{"id":3203,"date":"2022-05-05T10:11:03","date_gmt":"2022-05-05T10:11:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/digitalhumanities\/?p=3203"},"modified":"2022-07-27T09:59:42","modified_gmt":"2022-07-27T09:59:42","slug":"small-changes-and-large-impacts-an-interative-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/digitalhumanities.soton.ac.uk\/blog\/southampton-dh\/3203","title":{"rendered":"Small Scales and Large Impacts: an interactive story"},"content":{"rendered":"
In this post, Samuel Pegg – a finalist English student and one of our interns at Southampton Digital Humanities – describes the rationale behind “Small Scales and Large Impacts”, an interative story created during his internship.<\/em><\/p>\n Small Scales and Large Impacts <\/em>(known as Small Scales <\/em>from this point on) is an interactive storytelling experience – published at https:\/\/biglittleinteractive.itch.io\/small-changes-large-impacts<\/a> – that seeks to empower the small-scale decisions we make about the environment that have the potential to have large impacts (hence the name).<\/p>\n It puts you in the shoes of a second-person protagonist who must make a multitude of small decisions that have impacts and consequences that affect the rest of the narrative. In a choose-how-you-play format, Small Scales <\/em>uses the software Twine<\/a> to create a basic point and click adventure that feeds into a machine that can paint, to create an outcome based on the decisions the player makes. The idea behind the project is to educate people on their day-to-day decisions surrounding the environment, but also to provide them with a unique outcome that only our machine could achieve. Whether the player is incredibly aware of environment crisis or completely oblivious, Small Scales <\/em>is designed to be unobtrusive and educational rather than moralising and judgemental.<\/p>\n Narrative Structure<\/strong><\/p>\n Small Scales <\/em>is built around two core paths and four main variables that make up the narrative. \u2018Short-play\u2019 is a 5-minute experience around plastic bottles and recyclable waste. \u2018Long-play\u2019 takes elements of \u2018Short-play\u2019 (recycling all the content) but adding a more comprehensive and larger narrative around it that is largely inspired by the story of Afroz Shah<\/a> (the man behind the world\u2019s largest beach clean-up). While \u2018Short-play\u2019 has 4 separate endings, \u2018Long-play\u2019 has a possible 7, which all feed into our machine that can paint (but more on that later).<\/p>\n
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