Case Study
Authors: Florian Glock, Anne Junker, Marina Kraus, Christian Lehrian, Alexander Schäfer, Ulrike Spierling, Steve Hoffmann
"Office Brawl" is the result of a semester project by students (5th semester) of study “Media Management” at University of Applied Sciences RheinMain in Wiesbaden, Germany. Accompanying lectures covered theoretical and practical aspects of modelling a conversational storyworld combined with practical steps of creation. The goal was to create a story for the newly developed video client for Scenejo. The students not only designed dialogues and implemented them, but also organised recordings and produced the video snippets with a commercial photo animation tool.
Story
The content of the story reaches a kind of meta level, because it is about the project work itself, abstracted to an exxagerated and funny stage. The user works as a project manager and has to direct a serious argument between Ben, the technical guy, and Lucy, the designer. They use randomly weak, strong and non-productive arguments in a discussion about Scenejo and a new visualisation for the user experience. The user has to calm them down every time the argument heats up no real arguments are used.
Outcome
The figure below on the left shows a screenshot of the final user experience with the Scenejo video client. A good impression of the actual game play gives the demo video "Office Brawl" below on the right.
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Creation Process
The main project tasks are shown in the figure below. They were the dialogue conception, the authoring, and the final production of the representation. Part of the project was to determine what kind of visualisation should be chosen, the comic like animation or live film material. For the "Office Brawl" story with focus on an entertaining access to the topic, the advantages of a comic-like representation were predominant.
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The following figure shows an ideal production cycle.
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After the brainstorming phase dialogue chunks were created from a linear script (see figure below) that covered different topics, like the marketing or the look of the system.
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For testing and brainstorming cards were used, which are shown in the picture below.
Downloads & Links
- Demo Video for the Content Creation Project "Office Brawl" (External link)
- Office Brawl Flyer (External link, PDF)
- "Office Brawl" – A Conversational Storytelling Game and its Creation Process (Paper, external link)
