Here’s my initial proposal. I’ve got a couple more brewing, but this is the front-runner, and encompasses most of what I’ve been thinking about.

Super Hero Game

Description
I’m interested in games as a mediating device, both between the players themselves and between the players and their environment. My thesis will be a large-scale multiplayer game which explores the relationship between players’ internal narratives and the collective narrative of the game. One goal will be to make players aware of the system within which they are working as a metaphor for the cultural and political systems we move in every day.

The narrative layer of the game will be focused on the relationship between personal mythology and cultural mythology, and will deal with the power of speech acts to shape reality and mold the physical world. Some components of play will include: actualizing a shared mythology of the city, the use of networked objects to alter psychogeography, public play and performance, and the blurring of fictional or virtual space and real space. Above all, players should leave the game with a heightened sense of agency.

Personal Statement
I’m very interested in the psychological effects of game play, and what happens when players step inside the magic circle. Social interaction changes immediately, and, in a real world game, so does the player’s relationship to their environment. The relationship between these voluntary systems of control and the systems of control which exist outside the magic circle fascinates me, as does the meta-cognitive process of exploring these boundaries in a consequence-free environment. How much can we change by playing a game? Can this experiential media be the ultimate method of persuasion? What happens when we render the virtual or fictional into the real world - does it become more real?

All of this is being filtered through my recent thinking on public play and festivity, politics, the power of words, mythologies, super heroes, performativity, consciousness, social networks, networked objects, and mapping.

Background
SFZero, You Are Not Here, Portal, Abarat, Clive Barker, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, V for Vendetta, The User Illusion, Guy Debord, Jean Baudrillard, Bertolt Brecht, Michel Foucault

Implementation
I will build and run a large-scale multiplayer game with both physical and online components.

Link to the page in the project database (for ITPers only), where all the updates will go.