Erica Kleinman is studying the adaptation of metagaming practices within the interactive narrative genre in interactive story game design. Specifically, how metagaming practices within the genre have given rise to a mechanic that allows players to go back and remake choices after experiencing the outcomes.
I’ve been playing Life is Strange, and so far I’ve only cleared the first episode. But I’ve already seen quite a few moments where the game does some interesting things with immersion. The main character is so weak, and yet so filled with personality: she can’t be represented as a simple silent protagonist. In a world filled with flamboyant heroes, sometimes the subtle quiet ones are the hardest to do properly. Dontnot certainly tried, but when it comes to immersion, all it takes is one break to ruin the experience.
WARNING: Spoilers ahead, but they are all things that happen very early on in the game.
Counted amongst the first cohort in the PhD program in the Digital Media Department, Chelsea is at the forefront of web development. She is researching how to mitigate the drawbacks of gesture control in order to improve its ability to read intent by combining gesture and touch. Further development of gesture control is currently hindered by two major drawbacks: live mic and false-negative errors. These two issues impact a gesture system’s ability to properly read the user’s intent and decrease its accuracy and execution speed.
Immersive Paleoart is the master’s thesis project of graduate student Valentina Feldman. In conjunction with graduate students working in Paleontology at Drexel’s Science College, and the staff at Drexel’s Academy of Natural Sciences, she has been working on an animated reconstruction of the titanosaur Dreadnoughtus schrani, one of the largest creatures to ever walk the earth.
Digital Media Professors Frank Lee and Jichen Zhu received a grant from the William Penn Foundation to recreate H.G. Wells classic novel “War of the Worlds” in an interactive experience that will be played in the city of Philadelphia over the course of several months. The project mixes game play with site-specific live performances around a narrative that the city must prepare for an impending alien attack.