Out of the Box: Games & Research

In my sixth semester I joined the project in collaboration with the University of Konstanz for the third time. This time we focused on games and collective behaviour. We engaged in playing, discussing and creating our own games. The goal was to explore the principals of collective behaviour in humans and animals and how they can be conveyed and used in a playful manner. Our ongoing collaboration with the CASCB Konstanz brought up yet again new artistic projects with researchers knowledge. I designed the game and the gameplay by using hand drawn assets aswell as 3D assets, which I made with Blender. For the programming part I had a little help. I worked in Unity and made the UI Game Menu which leads to the game scene.

I chose to work with fireflies and my game is called „A Fireflies Fairytale“

Welcome to an entchanting world where male fireflies seek the love of a female firefly without any doubt! The game revolves around several principles of collective behavior observed in
both – humans and animals.

The multiplayer game is played with two people on one keyboard. Two contestants are playing the role of one male firefly each. Left player presses “A”, right player presses “L”.
Players must aim for the best time in lighting their lantern to be in synchrony with the rest of the swarm in the background. Attention! If the situation gets tricky, you can press the space bar to mess with the swarm. The female firefly is attracted to the winner of each round and comes closer to either of the sides. If she reached one side completely, the player won.

The applied principles of collective behavior are Synchronization (the insects light their lantern for mating reasons, for defense, communication and navigation matters), Selfishness (each player wants to gain the love of the firefly, regardless of the loss of the other player), Social Dynamics (competing males controlled by the players balance cooperation and competition) and Adaptive Pattern (each round features a different pattern, reflecting the diverse intervals and rhythms found in different species).

The Game can be accessed on a Windows computer via this link of my uni cloud. The game file is called A Fireflies Fairytale.exe:

https://merzakademie-my.sharepoint.com/:f:/g/personal/isabel_kohlhagen_merz-akademie_de/EhTsgCZFCS1BsPBDEbcw18MB8ExptWrO8NQsWWucHl5c8w?e=EEKHsi

Below you will find pictures of the game and pictures of people playing at our exhibition in Konstanz.