Open Play is a collaborative project between students, artists and academics. Open Play uses technology as a tool to learn ancient skills such as reading and writing, and thinking. It is a prototype for learning and producing digital media.
Open Play began two years ago as part of the Learning Games initiative of the USC School of Cinema and Television. Students were recruited from a local high school, the Los Angeles Leadership Academy, as were artists and academics from USC, and the group was formed. In the first year we wrote stories about ourselves and the media, and learned how to use Flash in order to animate them. It was strange. We spend so much time consuming culture, that the thought of producing it was kind of crazy. In developing our own media, we discovered that there is a grammar to our fantasy. When we are creative, we can imagine ourselves anywhere we want.
Either by choice or by force, we are in Los Angeles to imagine another life; and even if the city at times seems unfriendly, we came here to stay. That's why we thought it was important to define L.A. for ourselves. So we set out to map our neighborhoods and experiences in order to understand the ways in which this city belongs to us. We discovered that paper and pencil continue to be important and immediate tools of communication, and that the reality around us is the ripest and juiciest raw data one can find. These maps of our neighborhoods allowed us to create narratives - open narratives - that could easily be translated into the format of a game.
We looked back at the history of games and found ourselves infatuated by the simplicity of Pac-Man. We played the game at the IML lab over and over again and tore it apart, trying to decipher its rules. We wrote three scripts - based on our maps - and began to build our own games using our streets as a maze. Learning to program was not easy- but little by little we realized it was a language like any other. Some kids tag on a wall to let themselves be known, we learned to write code to show we exist.
Now we are moving to the last phase of our project; a large game based on the novel "Huckelberry Finn." Only instead of sailing down Mark Twain's Mississippi, we will navigate the modern day Los Angeles river. |
