Souvenir:

Learning to let go, and let players make their own story

Mohini Dutta
Team Srsly

Collaboration Thesis: Writing Sem. 2

Thesis professors: Nick Fortugno | Colleen Macklin | Barbara Morris
Parsons: The New School
05/13/2012

Introduction
Souvenir: something that serves as a reminder.
(orig.): French, literally, act of remembering, from Middle French, from (se)
souvenir to remember, from Latin subvenire to come up, come to mind.
Memory and perception work in strange ways. Often, what is
remembered has more to do with the psychological imprint left from an
experience instead of the facts. Add to this the bittersweet angst of growing up;
of miscalculated explorations of this transient space, full of deceptive memories
and tilted perspectives, and you will find the core of our thesis project
Souvenir.

Souvenir is an exploration of memory, perception and identity, using

game-play mechanics to recreate a familiar experience namely, the personal
evolution from childhood to adulthood. Coping with this transition is a familiar
experience, relatable to most people - something that we wanted to exploit in
this project. By using a common experience and adding the lens of narrative
upon it, we wanted to create a familiar landscape that could evoke memories
from the players past. We wanted to create an experience reminiscent of a
fable or folk-tale; resonating to the individual regardless of the unfamiliarity of
the narrative details, exploring a new mythology that relates to our time.

Figure 1: In Jaipur, Rajasthan - India

ROOTS
"What we seek we shall find; what we flee from, flees from us."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
Roots are important to me, although I feel like I have none. Which in itself is a
contradition, if you knew my family. We can trace our ancestry back at least several
hundred years, with suppositions and guesswork filgreeing back even further. So, with
such a defined base for my origins, why do I feel so rootless?
Part of the problem is that I am Indian, and in India, no one is rootless. The
idea is absurd. Even as a penniless beggar on the street, chances are you have some
history, at the very least a connection to your soil. Indians never break off their
umbilical relationship to the land. Mother India, mother to us all. The smell of Indian
monsoons is heady and intoxicating; that first drop of rain on the dry dusty ground,

the feeling of euphoria I get, as I am soaked, cleansed, reborn. Every year, everyone;
everyone who grew up here, that is.
My parents were young and experimental at the time, newly married and
already with a child, they had a decision to make, and they werent afraid of getting
creative with it. My father was a sailor, and my mother chose to leave her job to be with
him and raise me on the go. My childhood was their novel experiment, our private
little gypsy caravan on the ocean. The consequences of raising a child on the go are
that this child can never really ever settle down after that. Fit in quickly, assimilate
fast, but never last; like Ikea furniture. I have never lived anywhere for more than a few
years, at least not without feeling this painful physical yearning to move. To leave and
return some day, but never to stay forever.
I was raised on a ship for the first eleven years of my life. This is where I
learned to ride a bicycle, had my own swing, did home-work, went fishing, fell a lot,
and celebrated all my early birthdays. India felt more like an exotic vacation home to
me; we would only be there for a few months in the year, usually around the holidays,
when life was shrouded in gauzy unreality and everything was larger than life. India
was that weird in-between place where people did not talk like they did in my Enid
Blyton books, and I got sick a lot. I felt as related to my roots as a tourist in Times
Square.
The thing about taking root is trading in the freedom of the road for
assimilation, the old gypsy dilemma. Trading in open road for social constrains. Isn't
that a lot to give up? It is to me. I can follow a pattern in my life of unconsciously
staying away from anything but the most essential societal networks and close

relationships for the fear of loosing myself in the process. But being myself means I
never really know who or what I will be, only what I am, and that too ephemerally.
Since I am incapable of settling down and growing my own roots, I instead
compromise. I study roots, I try and trace things as far back as I can, hoping to find
some clarity, some sense of understanding my tendency to flee when things look solid.
This has cost me 2 careers so far, and at the outset of a new one, I wonder if this one
will take. I loved journalism till I didn't, I loved film till I ran from it, and I love games
now, but for how much longer? Is it a case of picking the right shoe to fit into, or just
an ingrained tendency to abort and run?

HOME?
We are all wanderers on this earth.
Our hearts are full of wonder, and our souls are deep with dreams.
- Roma Saying
What is home? Is it the place you were born
(Indian govt. standard), the place where you
grew up, or the place that feels most
familiar? What do histories have to do with
making a place home? I dont know when it
started, but at some point, I started
augmenting my memories with snippets from
stories and I cant quite tell them apart. It
also doesnt help that things like fighting

Figure 2: Me as an infant in our family
home in New Delhi

pirates really happened, although going to

Australia never did. Although we had a house throughout all our travels, we never
really lived in it, and it never felt like a valid homestead to me. My earliest familiar
memory is the departure gate at the airport; they all looked a lot alike back in the day.
Right after a few life threatening health problems, and my subsequent recovery
from them, my parents, exhausted from everything decided that a touch of the
"different" might help us all. So we fled. First, to a quiet coastal town, where my
father traded in his winged shoes for an administrative position, a house and a steady
income. I had many near death adventures here as well. Once almost walking into the
open jaws of a type of local crocodile and made my mother faint (the crock and I both
lost interest in each other, and nothing bad happened). Right after this, an ancient
ceiling fan fell on my crib and crushed it to smithereens. I escaped unscathed, thanks
to my mother who felt like she needed to get me out of that room, and removed me
from the premises, just seconds before the fan fell. This was when someone suggested
that my incredible fortune was all thanks to my paternal Grandfather's spirit, who was
protecting me. And just like that, ghosts became real to me.
Life in Porbandar1 was dull, never changing, and most of all, insular. It was a
tiny little town of 250 people, all employed at the dry dock my father administered, and
eventually the deathly creep of stagnation and casual institutional corruption began
creeping on my parents. Also, my mother was getting superstitious about my wellbeing
there. Official resignations took too long to get approved, and my parents had had
enough. We fled in the dead of the night, to shiny Bombay, and to a new beginning.
Bombay at the time was a transient seaport of great scale and many unique

1 Colloquial,

British Port, and Hindi Bandar - Port

wonders. It had the film industry, was the seat of commerce for India, and the most
modern utilities were easily available here. India was a socialist country at the time;
household amenities were on a lottery system and imported goods only available
illegally. As a result, government jobs were a prize catch, since it basically ensured a
nepotistic hold for the family of the employee for life. But Bombay was not our
destination at the time; it was our stepping-stone for a grander adventure to come.
Bombay was where the shipping industry thrived, and this was where all foreign
companies had offices. Eventually, my father
(overqualified as a chemical engineer working
on a ship's engine) got the perfect job. An
Iranian shipping company needed a Chief
Engineer for their ships, a long term posting
for several months of the year, and most
importantly, allowed him to take his family
along.
However, I was 3 years old, just starting

pre-school, and my parents had a big decision

Figure 3: On the Ship, age 5

to make at this point. This job would either

take my father away from us for even longer,

take both my parents away leaving me to be raised by the wolves, or something would
have to be done about me. The options seemed bleak at first. Leaving your kid(s)
behind and travelling for a few years was the option of choice for most newly married
sailor families, and openly endorsed by all my parents friends. But my mother had a

problem with this. Raising her children has been her lifes work, and even then, she
held on to this responsibility with far more dedication than anyone ever gave her credit
for. She found great value and personal satisfaction in it, and nothing would make her
miss the formative years of her first childs life.
My parents used to be pretty unconventional back then. My father used to be an
easygoing hippy, and my mother was a hip disco-girl. Both of them desperately wanted
to see and experience more of life before succumbing to the ever-tightening noose of
societal expectations. So they made a radical choice, to try to have their cake and eat it
too. They decided to take me along with them. Home-schooled on a ship by my
mother, and sailing all year long. They cut a deal with a local school2, as long as I
managed to pass the final exams each year, the school would accredit my
homeschooling, and I could continue my education in remote mode as a student of the
school. India had no homeschool accreditation at the time, so hacking the system was
our best bet.
And then began the best years of my life. We practically moved to Iran, and
began the gypsy life. Bombay became an in-between-house, a place where we spent a
few months every year, and the ship became my new home.
These years were spectacular. Apart from being my parents only child, most
often I was the only child on the ship, since no one else had the guts to extricate their
children off the system. Being the only child on a ship full of men, often stuck at sea
for months at end makes you everyones favourite. This meant that for a time, I lived
the Willy Wonka dream. I had 2 of everything I ever wanted. Once, for my 6th birthday,

My mother was friends with the principal

I got 7 different birthday cakes, and enough toys to fill a small cargo container. I had
so many toys that we always ended up leaving most of them on the ship, with promises
of returning there sometime soon. We never did, and that might be why I hold on to
silly souvenirs forever. Objects are frozen 3D pictures. They have so many stories
attached to them. Its very hard for me to even throw away things that are broken or
torn, because it feels like all the memories that object holds, will die when it is gone.
And who knows when Ill see those people/go those places again. In a transient life,
objects become such vivid idols to memorable times.
Iran. The Iran of my memories is a special place of freedom and nonchalance.
A place where I caught frogs in the fountains, celebrated spring festivals, had my only
pen-pal, and ate too many sweets. My Iran is a strangely wonderful place, full of
pistachio nuts, giant slabs of oven-baked bread, and chilo kebabs3 on mountains of
buttery rice. A place where
the women I knew liked to
wear fashionable overcoats
with gorgeous lace scarves;
not hijabs. A place where
everyone I met gave me a
piece of candy, or a cheap

Figure 4: School children in Iran, 1989

toy; just because they liked

children. Maybe I am deluded, and maybe my imagination has glossed over the

Meat Kebabs

negative things, but for the most of it, I think I saw a secret Iran, a place so unlike the
real thing that it feels mystical. Where intolerance, hate and violence did not exist.
People wore too much makeup, and made me special treats and loved me. Maybe I
hold on to this fragile Iran so strongly because my return back to India was nothing
like this. But then, the dream had to end eventually.

While we sailed, we were bold

explorers of the unknown. Kings
of our floating island and
oblivious to everything else
around us. Of the '84 and '92
riots in India, where people
slashed and burned their
neighbours, mobs of violent
fools chasing an ephemeral
dream fed to them by their
pundits and imams.

Figure 5: MS Wisdom, beached off the coast of
Mumbai


Figure 6: An old painting that became graffiti

STORIES

There is no such thing as fantasy unrelated to reality
Maurice Sendak

I started reading very early. Apparently I took to words like a fish to water and
never really stopped. I think the fascinating thing about stories and words is that they
are like life, but only better. Although someone else is the sutradhaar4, the reader
always has a choice, or some control over the situation. Books can be closed and
hidden away if they get scary, you can re-read the good parts and its like they keep
reoccurring, and finally, the best stories are what you want them to be, guided by the
author, but a personal experience nonetheless. I think I loved words for the way they
filled in awkward holes, and made everything sound better. Changing the position of
words in a line changed their meaning; made bad news sound better, and changed the

Bearer of the string, Sanskrit

way people react and responded to them.5

My father is the original storyteller of the family, and I have strived to be half as
good as him all my life. He has always had perfect timing, and a way to gauge his
audience and give them what they want. He is the king of embellishers, and every
real story he has told us sounds absolutely convincing, but might have only a grain of
truth in it. Mundane things like his trips walking to school sounded magical, because
he would lose his shoe along the way, and ride a donkey on the way back. He broke all
his sisters toys once to create a convincing backdrop for a story he was going to tell.
Stories used to be the glue that held our family together, once upon a simpler time.
Maybe it was all those childrens adventure stories, or maybe it was my father,
but making things up was the only way I could fit all the different bits into the tapestry
of my life. In my head nothing was ever amiss, because everything had a place in my
story. I recently read the Never-Ending Story, and it felt very familiar. The stories are
too many, like the time we got attacked by pirates in the Straits of Malacca6 or the time
we had sharks circling our ship, not allowing anything to come in or go off it. Or the
time when I kicked off all the prayer stones at a Namaaz in Iran, or maybe the time I
got lost in the Carnival in Brazil, or was stuck in a motel in Caracas during a civil coup.
There are so many stories, and such strange ones too, but they feel almost mundane to
me sometimes. I woke up one day on the ship, looked out and there was a magical
floating market all around us where there was only a canal the previous night. We were
sailing through the Suez Canal, and the Red Sea had become a flotilla of market boats

It felt like a more cohesive form of astrology even, instead of the stars moving and changing
your fate, you move a few words around to do even more
6
A narrow waterway between Malaysia and Sumatra notorious for its pirates

by day. Everything from fish, meat, antiques, perfumes to carpets were on display. All
disappeared by 5pm, for fear of the night patrol.
Looking back, the only steady constant in my life that has come with me on
every journey I ever took, right from the very first one, are my stories. I had inherited
my grandfather's library of first editions, classics and detective stories at birth,
followed by someone deciding to teach me the alphabet instead of the usual infantile
activities that a young child endures. This had an incredible effect on my life. I started
reading children's books when I was a little more than a year old, and never stopped.
My parents (more like my Mom) lived with my Father's family at the time, Delhi. My
mother had many things fighting for her attention, and had precious little time to sit
around baby-sitting me. Reading helped both of us.
Books, stories and storytelling have an almost religious place in my heart. They
are the one thing that I have never abandoned, evolved with perhaps, but never
abandoned. All the different places I have ever lived in have flourished with stories.
Legends, myths and mysteries are a given, India thrives on them. Even on the ship,
sailors are a superstitious bunch, full of urban legends of the ocean, and how to avoid
them.
Returning back home to India from the sailing was one of the hardest
transitions I ever had to do. Firstly, it didnt feel like the end of an era when we
returned from Sardinia7. We were back in the transition place, and we usually stayed
for a month or two, three if someone was getting married. Eventually, the months
became a year, and I had already been attending the local school full tilt by then. This

Italy, our last voyage was around the Mediterranean, ending in Italy

was most traumatic. After being the centre of so many lives, it felt very weird to be 1 of
60 students in as dehumanizing an environment,
as the Indian public school8. More than anything,
I felt deeply betrayed. No one gave me the memo,
I didnt know I had to account for permanency.
For all my resentment to this clipping of
our collective wing, I am thankful for one thing.
This was definitely the time that I developed a
habit that went on to stoke my future interests in
storytelling. After playing hide and seek with

Figure 7: "Incredible India!" using
local matchbox art by me

India for nearly a decade, all the fragments of the

myths and urban legends, all the remembered bits

of bedtime stories, even the fragments of parental conversation that I recollected, had

created a mood-board of sorts in my head. A dynamic mind-map to help traverse the

Indian psyche. I used this to make sense of a lot of it. Inspired by the Indian epics9 I
began adding stories to random events of the day. I would construct complicated
background stories to explain something new and weird I had encountered that day. A
constantly growing tapestry of cultural quirks; it made the experience richer by far to
imagine an unpleasant government official was actually a King who lost his all and
cant help being bitter now or maybe the abrasive fisherwomen who squat at the
entrance of the train at rush hour are just really exhausted mer-folk who swam all
night, and my boss is really just a nice lady who helps feed the needy by night and

8
9

What Americans call middle & high-school are grades 6-12 at public school in India
Mahabharata and the Ramayana

wont fire me at all

The problem with fitting into the Indian patchwork is that to them I was
neither an expat, nor an authentic Indian10. They just did not know what to do with
me. And for me, everything felt vaguely familiar, but like dj vu; so you arent quite
sure if dreamt it or if it really happened. I loved the colours, patterns and the chaos;
perpetually overwhelmed by the density of flavour, sound, smells, bodies, and colour.
A sensory collage that must be navigated by intuition alone. A desire to add a veneer of
story to everything, easing the shock of the new and unfamiliar, making the unknown
feel harmless, like a storybook.

Figure 8: Collage from "Sita Sings the Blues"

10

This is true to life. Friends have told me casually as recently as last year that they dont think
I am a legitimate Indian/ Bengali

Figure 9: Souvenir, view from the home world

STORYTELLING IN SOUVENIR
And there are so many stories to tell- too many, such an excess of intertwined lives
events miracles places rumours, so dense a commingling of the improbable and the
mundane!
Salman Rushdie, Midnights Children

This brings me to my thesis project. Souvenir is a study of transitions and the

story of the journey between places, of letting go and moving on. The process of
making it has in turn been a tangential exploration of my own relationship to both
these things. Having had to move constantly, and adapt to new people and places left
me intrigued by the process of transition. I am reminded of the spiritual concept of
Maya11 is centred on the fact that we do not experience physical reality itself but rather
a projection of it created by us. Every person's reality is as fragile as their dream world,
and alters just as easily. By this logic, wishing something into existence is totally

11

Maya: Illusion, Hindu/Pan Indian religious belief systems

plausible. If you want something badly enough, the universe conspires to give it to you.
And sometimes it doesn't. If transitions are so fascinating, and if cinema and literature
have already made a well-established trope for themselves in this, can games do the
same? Can the seamless interaction space of games be utilised to tell a deeply personal
story? Could we construct a system that trusts players to fill in the blanks with their
own memories? Will anyone want to go the extra mile to make sense of something that
wasnt processed for easy consumption? It is through these questions that we came
upon the core idea for Souvenir.
What is Souvenir?
Souvenir is a first-person adventure game that uses a gravity-shifting mechanic
to explore a dreamscape created out of old memories, to tell a story of transition,
personal history, growing up and leaving home.
In the game, the player is the protagonist a nameless young woman who has
recently graduated from high school, and needs to pack up; her dilemma being
deciding what to keep and what to throw away. While looking through all the
accumulated junk of her school years, she finds several worthless objects that bring
back memories, some good, some not as pleasant.
What we hoped to achieve at the end of this process was a game-play aesthetic
similar to experiencing nostalgia. Like remembering someone when you hear a certain
song, the way the fragmented debris from that memory create an image that is familiar
and comfortable, yet not complete. Which makes you think about that person, filling
in the gaps, completing the puzzle. We hoped to do this by using the visuals to create a

mood, and breaking that up with snippets of text that just hint at something more, but
leave it up to the player to add the rest.

Figure 10: Abandoned Theatre, Souvenir

The game begins in an abandoned theatre. We chose this because of the

ambiguity of a space like a theatre. It is familiar, yet it could be there for any reason. Is
the protagonist an actor or a performer of some sort? Is this a school auditorium? Is it
maybe a nightmare in an abandoned theatre? All this, and the fact that a theatre is
essentially a closed cube, making it a safe practice space, made us think that it would
work well as a place to begin the play-experience. The heroine must play through her
memories and chose to keep object(s) or continue exploring her mind. While re-living
her experiences she gets an opportunity to discover new insights into her memories (of
both mundane and traumatic events), giving her a fresh perspective. These objects are
the souvenirs of her life so far, and she must decide what to do with them trash them
forever, take them with her into her new life, or resolve them and move on.

True nostalgia is an ephemeral

composition of disjointed
memories.
-Florence King
We were inspired by the idea of
fragmentation, and wanted to
channel this in our game world.

The surreal topsy-turvy quality of

Figure 11: Still from Psychonauts

nostalgia seemed like a good place

to start, when we began designing this iteration of Souvenir. I played around with
distorting a familiar space, such as the High school, by building it only using rings.
Similarly, my team-mate Ben used floating platforms and intricate cross-beams to
construct a church, keeping familiar objects like the pew and stained glass windows
intact.
Similarly, the home-world is represented as a floating planet, much like the
home of the Little Prince, with a slice of everything the protagonist cares about on it.
This buffet style presentation allows the player to choose their path, create their own
experience. Eventually, I want to create a dynamic narrative system, which makes up a
story of your life based on your experiences in the game. Leaving each player with a
unique little something to make each play experience memorable.

How do we tell stories in Souvenir?

The heroine has the ability to shift the gravity of her dreamscape. She begins
the game inside an abandoned theatre, where she is in the seats, but needs to climb on
to stage. The stage is sparsely populated, but intriguing.
On it are a group of odd
props; there is a broken
front-wall of a room, a car,
a few boxes, and words
ribbonning across the
walls.
Figure 12: Words on the stage of the Theatre scene, Souvenir

As she exist the theatre, she plummets headfirst down a rabbit-hole style drop in the
floor, straight into their bedroom (on the home-world). The bedroom looks ordinary; a
bunk bed, a desk, table, dresser etc, only

Figure 13: View of the home-world as you fall towards it + the bedroom you fall into, Souvenir

all the objects here have floating bits of text tagging them to a snippet from a memory.
Something visceral and familiar, that I hope the player can identify with. My goal was
to keep the memory snippets as open-ended as possible, suggesting a story instead of
telling anything, and this was a huge challenge for me. Most of my storytelling
experience comes from books and cinema, and the hardest part was to divorce myself
from what I think words do to storytelling, and think of them instead as props in a
film. The way films use a mundane object to tell us so much about the place, the
inhabitants and the mood of the scene12. Could we use words in the same way?

Figure 14: Stills from "In the Mood for Love

How does the narrative structure work?

The player lands in her bedroom, looks around, sees some snippets of text,
begins to walk out. Outside there is a giant crow standing a little away from the
players bedroom, some more text on her car, some boxes spilled around. She can
decide what direction to go, will she go towards the school or the church? Maybe the
forest? As she begins walking towards either one direction, she gets closer to the crow,
which suddenly explodes into a dozen other crows that fly off to different parts of the

12

Such as "In The Mood for Love a film about unrequited love by Wong Kar Wai, where the
director uses minimal dialogue, augmented by the most gorgeously framed shots with
incredibly detailed propping to tell us more than the characters ever could.

space. After this, the player begins exploring the world, shifting gravity to reach certain
spots in the world. She comes across a lot of glowing orbs of light, with beams
shooting out of them, these are the souvenirs that the player is trying to sort through.
Each souvenir is a small and
mundane object, with a few words of
text around it. Giant beams of light
shoot out of them, visible from across

Figure 15: Lost in the forest, Souvenir

the worlds, to attract the player

towards it, also acting as a strobe

light; a pulsating element to break the zen state of the static world. As the player
approaches a souvenir, lines of text begin to appear out of thin air around them. These
are slivers from a larger memory, triggered by the players proximity to the object,
acting like a flashback. But to understand our current game, it is important to know
how we got there.
Domains of exploration + precedents
Sometimes an entire culture colludes in the gradual destruction of its own panoramic
spirit and breadth of its teaching stories. 13
Quoted from the introduction to Joseph Campbells Hero with a Thousand
Faces, this was the starting point to Souvenir. This quote is a sentence from a larger
piece speaking about the death of folktales and myths in modern mass media,
gradually leading to a spiritual starvation in our society. The writer prefaces this idea

13

Clarissa Pinkola Estes (introduction), Hero with a Thousand Faces (Pantheon Books, 1968)

by discussing the common story-tropes existing in populist film and TV these days
namely sex and violence, discussing how the shallow storytelling leading up to these
dramatic narrative conclusions, create an incomplete image of human relations. She
believes that mass-medias quest to entertain has created a parody of humanity that its
consumers believe to be an accurate portrayal of human-life.
Right from the onset we (as a team) were curious about mythology and the role
it played in society. Our readings of Campbell14, Vladimir Propp15, Levi-Strauss16, and
Robert Graves17 supported our initial explorations, encouraging us to think more about
fluid narratives. Exploring the Heros Journey, we realized that it was starkly similar to
the coming of age story. Whereas the heros journey is a common game-myth18, we
realized that the coming of age story was not a common game-trope.
What is my thesis question?
Can a game make you tell your own old stories?
Taking the critique of popular mediai, and using it to fuel our exploration, we
decided to use games as our medium to create an interactive narrative experience that
resonates the fluidity of folk-tales, while echoing a relatable experience such as a
coming of age story.
To understand why I chose to work on this project and explore games and story
telling, it is important to know a little bit about my childhood. Having spent a large

14
15
16
17
18

Joseph Campbell (author), Hero with a Thousand Faces (Pantheon Books, 1968)
Vladimir Propp (author), Laurence Scott (Translator), Morphology of the Folktale (American Folklore
Society, 1968)
Claude Lvi-Strauss (author), The Savage Mind (University Of Chicago Press, 1968);
Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture (Schocken, 1995)
Robert Graves (author), The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth, (Farrar, Straus and
Giroux; 1966)
Troy Dunniway (blogger), Using the Hero's Journey in Games (Gamasutra.com, 2000)

part of my formative years sailing on a ship with my parents; I was alone a lot, which
made books my best friends. I spent a lot of time reading, but a lot more making up
stories. My nomadic upbringing ensured that I always ran out of reading material, and
would have to improvise. The only constant on a sailing-ship is the space inside your
head, and that is when I fell in love with stories and storytelling. Following my
narrative-wanderlust, I spent four years working in films, looking for my niche. My
experiences were not the most fulfilling, and this pushed me to explore other media as
tools for storytelling.
I worked in journalism for a while, but in early 2008, newspapers and bloggers
sounded the death-knoll for the physical artefact of the Book19, and the printed word
by association. Journalists speculated the death of paper publication with the advent of
new digital media, especially touch-based devices and e-readers such as the Kindle.
These posts implied an alarming notion, the phasing out of traditional media while
encouraging a rapid exploration of its digital counterparts. This debate shook me up,
partially because on one hand I felt strongly defensive about books, and on the other I
found the idea of exploring of a digital parallel to books very exciting. What people
were speculating about print, echoed my feelings about film; film felt inadequate to me
as a medium of the type of storytelling that I wanted to do, the future and new media
must have an upgrade to this traditional form, if it was heading towards replacing
books so rapidly. Perhaps this was a reaction to my personal experiences with using
the medium, but I (as a viewer) wanted to control the outcomes of bad film stories, and

19

Jeff Jarvis (blogger), The book is dead. Long live the book (Buzzmachine.com, 2006)
Ben Ehrenreich (blogger), The Death of the Book (LA Review of Books, 2010)

as a maker, wanted to see where a narrative would go with this un-orchestrated

audience input.
Although print is far from dead, we can already see traditional media losing
steam as the prime medium for narrative delivery; whereas new media is not gaining
much by trying to mimic the old. My story at Parsons began at this point, which is
when I found myself looking into the realm of games. I was really interested in seeing
if there could be a more democratic medium for narrative delivery, a space that gave
the audience more control over the story. Games allow for a deeper immersion, as the
audience can literally embody the protagonist and live through their experiences. The
magic circle20 creates a safe space that while being realistic, can be a stage for the
fantastic. The cinematic quality of game visuals, coupled with the deep interaction of
game-systems, and the natural affordances to role-playing results in revealing a very
interesting narrative medium21.
Since our project strives to use the game mechanic as the principal narrative

Figure 16: VVVVVV + Fez + Ico; games that inspired us

20
21

Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens (Beacon Press, Boston, 1955)

Michael Mateas (article), A Preliminary Poetics for Interactive Drama First Person New Media as Story
Performance and Game (MIT Press, 2004)

tool, we looked at several evocative games for inspiration. Our project draws a lot from
the mechanic of the game - VVVVVV22, which has a gravity-shifting mechanic in 2D,
and uses the game environment in an unconventional way. We looked at another
indie-hit, Fez, a puzzle platformer that switches from 2D to 3D in the game play.
Studying the game Ico23; a much quoted milestone in the world of evocative games24,
informing our aesthetic choices in terms of user experience and its relationship to
abstraction and art. The puzzle game English Country Tunes25, is our most recent
inspiration in terms of small tight levels, and concise world building.

Concept Evolution
Nothing endures but change26.
As a team, we embraced this adage early on; deciding to think of all our
prototypes as cheap throw-aways; so not just our thesis question, but our entire project
has gone through several metamorphoses, always ending up richer than before. Our
primary focus was to explore through making, and never get too attached to an idea
that we cant think beyond it.

22
23
24

25
26

Terry Cavanagh (lead game developer), VVVVVV (Nicalis -3DS, 2021)

Fumito Ueda (team leader Team Ico), Ico (Sony developmental Labs, 2008)
Drew Davidson (editor, article) Ico Well Played 3.0: Video Games, Value and Meaning (ETC press, 2011)
Chris Pruett (blogger), Balancing Game Mechanics and Narrative (The Journal of Education, Community,
and Values - Pacific University Oregon, 2004)
Increpare Games (game studio), English Country Tunes, (increpare games PC, Mac, iPad, and iPhone
2011)
Heraclitus (philosopher), Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers (540 BC - 480 BC)

The Prototypes leading up to the current Game

1. Shill
I kept returning to the idea of storytelling and games; trying to combine my
interest in mythology and folk tales in a game space. I was very concerned about my
lack of experience in game-narratives, and worried about approaching the field from
the perspective of a divergent narrative media, such as the more linear medium of
books and film.
My classmate Ben and I had kept in touch over the summer to discuss our
thesis ideas, and in the process of sharing our new ideas we realized that both our
interests and ideas leaned towards very similar core concepts - namely the use of mythstories in games.
Could we use myth-stories and games-systems to create an aesthetic similar to
oral story-telling, which teaches and changes through the telling, or in this case, the
playing?
We started reading up about the mechanics of myth making, diving deeper into
a suit of academic topics, such as the study of anthropology, comparative mythology
and the relationship games between games and hero-sagas. Robert, another classmate
of ours was looking for a group at that point and he was specifically looking at working
on a game that exploited and re-envisioned the cinematic 3D environment of first
person shooter games. This premise was complimentary to our initial explorations,
given that first-person games have a deeply immersive personal visual aesthetic to
them. As the new semester began, each of us tried to take a stab at the process of game
design from our own perspectives. Our very different backgrounds led us to end up

with three very different prototypes that explored very different aspects of the project
(narrative, game design, and finally game as drama).
Our project underwent three major changes, the first set of projects explored
dynamic narrative creation, and given the transient nature of the project at the time,
we decided to give it a tongue-in-cheek working title - Shill.
LIGHT/DARK
I was really interested in the idea of using light as a metaphor for learning. So
creating a world where visibility was minimal, and the only light source
available to you is a very small personal torchlight. As player progresses
through the world and accomplishes more, the light source keeps getting
stronger, increasing the radius of light around them, allowing them to see more
of the world, and explore more in the process. The metaphor being that
learning leads to more exploration.
ConclusionThis idea was shot down on account of light /dark being technically undesirable, and
the team did not like this direction of game-play.
CLIMBING UP
In this game an unnamed protagonist starts the game at the base of an infinite
flight of steps / floating platforms rising into the air. They must keep climbing
up as there is a corrosive gas like element that keep rising higher and higher,
obliterating everything it touches. On the way s/he finds many mystical people
and things that speak to them, giving them cryptic messages and leading them
to side paths or misleading them completely. The process of climbing is an

endless exploration for the character, and they do so while exploring the broad
narrative elements along the way.
ConclusionThe group decided that this was more of interactive experience than game, and we
discontinued exploring it. This also felt more like a 2D game than a 3D game and there
are some similar games (GIRP, Katherine) that do this badly so we abandoned it on
account of questing to find something better or unique.
THEATRE of STORIES
This game exists in two states - The Dreamscape and the Real World. The base
mechanic for this game was perception in dreams and reality. Objects that the
player touches/moves in the real world appear larger than life in the
dreamscape. These are props that the player had interacted with in the real
world (an abandoned theatre), becoming overt and exaggerated aspects of
themselves in the players dreamscape. Ex: The player picks up a bottle from
the floor and places it on a table, on entering the dream state, this bottle
becomes a giant monolith that becomes an obstacle to over-come.

Figure 17: Shill, paper prototype

Robert had his own unique spin to this idea and suggested making the theatre a
space where visual avatars would mingle, going one at a time, players would get to be
under the spotlight, and during that time they can direct the narrative to a direction of
their choice. The remaining players would have to construct a set that reflects the
spotlight-player's wishes in the background from the props in front of them. The next
player must pick up and work with the narrative till then, creating a virtual improv
theatre/exquisite corpse.
Ben suggested a secondary more game-like state to this scenario. He suggested
having a more clearly defined dreamscape where each constructed set becomes a
terrain that the players must play through individually. Each player competes to play
through this terrain with the most points (judged in speed, dexterity, points-acquired),
where the most successful players then lead the next round of stage direction.
This seemed like a fairly lucrative idea, from a collaborative-narrativegeneration game point-of-view. While exploring this further, we encountered many
technical issues in terms of how much leverage to allow players, and how to create a
robust suit of re-usable assets to reflect player-intent (that were not just blocks and
cylinders). Nick Fortugno warned us to be mindful of the Scribblenauts27 syndrome.
Scribblenauts is an urban legend in the world of game design, a fabulous game where
players can create a unique character and opponent combination, all character and
opponent possibilities are pre-created. This means that the game designers spent years
just creating a massive database of designed objects, hoping to cover any type of
character a player might want to play with. This resulted in creating a beautiful game at

27

5th Cell (game developer), Scribblenauts (WB Games 2009)

great production cost and relatively low impact, since very few players would ever
experience the complete range of these assets. Coming up with constrains to control
this was a nightmare and we soon realized that this idea might not be as feasible as we
had hoped.
ConclusionAt the time, we were focusing on creating a dynamic system that would act as a
narrative creation machine. We were trying to mimic oral storytelling traditions
by creating a space where collaborative story creation could occur through
game play, and participant input. We realized through experimenting with our
prototypes that although we could create a world that was cohesive while still
being open enough to generate a personal experience, we lost a lot of our
narrative intent along the process.
2. Taroch
Our failure with the Shill set of prototypes brought us back to exploring some
analog mediums of narrative generation, such as Tarot Cards. Tarot cards are very
interesting objects, they have such a potent aura of mystique about them, that they
inadvertently create very interesting social situations around them. Having dabbled in
the Tarot in the past, I had come to the conclusion that it was a very interesting
medium to use to talk about the unspeakable or awkward things with friends. The
exotic guise of fortune telling often allows people to make unexpected connections
between the vague predictions in the cards and the events in their life, decoding the
cryptic messages of a spread in interesting and creative ways. I was pleasantly

surprised to find my thoughts echoed in studies done by Carl Jung28 and Sigmund
Freud29 in exploring the use of the Tarot as an archetypal tool in psychoanalysis (used
much like a narrative counterpart of the Rorschach Test).
We found Tarot based book narratives like the Castle of Crossed Destinies30 at
this time, which actively used the abstraction of Tarot cards to create varied narrative
nodes. The Tarot gave us new hope in the form of an archetypal device that could
resolve our previous asset creation problems elegantly. Tarot cards are not only
archetypal, but are easily recognizable and beautifully designed; all we needed to do
was use them in the game as re-usable modular narrative carries. Each Tarot card can
be interpreted in so many ways individually, and countless more in combinations, that
within themselves they had a wealth of dynamic potential. The question would remain,
could we break down the Tarot deck to usable archetypal imagery, allowing for
dynamic terrain creation in a game environment?
At this point, we had another breakthrough. Robert had been researching game
mechanics and level design along with our explorations in narrative systems. He was
exploring the mechanic of the popular 2D independent game VVVVVV31 that used a
gravity-shifting mechanic to tell a loose abstract narrative. Putting this style of gameplay in a 3D environment allowed us to created very interesting Escher like worlds that
presented a rich new set of possibilities when combined with the Tarot (which already

28
29
30
31

Sallie Nichols (author), Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey (Weiser Books, 1980)
Sigmund Freud (paper), Psycho-analysis and telepathy (Partric Valas blog, 2011, orig. 1941)
Italo Calvino (author), The Castle of Crossed Destinies (Mariner Books, 1979)
Terry Cavanagh (lead game developer), VVVVVV (Nicalis -3DS, 2012)

have a complimentary affordance of card turning leading to different interpretations).

TAROCH
Taroch begins with a young persons exploration of their past memories while
unpacking their things. They embark upon this exploration while playing with
some Tarot cards, using them to categorize their belongings. The act of placing
the Tarot cards on their boxes takes them into a dream-like world where they
encounter scenes from these memories and sort through them with the help
of the Tarot characters, ranging from ambiguous passers bys, friends,
guardians to villains. This exploration is undertaken by shifting gravity to turn
the game-world around, traverse strange and surreal buildings, and meet
fantastical characters. We were very excited about this iteration, and went
forward and spent the better part of the semester (till midterms) fleshing it out.
The ebb and flow of game design consumed us, and we ended up putting too
many elements into this iteration.
Having too many interesting elements in the medium of games with its strong preexisting expectations and affordances just creates chaos. After a very helpful critique
session over Midterms, we decided to take a strong hard look at the project and shear
away everything that was not absolutely necessary.

3. Souvenir
The Tarot is a strong reference, often fading everything else into the
background. We realized that over time, we had been abstracting the original
archetypal characters, until they were barely recognizable as the Tarot; it instead
informed our character design and meta-world narrative, so we moved all mention of
the Tarot to our designers back-end inspiration file. This liberated us, and we realized
that at some point in our design process the Tarot changed from being a solution to a
problem, and had been holding us back, instead of making things easier for us.

Figure 18: Sketching ideas that would become Souvenir one day

We stepped back and re-imagined our existing assets (the Escher world, gravity
shifting, memory exploration, sorting through objects) in another combination. What
we came up with was a sleeker system, with fewer elements; it looked like something
that could work. Maybe.

Figure 19: Souvenir 1.0, the free-floating world

SOUVENIR 1.0
The game begins in the players bedroom as she is sorting through the
debris of her childhood, trying to decide what to keep, what to throw and what
to take with her to dorm at the University. She must sort the objects in her
room into either a trash bag, a cardboard box or a suitcase. As she looks at an
object something the object is taken-away from her, as she tries to retrieve the
lost object, and she is propelled into a memory of how she acquired it.
Souvenir is a first person adventure game with a gravity-shifting
mechanic that systematizes a coming of age story through the game play. Our
hope is that by keeping the narrative component of the game sparse and
minimalistic, we can allow for the player to fill in the blanks with details from
their own live and by doing this let them immerse more deeply into the existing
narrative scaffolding by finding common elements with their own growing up
story (Ex. mean teachers, cutting the umbilical cord, etc).

We had originally planned to break the experience into four levels, that would each
explore the players relationship with a mean teacher in their high school, a grandparent, friend(s), and finally their mother. Each of these levels begins with an object in
the heroines bedroom, plummeting her into an open Escher-style world that the
player then traverses to find snippets of conversation and smaller useless articles.
These articles and conversations stitch a story about the heroines relationship with
the Teacher character (not revealed till the end) while presenting both the teachers
side of the story and the players. This mix of exploration and puzzle solving leads to
the final boss-battle with the teacher, who is revealed to be unlike the players
expectations - scary monstrous creature. Instead, the teacher is a pathetic crow-like
creature that is trapped in its own insecurities, allowing the player to make an
important decision - will they free this creature and forgo the stolen bauble, or will
they collect their belongings and leave the creature to continue living in this prison of
its own construction?
We got a lot of great feedback about how to improve the game play etc., but
almost everyone we shared this idea with was generally positive about this direction.

Figure 20: Playtesting at the "PlayTECH! Saturday" event at Parsons

The one structural problem we kept facing was that a system of 4 broad strokes, did
not allow us to create a good tutorial level to teach the system. Our game play of gravity
shifting is uncommon and not intuitive to new players. Even experienced players of
first-person shooter (FPS) games find it hard to path-find and navigate the terrain,
given that FPS players are trained to look to the sides, rarely at the ceiling or floor.
Since our game requires players to look in all directions, including top and bottom,
this created a strange predicament for us. Our game play was counter-intuitive and
unforgiving of learners. Once players understood the system their experience playing
was mostly positive; a small minority of players with a richer game vocabulary figured
it out by themselves and enjoyed it start to finish, but to most of the players, learning
our game was an enigma. The large size of the first level made the game unforgiving to
beginning players, and the high-skill level made the narrative too obtuse to follow. At
this point, we were advised by a play-tester to try smaller levels, and definitely have a
tutorial level.
This was a breakthrough again! The idea of having smaller more insignificant
levels reinforced our core idea of looking at useless souvenirs from your life that had a
meaningful place in your mind. This could allow for a richer environment, and more
experiments with non-traditional narrative elements in the game world like music,
dialogue and sound-design.

Figure 21: Souvenir 2.0, school hallway

SOUVENIR 2.0
Game begins in the players bedroom as she is sorting through her
belongings. She looks at some of the cheap debris from her childhood/high
school, and is propelled into the smaller vignette-style memories of each of
them. Each memory is a small puzzle where the player must try and find that
object in the adapted Escher-like world (which looks like the normal world, but
with parts missing or misrepresented to add a surreal quality to the visual
design). While in this dreamscape, player overhears conversations, glimpses
forgotten memories and encounters a giant crow-like monster.
The first chunk (consisting of 3-4 small levels) would remain anchored
to her experiences with the unpleasant teacher, but broken into smaller
montage style stories, each related to an object but feeding into the Teacher
narrative. As she plays, she pieces together this disjointed narrative over 4 small
levels, thereby preparing her for the final boss-puzzle where she must chose to
release or ignore the crow-creature, that is revealed to be a small pathetic
creature.

This approach allowed us to make smaller tutorial levels that are very basic in
nature, but have a richer narrative quality to them. This also let us ramp up the
narrative, re-cycle characters/objects and weave a less linear storyline. All good things
from our point of view, and we were very optimistic about this prototype.
However, this did not pan out as well as we had hoped it would. While
revisiting Souvenir 2.0 at the beginning of the spring semester, the feedback was
overwhelmingly negative for the sound design, the level design and the game-play.
Players felt that now, the game was far too easy, and felt boring. The voices and music
just created a discordant chaotic background that did not add value to the play
experience. They did like the visual design of the piece, which was more realistic, and
relatable, showing some character; which was lacking in Souvenir 1.0
With heavy hearts, and not an insignificant amount of panic, we decided to
return to the drawing board and explore yet another new direction. This, 4 months
before the project was due, and without really knowing what to change, we just took a
shot in the dark, and changed our entire workflow. Fingers crossed, we waited to see
what would come of this.

Figure 22: Souvenir 3.0, view from the home world

SOUVENIR 3.0 (Current Version)

After the debacle of Souvenir 2.0, we decided to change our working style. So
far we had been working as a team, with each teammate owning one part of the game
design. I did the storytelling bits, Robert did the level design and 3D modelling and
Ben did the code and some 3D modelling. What ended up happening was that we
would shoot each of our ideas down, and end up with a watered down version of all of
them. We were thankfully mature enough to look at this as the professional workflow
we would have to adopt in the working world, and stuck with it. However, in the end,
this turned out to be both frustrating and not as successful as we had assumed it would
be. So we decided to break apart, and work solo. The goal being that each team-mate
would build a complete level by themselves and present it in 2 weeks. This was a tough
challenge for me, as my 3D game design skills were still nascent at the time, and of all

of us, I had the least Unity 3D32 experience. Nick (Fortugno) warned us about the
follies of this type of workflow, with one person either outshining the rest, or one
person being left behind, and the subsequent problems that would occur out of that.
We were as apprehensive as he was, but went ahead with it anyway.
Two weeks later, we had the barebones sketched out, and decided to work a
little more before exposing playtesters to our new direction.33 Soon two weeks turned
into 4, and suddenly midterms were upon us. We decided to show our new directions
at Midterms and just go with the
feedback from there.

So far, I had been working on a

variation of the high school level,
inspired by the idea of a
Panopticon34, using a set of
concentric rings. I was very worried

Figure 23: The highschool level, Panopticonised,

pre art-pass in the editor, Souvenir 3.0

that my assumptions of 3D games

would fall flat on my face and we

would have a disaster on our hands. However, I continued working on it, hoping my
playstyle wasnt unique to me, and would translate to a fun game experience. I liked

32

Unity 3D is the game engine we have used for Souvenir

The most frustrating thins on earth is having people react badly to your work because it isnt
finished yet, which is usually the reaction casual players have as they cannot filter the work into
its technical pockets yet.
34
Designed by Jeremy Bentham, philosophised by Michel Foucault
33

how the rings created a security blanket for the player; they could bounce inside the
ring without fear of falling, and the concentric shrinking rings. The one drawback was
that there was a lot of monotonous walking going on. On a whim, I decided to try and
to break it up, so I scattered some trinkets around it. These were glowing metallic orbs
that displayed a line of 2D text when you picked them up, usually something like "You
picked up a Souvenir 1/20", a test element we had built a while ago for Souvenir 2.0. I
played around with the text line, and placed a few of these around the level that
commented on the player's game play with lines like, "I always hated track" when the
player has been walking around a ring for a few seconds.
When we presented our 3 levels at midterms, the reactions were
overwhelmingly positive! Finally it looked like we had hit the right note somewhere.
The text addition hit just the right note with the narrative issues we had been having
and the feedback we got was overwhelmingly positive. Nick (Fortugno), our former
thesis professor and now guest critic loved how the text gave you a hint of story,
perhaps even suggested that there were story paths around the space that could be
developed to encourage one type of exploration, where as, the spaces were a lot more
visually interesting now, and were pleasant to explore by themselves. The levels
themselves were visually captivating, with each team-mate channelling a lot of
personality and character to the spaces, which helped make them memorable and fun.
Naoimi Clark, another critic at the midterm remarked that she loved to fall in our
game. This was in many ways a huge breakthrough moment for us. We realized that we
had found a workaround for our story problems as well as the monotony issue with

there being no other characters or animated objects in the game. If we could leverage
the narrative elements and the falling action, we might be able to make a fun game!
The text was my baby, and it worked surprisingly well as a reward for
exploration, and broke the static-ness of our world. We realized that although
exploration was a fine goal to aim for, if our environment did not change at all, it
created a plateau like play-experience. After a while the jumping around and switching
gravity gets as monotonous as walking slowly through the space. Since we tried to stay
away from boss fights and shooting, nothing really happened in our world. Getting
some text on the screen bridged that gap perfectly. This was a reward that fit with our
game aesthetic and world logic, it was not a pointless trinket there just to give you
something to do, but hinted at something more. It made the experience more easteregg hunt like. Making players look forward to finding more trinkets and reading more
text.
This in itself was a breakthrough. Usually, text in games is something to be
tolerated, and often clicked through, and here we were, with players asking for more.
We tested this again at Playtech, with middle and high school students, and they
wanted more text too! Having attended 4 Playtech's so far, we have learnt that the
average NYC middle-schooler has no filters, so they always give us the most honest
feedback we can ever hope to get. So if these kids wanted more text, I would have to
give them more text! Another interesting thing that happened at Playtech was that the
kids all got the narrative of the story, without being told anything. They knew someone

was moving out, they knew that this person was a woman35, and it was inside
someones mind. This was great news to us! If kids got it, then we were on the right
track.
I continued working on the text since the level design experiment worked fine
so far. I tried to construct little pathways that had specific stories in them,
experimenting with a choose your own adventure style dynamic narrative system,
where the objects and the order in which you get them build a different textual story at
the end of the game for each player. A more structured version of the experiential
narrative that we had been chasing so far. Colleen (Macklin) advised us against
spending too much time on this, as it was an additional element that we had not tested
at all so far, and work instead on finishing the things that we had tested and worked.
At the same time we got 2 very valuable pieces of advice that really went a long
way in helping our game come together. Colleen told us that the 2D text was very
jarring and broke the player's engagement to the game-world. This was the first time
we had heard this, considered the 2D text to act like a Graphical User Interface (or a
GUI), a fairly common in-game asset. However, she felt like the cinematic quality of
our game (no buttons, no other 2D element, no counters or health-bars) allowed
players to get lost in the experience and forget that they are in a game space
(something we had been chasing desperately so far) and the text breaks you out of it.
Almost like breaking the 4th wall in a film, but creating a jarring dissonance in the

35

Fun anecdote: So one of our highschool students was giving Robert feedback and said that it
was definitely a female character (something we never overtly specify, although some of the text
hints to it), on asking why he though so, he was told, Ofcourse it is a girl, the world is all
messed up and weird.. Which we all thought was very interesting, although not the message
we were going for!

process. The second piece of feedback was that the game play was plateauing again.
There was nothing changing or moving in the space and it created a lull in the game
after a few minutes of play. She suggested using the text in a more interesting way to
create a variation in the world. Could we make it a more organic part of the game
world? Could it grow out of the ground? Could it appear in a mirror? Could the
delivery of the text belong in the world in someway? This was valuable for 2 reasons.
First being that we had no idea that the text felt jarring, second being that if we could
work with the narrative objects and make them interactive, we might be able to
mitigate our static-ness issues.
This got us thinking about narrative some more. Was the 2D text as valuable as
we thought it was? So far, it was the only thing that changed, and that was good, so did
we need more things changing? Was it wise to spend precious time on animation,
which was not a skill set within the group, or should we try and adapt the text to react
more? We experimented some more, changing tracks from the old narrative
experiment, but bringing some of our ideas from that in here. We played around with
bringing back trinkets, our original souvenirs, and having text appear uniquely for
each of them. Then we tried to make a mesh of souvenirs, where some souvenirs acted
like portals that would take you to a different part of the dreamscape, mitigating the
"lot of walking" and "monotonous experience" concerns. We started with adding
souvenirs to all the spaces, adding small text fragments to hold them up. We also
started exploring 3D text objects at this time. 3D text objects act as text that exists in
the 3D environment of the game, and by hacking these objects, we made our own that
would hover around their location, tilting and turning to face the player as they

approached them. This was a big success. Now the player had an even more surreal
world, where words would appear and disappear around them. Hints and hidden story
lines were scattered all over the world.
However, these trinkets were small and got lost in the vastness of the world.
People often did not expect them, and missed them constantly. When they found them
they were very pleased, but till then, it was the same issues again. To mitigate this, we
added these giant beams of light coming out of the souvenirs, penetrating through all
the walls and structures in their way. These beacons fixed a lot of things. They added
yet another massive visual asset to the world, with spears of light going though walls
looking really cool. Robert then added strobing orbs of light around each souvenir.
These were pulsating lights that throbbed in a distance, breaking the static-ness of the
empty world. He also added clouds that passed overhead, that went a long way in
making the world look more organic and realistic.
This worked very well, and we began developing a narrative treatment for our
levels. At the same time, we were also trying to make the move mechanic more
accessible to people. There was still a problem with players not understanding what
way they would fall if they shifted gravity in a complex situation. We played around
with adding streams of light in different colors coming out from the target to the
player, letting them know what direction they will fall, and what direction they are in
right now. We added a giant cone of light to show the player what wall they were
aiming at. Eventually we had cluttered the player-view a lot, and didn't mitigate the
orientation problem much in the process. Going back to one of the narrative
experiments we had started sometime back, the idea of a mesh of souvenirs that acted

as portals, we had evolved that so instead of appearing in a new location, picking

certain souvenirs blasted you from your location to a new one. The logic was that by
embracing the experience of falling we would mitigate the static play problem and give
the player more of the sudden falling feeling that they said they enjoyed. However, at
this time, Robert re-worked this fledgling idea, and instead incorporated the blast-off
code to the move mechanic. Allowing players to now fall to exactly the spot they
shifted gravity too, instead of in that general direction. This sounds like a small change
but it cleared up all kinds of weird gameplay problems we were experiencing. We got
rid of all our guide lights, cones etc, reverting to our old minimal hovering circle.
This made the game a lot more intuitive, taking away the middle-step of understanding
the gravity logic, which is a physics puzzle of its own. In the end, we managed to even
have time for an art-pass of the game, bringing everyones levels to a more standardized
aesthetic space.

Gallery opening and the post-show response

We were lucky and managed to get a great spot for our big thesis show, by
projecting our game on a giant wall in an art gallery. This was a great move, since it
played on the visual strength of the game and its cinematic gameplay, where 1 person
played the game, but almost everyone else watched and enjoyed it. This was both a
blessing and a curse the first day; people attending the gallery, primarily art
aficionados, friends and parents are not gamers, and get intimidated by both a gamecontroller and having your skills displayed on a 10 foot projection for everyone to see.
Although people kept complimenting us on how great it looked, very few people

actually played the game. At the same time, our school-provided computer crashed
and refused the play the game anymore. After using Robert's laptop connected to the
projector for one night, we had to find an alternative. Colleen came to our rescue yet
again, leasing us an extra computer from her office to use instead. This was an iMac,
and had a large screen that we couldn't really hide elegantly. So instead we put the
screen on the table, attached a mouse along with the controller, and left it up to the
audience to decide what they preferred playing with.
This changed the entire play dynamic at the show. Having a small screen right
there, and the mouse helped casual attendees to play around a little bit, get confident
and then play through the rest. The more seasoned gamers picked the controller up
and played. The game looked great on the projector, but it looked phenomenal on an
HD screen. So for opening night, there was a line at the Souvenir table. People were
really happy with the experience, although it had a ton of bugs and glitches in it.
Our friend Anna Anthropy, a highly respected indie game designer endorsed
Souvenir, as did Colleens friend Richard Lemarchand, who player the game briefly at
the gallery and loved it. He went back, played some more (there was a line at the
show!) and tweeted about the game36. Richard is a huge figure in professional game
circles and his endorsement went a long way for us. The very next day,
indeGames.com did a shining review for us37, and finally RockPaperShotgun.com, a

36

Tweet: While I was there, I checked out the amazing game by @bennorskov @radiatoryang and
Mohini Dutta: 'Souvenir' http://souvenirgame.com/ Congrats!
37

Excerpt: Souvenir is the thesis project of Parsons' MFA candidates Robert Yang, Mohini Dutta, and
Ben Norskov. The team posted more hypnotic art if you need convincing before diving into the free
Windows or Mac builds. Be warned: there is no ending implemented, yet. However, life's about the
journey, or something, and this one is quite heady.

cornerstone publication in the games world did a review that really got people
interested38. Right after this, a bunch of smaller blogs picked it up and the viewership
to our page went from 0 to 6000 in 2 days! People are currently emailing us from all
over the world with feedback and compliments, which I have to admit is a very
gratifying feeling! We are sending the game to a few competitions and hope this buzz
will help us get into some.
Conclusion
The current positive reactions to the game are very encouraging and make me
feel like this is a project that might mean something someday. The current indie game
favourite, Journey began as a college project, and it has had major ramifications on the
game world. My personal hope is that games like this will get some traction, and we
can keep building Souvenir, till it is bug-free and glitchless. I have learnt so much
through this process, working with as talented a team as I have, and hope I can
leverage this professionally some day. My main interest is still storytelling, and it is
great to see people interested in an experiment like Souvenir.
My own assumptions of storytelling have evolved drastically, and I feel like the
biggest takeaway from this project is never assume and just make. By over-thinking for
the first part of this process I was holding my self back. Souvenir 3.0 pushed me to
think while making, embracing the iterative design process that is so fascinating and
scary at the same time. The best ideas come from experimenting, and over thinking
doesnt mix with spontaneous experiments. Talk less, make more is a mantra I want to
endorse by doing, and hope it will fare me well.

38

Exerpt: The glitchiness of the main mechanic was a little frustrating, but only because I was
tantalised by this work in progress.

Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Colleen Macklin for being an incredible teacher, and
friend, who has encouraged and helped me find my way around the maze of Parsons
from my very first semester. I owe you so much Colleen.
Next I would like to thank Barbara Morris, my phenomenal writing teacher.
Barbara, we have spent 2 great semesters together during which you have only been
supportive and constructive of my work. You have had incredible grace and patience
with my late submissions, and thank you for that. If I ever write one day, it will be all
thanks to you.
I would also like to thank Nicholas Fortugno, my thesis professor of the
awkward first semester when everything seemed difficult, and nothing made sense.
Thank you Nick, for being supportive of Souvenir, and encouraging us to push aside
the mundane and explore the esoteric in storytelling and games. All I know of dynamic
narrative comes from your incredible Narrative and Dynamic systems, and anything I
know of games or level design comes for your LARPs, workshops and classes.
I have to give thanks to my thesis class for being incredible, humble, and kind
people, who made these 2 semesters as painless as possible and far too fun.
And of course, nothing would have happened if it wasnt for my incredible
team- Ben Norskov, Robert Yang you have taught me so much. Also, thank you Shin
Huang (Stone) for being part of our concept art and animation, we would not have our
beloved and beguiled crow without you. Also, Arehandoro Ghersi for being such a
talented, patient and reliable sound designer. You always got exactly what we wanted
and delivered in record time.

Works Cited

5th Cell, Scribblenauts (WB Games 2009)

Albert Lamorisse, Risk \ La Conqute du Monde (Parker Brothers - Hasbro, 1959)
Ben Ehrenreich, The Death of the Book (LA Review of Books, 2010)
Chris Hecker, Spy Party (Chris Hecker, 2009)
Chris Pruett, Balancing Game Mechanics and Narrative (The Journal of Education,
Community, and Values - Pacific University Oregon, 2004)
Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Hero with a Thousand Faces (Pantheon Books, 1968)
Claude Lvi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (University Of Chicago Press, 1968);
Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture (Schocken, 1995)
Drew Davidson, Ico Well Played 3.0: Video Games, Value and Meaning (ETC press,
2011)
Espen Arseth, Genre Trouble: Narrativism and the Art of Simulation First Person
New Media as Story, Performance and Game (MIT Press, 2004)
Fumito Ueda, Ico (Sony developmental Labs, 2008)
Heraclitus, Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers (540 BC - 480 BC)
Increpare Games, English Country Tunes, (increpare games PC, Mac, iPad, and iPhone
2011)
Italo Calvino, The Castle of Crossed Destinies (Mariner Books, 1979)
Jeff Jarvis, The book is dead. Long live the book (Buzzmachine.com, 2006)
Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens (Beacon Press, Boston, 1955)
Joseph Campbell, Hero with a Thousand Faces (Pantheon Books, 1968)
Markus Persson, Minecraft (Mojang, 2009)
Michael Mateas, A Preliminary Poetics for Interactive Drama First Person New

Media as Story Performance and Game (MIT Press, 2004)

Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth, (Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 1966)
Roger Ebert, Video games Can Never Be Art (Ebert @ Chicago SunTimes, 2010)
Sallie Nichols, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey (Weiser Books, 1980)
Sigmund Freud, Psycho-analysis and telepathy (Partric Valas blog, 2011, orig. 1941)
Terry Cavanagh, VVVVVV (Nicalis -3DS, 2021)
Troy Dunniway, Using the Hero's Journey in Games (Gamasutra.com, 2000)
Vladimir Propp, Laurence Scott (Translator), Morphology of the Folktale (American
Folklore Society,1968)
Zach Gage, Lose\Lose (Gage, 2009)