exploration

Super Mario 64 is a 1996 platform video game for the Nintendo 64 and the first in the Super Mario series to feature three-dimensional (3D) gameplay. As Mario, the player explores Princess Peach's castle and must rescue her from Bowser. Super Mario 64 features open-world playability, degrees of freedom through all three axes in space, and relatively large areas which are composed primarily of true 3D polygons as opposed to only two-dimensional (2D) sprites. It emphasizes exploration within vast worlds, which require the player to complete various missions in addition to the occasional linear obstacle courses (as in traditional platform games). It preserves many gameplay elements and characters of earlier Mario games as well as the visual style.

(Source: Wikipedia)

Uncharted: Drake's Fortune is an action-adventure video game developed by Naughty Dog and published by Sony Computer Entertainment. It is the first game in the Uncharted series, and was released in November 2007 for PlayStation 3. Combining action-adventure and platforming elements with a third-person perspective, the game follows Nathan Drake, the supposed descendant of the explorer Sir Francis Drake, as he seeks the lost treasure of El Dorado, with the help of journalist Elena Fisher and mentor Victor Sullivan.

Gone Home takes place entirely in one environment—literally a home—and relies on found objects like receipts, personal notes, ticket stubs, and phone messages to further its plot. In doing so, the game goes beyond the story’s central mystery and delves into the inner workings of teenage rebellion, marital strife, and love. Gone Home’s intimate nature, strong storytelling, and ambitious scope has garnered heavy accolades for both the game and The Fullbright Company studio, including an IndieCade Audio Award, two Spike VGX awards, and a 9.5 rating on IGN.

Source:http://getinmedia.com/articles/game-careers/steve-gaynor-designing-gone…

Opening in the center of the international refugee crisis, this playable story places the interactor in the position of the refugee. As the tale opens, an explosion sends the interactor from the comfort of a ship into the salt immortal sea. Rescued by a mysterious boat the player encounters eight other passengers, drawn from the present and the ancient past. However, one of these passengers has angered the gods, and unless the player can discover which, all will face their wrath. However, finding that secret is no easy task. Each passenger harbors secrets that pit them against each other in an allegory of contemporary global crisis. Choosing from one of nine iconic positions in the refugee crisis, the interactor can explore tales of misfortune while trying to keep the shipmates in balance by collecting and circulating secrets. In this tale, we recast figures in the contemporary refugee crisis against the mythos of the quintessential traveler, Odysseus, for the refugee likewise travels cursed, unable to return home. It is a tale of the eternal return to proxy wars and the challenge of achieving some semblance of world peace. The story of the refugee is a harrowing reality reimagined here in terms of sirens and cyclops, not to make the horrors of war fanciful but to render the tale of the contemporary global conflict in timeless, epic terms. What does it take to survive this existential journey with humanity in tact? How can one negotiate the turbulent waters and the whims of unseen gods and foreign powers in the human tragedy of a proxy war? The Salt Immortal Sea will be set up as an installation that invites a primary interactor to make choices while a larger group can watch the story’s progression play out.

The primary interface will be an iPad. LED lights spread in the room will represent the characters aboard the ship, lighting up when the player interacts with them. The reading experience can take 5-30 minutes, depending on depth of exploration. Platform: Ink + Unity Displays on IPad, (also PC or Mac).

(Source: ELO 2017: Book of Abstracts and Catalogs)

An interactive series about the exploration, exploitation and transformation of the American West.

Following works by John Wesley Powell and Edward Abbey, filmmaker Roderick Coover creates actual and virtual explorations into the places they wrote about, the landscapes they imagined and contemporary land use.

When John Wesley Powell first navigated the Colorado River in 1869, much of the great American desert was marked on U.S. government maps as an "unknown territory" -- unmapped lands known only to native cultures. His works name, narrative and mythologize the West and his encounters within it. Ironically, later, as U.S. Geographer, Powell came to recognized perils of unsustainable development, but his calls to restrict growth to natural watersheds were rejected.

Writer Edward Abbey moved to the Canyonlands region of the Great American Desert in the late 1950s at a time when air-conditioning, access to abundant water and power from massive dam projects, a cold war boom in uranium mining, and an automobile-driven boom in tourism were transforming the landscape. Abbey worked as a ranger and fire-lookout in Utah and Arizona, and he wrote about what he saw: beauty, destruction, and rising communities of resistance. Abbey's words ignited debates about the role of direct action and free speech in local and national discourse, and they helped to forge new ways of thinking about communities, deserts, and protest.

(source: http://astro.temple.edu/~rcoover/UnknownTerritories/index.html)

USA-based computer engineer and innovator PJ Sanders returns to his remote family home in the UK following the death of his elderly mother. His agenda: to close the place down and sell it. But not before he employs an experimental device he’s been working on, primed to help him uncover the history behind one particular room in the house – a room that has remained locked since his childhood.

(Source: Author)

WALLPAPER is an interactive and immersive piece of digital fiction that has been exhibited in the UK at Bank Street Arts Gallery in Sheffield as a largescale projection and as part of the Being Human Festival of the Humanities 2016 in Virtual Reality. Funded by Arts Council England and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, it forms part of the Reading Digital Fiction research project led by Dr Alice Bell at Sheffield Hallam University. Reading Digital Fiction aims to raise public awareness of and engagement with digital fiction by analysing the way that readers respond, applying empirical methods and cognitive theory. Through its accessible storyline, strong visuals and immersive atmosphere, WALLPAPER has engaged non-academic audiences online, through live events and within gallery settings.

A work of short fiction, it follows the story of PJ Sanders, a USA-based computer engineer and innovator who returns to his remote family home in the UK following the death of his elderly mother. His agenda is to close the house down and sell it. First though, he wants to trial an experimental device he’s been working on to help him uncover the history behind one particular room in the house – a room that has remained locked since his childhood. WALLPAPER can be shown on a modern gaming PC, through large-scale digital projection and in Virtual Reality on the Oculus Rift.

To see a short film of its reception in the UK at the Being Human Festival of the Humanities, please visit http://wallpaper.dreaming-methods.com/being-human/ For more information about the work, the storyline, its development, screenshots, in-project footage and downloads, please visit: http://www.dreamingmethods.com/wallpaper http://wallpaper.dreamingmethods.com http://www.readingdigitalfiction.com

(Source: ELO 2017: Book of Abstracts and Catalogs)

Notes Very Necessary is a collaboratively authored web-based multi-media essay that aims to addresses climate change by remixing images, text, and data generated by centuries imperialist, colonialist, capitalist, and scientific exploration in the Arctic. The title is borrowed from an essay authored in 1580 by the Englishmen Arthur Pet and Charles Jackman offering detailed instructions on how to conquer new territories by taking copious notes. In 2015 Barbara Bridger and J. R. Carpenter attempted to follow these instructions by making, finding, and faking notes, images, data, and diagrams online and reconfiguring them into a new narrative. The result is a long, horizontally scrolling, highly variable collage essay charting the shifting melting North.