Project Description
The story of our final project takes place in two different locations which connect to each other by a common thread present in both locations – plastic waste. With our project we aim to represent the theme of apocalypse and how both conscious and unconscious actions and habits of human beings lead to ocean pollution. The player first finds themselves in a living room in a multi-story apartment building, which is our first scene. The living room is small, representing what living in the city often looks like. There are plastic containers such as bottles, food packages, etc. lying around on the surfaces in the room. When looking around the room, the user notices a reticle which changes size when hovering over the plastic packages, thus indicating that it is possible to interact with them. By clicking on the packages, the player is able to pick them up, move them around by changing the position of their mouse and finally drop them by releasing the mouse press. After moving around the room, the user notices a television. When the television is clicked, a short video about plastic pollution in oceans starts playing. Once the video is over, the lights of the room go dark and a coral figure standing next to the television lights up and emits particles, thus indicating that the player should click on the coral next.
Clicking on the coral brings the user to the second scene which is an underwater ocean scene. At first it seems lively, filled with sea creatures swimming around and colorful corals. The user is able to move around by following a looped path guided by a trail of seaweeds. The beginning of the path is marked by a sunken ship on the right from the player to act as a reference point to where the path started. As the player slowly moves around the ocean, the atmosphere changes drastically – the overall lighting becomes darker, fewer sea creatures swim around and plastic packages that were present in the first scene start leaving a trail behind the user and floating around the ocean. At first the plastic waste appears slowly but towards the end of the looped path, increasingly more packages start surrounding the user. By the time that the player finishes walking on the path and gets back to the sunken ship, the ocean has changed dramatically and all of its pristine cleanliness and liveliness has disappeared. There is now a coral in the place where the user started the underwater journey which is the same coral as in the first scene in the living room. By clicking it the user goes back to the first scene and finds themselves in the same room with the same plastic containers to reflect back on the experience and think about different choices that could have been made.
The story is a journey of reflections about the role of human actions and habits in polluting our oceans. The story touches the user no matter what actions are taken in the first scene, because even if the user does not interact with the plastic packages, the deeper meaning of the story is that they can still eventually end up in the ocean because of reasons such as wind blowing the plastics from landfills into the water or industrial leakage. Therefore, the player is encouraged to think that even if they do not directly pollute the oceans themselves, it is possible that their consumption patterns can still affect how the ocean is contaminated with plastic waste. Thus, we wanted to make sure that all the interactions in the scenes are connected to the story, such as picking up and dropping the plastic packages acting as a metaphor for both conscious and unconscious human actions and the logic of the world being a loop where the user eventually finds themselves back in the first scene to reflect about their own experiences and relationship to sustainable living and recycling.
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Process and Implementation
When we first met up to brainstorm our idea, we discussed themes such as recreating a city from Invisible Cities or creating a version of Escape Room where the protagonist wakes up from amnesia and finds themselves in a prison cell. However, we all felt that these approaches lacked “storyness” or it was hard to convey the story to the player so that it feels relatable. We then came up with an idea for the apocalypse theme and we instantly felt the most attached to it. We thought that it is a topic that inevitably concerns everyone, no matter whether the player is actively environmentally conscious or not. We actually felt passionate about transmitting the message to people who might not be as environmentally conscious with the hope that we might encourage them to take some tangible actions towards the cause in the future.
initial storyboard 1;9 
initial storyboard 2 
initial storyboard 3 
initial storyboard 4 
initial storyboard 5 
initial storyboard 6 
initial storyboard 7 
initial storyboard 8
Thus, when designing and building the space, we always kept in mind the psychological effect of our project on the user and whether it might encourage them to become more environmentally friendly. Thus, for the first scene we wanted to recreate a relatable living space – a small room in a city environment where more and more people end up living as a result of urbanization. We added numerous objects such as furniture and decorations to represent how easy it is to accumulate different objects consisting of different materials in your living space. The plastic containers represent the waste that accumulates from our consumption habits such as buying groceries or other commodities in plastic packaging. We were very cautious about the positioning of the plastic objects in the room. Although they are untidily scattered around the room, seemingly indicating a messy person living there, we wanted the plastic waste to act more as a metaphor which represents the role of plastics in our life in general. In regard to the television, we thought that acts as an inviting cue for the user to want to interact with, however, the coral which needs to be clicked to travel to the next scene acts as a bridge between the two scenes, tying their themes together.
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In the underwater scene, we wanted for it to have a realistic and mesmerizing look, in order for the user to fully relate to the actions happening in the ocean. We added several sea creatures, such as fish, sharks, jellyfish, corals, etc. to build up the ocean’s fauna and make it look full of life. There are also many seaweeds and other plants that grow in the ocean to enhance the mesmerizing look of the ocean. At first, the ocean also looks full of life. However, as the user walks around the ocean, over time the living creatures disappear, the overall atmosphere changes to a darker and duller place and slowly plastic waste starts floating around the user. When the user completes the loop when walking on the path, the ocean has completely changed and looks nothing like in the beginning. By this we wanted to emphasize the effect of time and how oceans can change over time because of human actions that lead to pollution. After feedback that we got from playtesting, we were keen on adding the coral figure in the ocean scene as well, which would allow the user to go back to the first scene and reflect on the experience. This connected loop was important for the logic of our world to make sure that the user goes through a full circle and can rethink their decisions regarding environmental issues in the future.
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The user’s role in the story is character with impact. The user is able to interact with different objects in the first scene such as plastic packages, television, and coral. Although there are fewer interactions in the second scene, the user still leaves a trail of plastics behind towards the end of the path that the user is walking on. The trail of plastics and plastics floating around the ocean are also directly connected to the plastic amount witnessed in the first scene.
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A video of the experience is available here:
Reflection/Evaluation
Our initial expectations were to build a more elaborate project with far more scenes to better convey the passing of time in the ocean. However, the restrictions of creating the project like it is made for the Google Cardboard also limited the possibilities and amount of interactions that we could include. Overall, it was however a good decision to reduce the number of scenes, as it was still possible to convey the same story with fewer scenes from our side and leave more room for interpretation to the user which was ultimately our goal with this project.
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If we had more time we would have liked to improve the ocean scene by adding more interactivity to the fish, for example, the fish swimming away once the user approaches them. However, the primary goal was to make the fish more around the ocean and we were still satisfied with the effect that the moving sea creatures had on the initial atmosphere of our ocean. Our favorite part was the change in the ocean over time where it becomes darker, less inhabited and slowly filled up with plastic waste, as we hope it conveyed a strong message to the user.