DARKNESS IN THE CORNER
VR DESIGN PROCESS
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RAZER
A narrative-driven VR experience adapted from real-world cases that immerse the player as a trafficked woman, who is seeking to escape from her darkest days in a village in an unknown place and back to her normal life.
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SLOGAN
Women chained in dark corners, who hears your cries?
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Vision statement & top level summary of your project idea
Darkness in the Corner is a VR role-playing game about the topic of woman traffick. By getting into another place in the world and being as another person, players would need to observe, think, collect, risk, and make sure not to be founded by the people who brought the woman here, to solve any challenges and dangers, and successfully escape from where she is locked in and reveal the evilness hidden in the corners that no one knows.
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Goal of project/Differentiator
We hope to use this project to draw people’s attention to people who are suffering /have suffered from illegal detention. Considering the superiorities of VR to other media forms, we would like to let the players “actually” experience as the game character (which can be adapted from real-world stories) for an impactful immersive experience (like being in the body of the game character). This topic does not need to rely on the Challenge Based Immersion and Sensory Based Immersion models that have been discussed in readings but instead engage with the Imaginative Immersion to strongly impact the players by making them dive into the story world to achieve the goal of being transformative.
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Themes of project
Transformation, empathy, behaviour change, learning.
The time we are aiming for is 21 century.
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Visual style of project
We aim to create a realistic visual style as our story is adapted from real stories, we want the visual style to enhance the realism of these events to make them realize that these things actually happened in the real world. Also, we frame the beginning of the story to be an escape room, so a more lifelike illustration can make the audience feel like being part of the world. It also makes the transition from real-world to virtual reality much quicker. One of our inspirations is from The Room VR: A Dark Matter (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1104380/The_Room_VR_A_Dark_Matter/ ) which is also an escape room and investigation game. The realistic visual style helps the player be completely immersed in the fantasy world. Moreover, since we also want to create an intense and unnerving, players can easily feel the nervousness when they are in an unknown yet photorealistic place.
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Core desired user experience
a) Desired user experience and how your VR experience ideally transforms immersants
We hope to bring players to the scenario of a woman being trafficked and imprisoned, to inspire compassion and a sense of sadness through the virtual environment. And through the narrative told through the game to achieve a transformative game experience.
We want to allow the user to take on the role of a trafficked woman and thus believe and immerse themselves in the story. We will give the player an escape goal and a challenge that they want to cross. We want to move the story forward by giving players choices that seem to change the present. But these choices lead to the same outcome so that the player can feel the helplessness of the victim at the time. Finally, we hope to use realistic style scenes too, players can promote a more realistic and immersive experience through auditory and visual sensations.
b) How is your project taking advantage of the special affordance and opportunity of VR?
During our game, we will place the player in the perspective and scenario of a victim of trafficking. In reality, we would not want anyone to be trapped in such a situation. Therefore, the immersion that VR has allows safe players to experience scenarios that may be almost unrealistic to experience in the physical world. At the same time VR allows us to adjust scenes, plots and sounds so as to enhance or detract from the experience the player is getting in one of the senses. This makes it more likely that the player will get a result that is helpful to the player, such as a transformative experience, without getting too many negative effects. So we can design their experience to customize and adjust the process, which is also difficult to do in reality. The last thing about VR is that it is somewhere between reality and falsehood. It allows players to believe in the situation while being more stress-free to convert a perception that is different from their own.
c) Relation to course design challenge
When one looks at female victimization and even trafficking from the perspective of a bystander, one's imagination is often biased and limited. We see people questioning why trafficking victims don't run away, whether they are perfect victims, and so on. Our project hopes to give players a new perspective through VR gaming, taking them through a female-trafficking-themed experience. Through this sensory stimulation brought by VR, and tangible sensory collaboration, players can understand the helplessness of the victims in the mindset of the time. At the same time, recognizing the help of bystanders is important and necessary. Help players in the future can successfully transform their perception as well as action.
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Introduction
The time setting is 21century. The player will play as a woman investigator who is working on solving illegal women trafficking cases but found herself trafficked and imprisoned in a remote village area.
The goal of the user is to survive and escape from the village, and at the same time collect information.
The core interaction will focus on environment exploration and object investigations to uncover the truth and find a way out.
The images below are the basic settings/style from similar game themes and mechanics:
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Narrative/Story
As a woman being trafficked to a remote village, the player wakes up in a cold, shabby room. She has always wanted to get out of the village and go back to her hometown. Looking around the place, she recalls all her bad memories of this place. The inhuman treatment and the memories make her more determined to leave the place. However, in order to avoid being caught by the man and the villagers, she decides to escape at the night. When night comes, she runs with all her might to get out of the village. But just as she reaches the outskirt of the village, the man who kidnapped her and the villagers gathered together and beat her until she passes out. While she is unconscious, she dreamt about her cozy life before she was kidnapped. She recalls her family and friends, and wonders if she could ever meet them again.
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VR mechanics & Physical Rig
Core mechanics
The main game mechanic is that the player takes on the role of a trafficked woman from a first-person perspective, and interacts with special items around her. Realize the whole story by exploring the environment.
The main device we use for our VR projects is Oculus. Players will bring an Oculus device and hold two controllers in their hands. The Oculus device will present the real scenes to the player and the environment's sound. Players can use two controllers to teleport in a virtual environment and interact with objects in the game, such as catching the photo and throwing the rope. Authentic actions and environments allow players to better immerse themselves in what they want to express and make players believe that they are the trafficked women. There will be a GUI in our VR environment, when players enter the game, they will see the name of the game and the introduction of the game story. If the player clicks the "Start" button, he will enter the village scene. At the same time, in order to have a clear user interface, we will have appropriate text prompts above the objects that can interact. When players explore some key objects, some text stories about the object will also appear. The textual content displayed by special items allows players to understand the true meaning of these objects.
Secondary mechanics
The number of users: At most one user can enter the VR world at a time.
Target audiences: 18+ who are interested in VR experience.
Envisioned physical setup
Players would first enter into a private and dark place where they will encounter a mailbox, paper and pencil. They will be asked to write a letter that seeks help from the outside world to escape from a village. Then they will put it into the mailbox to send them out.
Locomotion technique
Teleportation - Users can move from one place to another by specifying a location with the controller. It allows users to quickly teleport to the desired location. Users don’t need to keep turning their heads to find a way. This also reduces the effort players need to learn how to walk in a virtual environment, and does not need to provide a large field for the players to walk instead of virtual walking in the real environment.
Joystick - Players can walk freely in the virtual world by using a joystick. Buttons on the joystick could help player interact with objects in the game scene. Since it is common to use a joystick for gameplay, it can be very easy for many players to get used to.
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Inspiration Analysis
Our project theme is inspired by some recent news regarding a woman that is illegally trafficked and imprisoned in a rural village in China. As revealed on a social media platform by a user, a woman who is the mother of eight children was chained and locked in a small room that was in terrible condition, not living together with her family. And per the further interviews with someone else in the village, this woman was trafficked into this village in the past, and she was much more “normal” than at present in terms of mental and physical condition. We are shocked by the tragic story of this woman and more by the apathy of other people who knew this thing already but never revealed it. Thus, we decided to work on a project to help people have more knowledge about how serious the problem of woman trafficking is, and hope to arouse a sense of justice to reach out to the helping hands to these people who suffered from these inhuman treatments.
We did research and found out Women Trafficking is always a global issue. In an interview we watched, Rebecca Bender, a survivor of the sex trade, described how she was sold Rebecca Bender's Story - Human Trafficking Survivor. When Rebecca was in college, she met a man and she thought this was her true love, as this man was very nice to her and her daughter. Thus, Rebecca followed him to Las Vegas because she loved this man and wanted to give her daughter home. However, her nightmare began at the moment she entered Las Vegas. This trafficker used Rebecca's daughter as a threat to force her to play to the casino. Rebecca then was tortured and subjected to sexual services in the process. What struck us most when we watched the whole interview was one of Rebecca's words, "If you got robbed, it was your fault for being stupid, if you got raped, it was your fault for not watching your back anything that happened to is typically your fault, and you incurred more punishment for allowing those things to happen to you," this sentence is worth thinking about. Sometimes victims would believe it's their fault to fall into bad things because there are always people who think the victims brought the trouble on themselves, and the doubts, opinions and strange looks from other people can lead to self-denial and self-doubt. But in fact, they didn't do anything wrong. This video gives us an inspiration that many times women are traded, and people think it is the fault of these women because they are beautiful, sexy or other reasons. It would destroy the victim's mind. We want to use VR to create an immersive experience and a first-person perspective to experience or discover the damage done to the victims of these illegal things, to let people realize how difficult they are, and how serious this issue has always been.
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Immersion Frameworks
(a) In what way will your project support immersion, flow and/or presence etc.?
As providing an immersive VR experience, our project will be built using VR modules including the XR toolkit in Unity, and requiring VR HMD sets to play. In the project, there will be GUI elements that guide the game flow for users so that they will not be lost in the game world and make sure the users are always on track with plot development.
(b) What type of immersion are you focusing most on, and why? How do you plan on using these to support your overall project objectives and desired user experience?
Our project will focus on using imaginative immersion and sensory immersion. Since our story untackles a very sensitive issue that may include sexual abuse and violence, we think it will leave the user traumatized if we show these scenes. Therefore, we decided to use objects and information to imply this aspect of the story. This relies on the user’s imagination to fill up the story. Plans we have for using it are to use blood and a tooth on the ground to signify violence and voiceover of the character’s own thoughts to imply her bad memory of sexual abuse. We also will use sensory immersion. We think sensory immersion can help the user to be engrossed in a village. Therefore, we will use background sounds, conversations with NPC and more realistic models to immerse the user in the environment.
(c) Please explain in detail how your team plans on evoking your chosen immersion aspects.
To increase immersion, players need to drop a letter into the mailbox before entering the virtual world. Let players substitute themselves into the game in advance, believe in the role that they play, and prepare for entering the VR world. The scenes we create will be realistic, restoring the villages in reality, and some objects will be made very realistic. At the same time, a large number of objects can be interacted with, and should material will appear in some important places. These settings enhance immersion by making players believe that they are truly entering a new world.
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Why Your Project is Innovative
(a) What’s new/interesting/cool/exciting/different about your project?
By our research, we’ve found our topic a worldwide issue but there weren’t any games, especially VR games (or experiences) that focus on this topic of women trafficking. Therefore, we hope our implementation on VR of the women trafficking topic can help more people realize the seriousness of this issue, and learn about how cruel and evil this issue is by experiencing from a first-person perspective.
(b) Why is your project relevant? How does it provide a meaningful / desirable experience to the users?
We initially decided to do a topic on women traffick because a thread on Weibo (China's social media software) about a woman being tied up with chains caught our attention. Later, the woman was being trafficked and exposed to her -living environment. After our research, we also found that most of these trafficked women will eventually be trafficked to some villages or remote areas. So in terms of aesthetics, we decided to use the village as the main scene of our game and decorate the scene with older items. At the same time, our story content and character settings are also in line with our project. Players will play the role of trafficked women, exploring the place while discovering the dark side of human nature and the dark lives of women. We hope that game scenes, sounds, and mechanics can give players a meaningful experience to achieve what we want to convey.
(c) For your showcase, what would be your main “selling points”? Why should anyone care about it?
Because our gaming experience could be unique considering its topic and background story - this isn’t a hot topic that appears in other games and especially VR experiences. Another unique point is that we set our ending “imperfect”, with that said, it is not like most games that the players can achieve their ultimate game goals and get the good ending, instead we would like to pass one message that in the real worlds falling into this situation is not simply playing a game, and in most real-world cases those trafficked women have to accept their destiny, and our ending could help emphasize this to leave a stronger impression and raise the attention of the users.
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User Testing Goals and Outcomes
(a) Goal, Questions and Hypotheses
(b) Methods
(c) Results
(d) Meta-reflection:
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We need to change the color of the display font. The color of the font is too light causing the player to not be able to see the content.
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We need to pay attention to the size of the room. If the room is too big or too small, it will make the players difficult to find clues.
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We need to reposition the teeth (game props), which are now a bit difficult to spot.
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Prototyping process
Above is the initial sketch of our preliminary plan for the project. We brainstormed how we develop the story, and finally planned to make the player stay in a small old dirty room for most of the playtime and then let the player try to escape. We sketched a map of the overall environment settings and the experience process (game stages).
The in-game captures above show the overall look of the village environment. We built the village in an old and dark art style, aiming to reflect the woman being trafficked into a very poor rural village to have a strong comparison of her normal life and life trapped here.
The small room that the player will mainly be in to interact with the objects and recall the memories to bring back the story of the trafficked woman. And as shown in the image above, players are able to see the left hand and right hand that look burnt by fire, as here we would like to reflect that this woman has suffered before. The hands are representing the actual hands of the players, and can perform the basic interaction mechanism we planned to use, that is direct grab/touch since we are tying our best to make the experience realistic. And because of the same reason, the locomotion technique we applied is real-walking since we feel it can better immerse the players of really being trafficked here rather than joystick control and teleportation.
Part of the room and some objects like the bed in the room. Player can pick up and interact with the items, and trigger the dialogues to help get the full story. The items such as the bed, the teeth on the ground, and the rotten food (as shown in the image) are designed to emphasize the poor treatment of the trafficked woman. For instance, the blood can help reflect that the woman had suffered something terrible, and not even able to clean it up.
Development Process
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(a) Summary
At the beginning of the project, our team discussed several topics we want to focus on and finally settle on the current woman trafficking topic as we read the news report about a woman being trafficked into a poor village and suffered terrible treatments that made her have a serious mental illness. Then, we decided to brainstorm for the story and asked Bernhard for feedback. And after we received the approval of going on with this topic, we started working on the other project elements as shown in the image below. As for now, we are going on our plan, and have created most visual elements in unity.
(a) Discussion and reflection on your team process
The Scrum board we used is Miro, and I feel it was effective for our brainstorming as each member was able to put their thoughts down, and then compare and discuss as a team. We learned many new insights from the idea changing in this process. And by repeating this process, we used the same way to help establish a basic framework of the project, and develop it step by step. Everyone in the team had participated in this process so we were always having new ideas and insights come in to refine the project. Also, we feel the Scrum board is also helpful as a to-do list or a reminder for the team so we can always refer to our plan conveniently to make sure we stay on track, and we can always make any changes and updates since everyone in the team have the access to it.
Critique
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(a) Game Story and Setting Feedback:
Feedback #1:
After we provided two themes, Benhard thought that the women traffic was a good one. It is also suggested that we use real sounds or clips to show the content related to the kidnapping of women. TA advised us not to create a scene so scary that it would cause panic.
Improve:
Based on this feedback, we decide to enhance the transformative experience by adding real-life clips of women traffic, which is more powerful to achieve our topic. In order to make the scene less scary, we set the game in the daytime and increased the brightness of the scene. Also removed some items that would scare the player.
Feedback #2 (March 2):
Benhard reminds us to pay attention to the transition from game over to reality, as it is not convincible and too sudden when just taking off the HMD for the users.
Improve:
We decide to play some real-world clips to help the users gradually transfer from the game world back to the real world, as well as enhance their experience and knowledge about women trafficking that actually happened.
Playtesting Vision 1.0 Feedback:
1. movement can be joystick based
2. Have some hints for the interactions when the player enters the scene (e.g. use dialogue text to give hints like “what is this radio?”)
3. Make the room more enclosed (window)
4. Improve the menu.
Playtesting Vision 2.0 Feedback:
1. We received feedback on making improvements on the light brightness.
2. Need to change the color of the display font. The color of the font is too light causing the player to not be able to see the content.
3. Need to pay attention to the size of the room. If the room is too big or too small, it will make the player difficult to find clues.
Equipment needs
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We might borrow one power bar from the library. We will prepare the custom and props used in this game by ourselves.
Equipment List For Showcase
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Two VR equipment.
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Three computers provided by ourselves.
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Mailbox provided by ourselves
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Paper and pencil provided by ourselves
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Power bars from the library