Directed Study - Live Brief from Gina Jackson.

Today we were officially given our directed study project (Next Gen Equality) to last us from today for the next three weeks, then we are given our brief for BA6 which I am rather looking forward to especially after having felt so disconnected from BA5.

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For this project I partnered up with Maxine ( http://mhuntergad.tumblr.com/ ) I felt it would be beneficial to do some form of team work to understand what could be in the future as far as working in a group, and I love her work so win win!

First off we started by brainstorming, I had an initial idea from when we first had the briefing based around the concept of being in the boardroom and not having your voice heard. You would operate the game by tapping the screen with your finger/stylus/space-bar and you would have to tap more to make yourself louder, the idea behind it was that no matter how hard you try to get your voice heard .... you could never out-speak the men. However I realised that this idea was a bit too obvious, but also didn't give much to the imagination, it was too realistic and would probably not allow the player to sink into that world without feeling straight away excluded.

The next idea was a joint effort of thinking between myself and Maxine. This was around the idea of the 'Glass Ceiling' that you could progress so much but never reach the top. You start at the bottom of a set of stairs similar to Ghost Busters on NES and make your way to the top each time the scenery gets better and more impressive, when you reach the top you hit an invisible wall, above you you see a business suite and the soles of shoes .... the business suite is a man only zone. However once again it didn't seem unreal enough, like my first idea it felt straight up human and to obvious.

We decided to have our work based around anthropomorphism of some sort, based around the theme of Aesop's Fables. Starting with several notes and brainstorming sessions.Looking through the list of Fables one stuck out to us .... 'the jay and the peacock'.

                                           The Jay and the Peacock

"A jay, who felt that he was a very plain bird, came across a pile of peacock feathers on the ground one day. He gathered up a big bunch and then tied them to his tail.

Very pleased with himself and the way he now looked, he left his friends behind and strutted towards a group of peacocks. But as he grew closer they saw what he had done, and were angry with him, and pecked the peacock feathers off his tail, and sent him away with his tail between his legs!
The jay sadly walked back to his friends, but they weren’'t impressed. In fact they were very annoyed with him! Who did he think he was, pretending to be better than them?

And the moral of the story is that it is not only fine feathers that make fine birds! It is what you are inside that counts."

I love the idea of this Fable, it works really well and gives us a lot of ideas to roll with, the idea is you play a Peahen who collects feathers to be as glorious looking as the ever dominant Peacock. The game-play involves collecting feathers to disguise yourself, collecting seeds to get more points. The trick is that there is a Peacock hidden from view who will always be better than you whenever you collect seeds he gets triple the points you do (playing on the men get more money than women do), every-time you collect feathers the Peacock will come out and knock those feathers off you and you lose points ...

We went with the title "All cock and no pea!" playing off a quote from the old Carry On Henry film, it also works rather well with the game idea, that it is all (pea)cock and no pea(hen). It is a little bit close to being not safe for children but the game is about birds so it has to be seen as that term .... not the other meaning.