Hello World!
We are Commit to the Bits. Over the course of this semester, we will be exploring the intersection of Improvisational Acting and Twitch live-streaming. We are a discovery project – what we are doing has not been done before.
We are a varied team from computer science, engineering, and artistic backgrounds with a lot of overlap. The strongest common thread is a shared love of game design. We hope to not just translate improv games to Twitch, but to design new ones around the platform’s unique features.
As a research project, we are starting off with a lot of reading. The first set of actions we took this week was meeting with our advisers, Brenda Harger and Jessica Hammer. In order to help us get a better understanding of existing research, they pointed us towards massive bibliographies, ludographies, and code bases to work with. It was a little bit scary, but we decided by the end of our first week how to break this all up.
We see our cycle in these to be iterating on this research. Major topics are broad audience psych evaluations or video games with audience voting in them, but we know we want to go deeper than that with this project. Our ambitions will drive these iterations. We envision many prototypes being made throughout this project as we figure out how best to connect audience agency with what goes on on-camera, and naturally many game jam moments will happen as we come to understand the possibilities of these connections.
But, this is all wishful thinking at the time, this is just Week 1. We’ve hardly established team roles at this point! Crossing over into Week 2, we plan to absorb all of this research and find where our intersection truly lies. That is when we will begin to discover our tentative road plan and deliverables.