing we are behind, they appreciated the progress we had made toward improving our development cycle and ensuring we are making up some ground on where we would like to be in development. With our sights set toward our next advisor meeting on Monday 10/24 (more on what is happening next week further below), we want to work with Mike and Ricardo to identify what feedback will adjust our work, what may pave pathways for discussion/activity in the larger enclosing workshop, and overall how they will help direct us in the weeks ahead.
Student Feedback
We were also happily surprised to receive an email from a first year student that had watched our presentation, Marie Leung. Students don’t always get involved with giving feedback at this point, so we really appreciated having another perspective on our 1/2s presentation.
Marie had some general questions about (with my general responses in bold):
- What are the marginalized/non-marginalized groups in our project representative of/how many races are involved?
Our project is meant to primarily look at African Americans as the marginalized group and other students being identified as the non-marginalized group. These classifications are based on the research questions laid out for the project proposal and were not established by our team. This project could certainly be extended to look at different situations and have scenes that don’t look at those same marginalized/non-marginalized groups, but within our semester we won’t be able to approach more than the aforementioned groupings. - How has the visual style of the characters evolved? What are the distinctions between groups in our current state?
Originally we expected to use animals as characters within our game. However, we were surprised to find the general feedback we received at 1/4s was that animals would likely not translate well to the messages we are trying to communicate. After 1/4s we started iterating more on aliens and have gradually grown closer and closer to humanoid beings similar to humans. Our intent is that the characters read similar to people, but that the message is initialed obscured to the audience so they don’t immediately jump into a defensive “not interested in learning” mindset. Currently our characters are different colors (although non-human colors) and their body shapes are a bit different. - Is this project intending to tackle examples of positive stereotyping, something that reads almost like a compliment but is rooted in discrimination?
At this time, we don’t plan on attempting to tackle examples of positive stereotyping. It was something we have mentioned in the past and depending on our progress we would love to cover. That said, it is not our main/intended message to talk about as we don’t want to try to tackle all kinds of different bias, then poorly represent them.
I had a lovely back and forth with Marie discussing the project and getting feedback. Hopefully we are able to continue communicating with students like Marie to ensure our messages are reading as intended.
NextGen Project Team Feedback
We received an email from three members of the NextGen Project Team, researchers involved with the Collaboratory Against Hate, with a variety of questions, concerns, and considerations. The next blog post will contain more of a dissection of this feedback as we plan on meeting as a team to discuss it. We are really appreciative to have subject-matter experts like Rachel Hopkins, Amanda Lee, and Anna Fisher provide us feedback and look to incorporate this feedback into the development of our project.
Moving Forward
Next week (10/17 – 10/21) is our fall break and we will therefore not hold any core hours until the following Monday 10/24. We plan on meeting to discuss our 1/2s feedback and then hit the ground running to finalize a prototype for playtest day on October 29th that should allow us to gain more feedback on our current design.
Thanks for reading,
James from STEMspire