A processing workshop and a multiplayer game.
During workshop the participants invented an island and populated it with their own characters. They were controlled trough a customized interface and each character had different skills. The rules of the game were also designed during the week and many interesting concepts emerged.
We finally decided to go for a gold hunt on the very vast island-area. Players had to move along together to find gold but had to collect it individually. This created interesting dynamics between collaboration and greed. A “bomb” feature was also built in; for fun at first but it resulted useful as it permitted to mark visited areas (by bombing them). The terrain was generated by height maps and textures and could be customized and swapped on the fly.
The participants came form very different backgrounds and with different skill-sets: we had a satellite engineer (and security freak), various IT folks, an electronic musician, graphic designers and programmers.
I asked participants to bring sunglasses and bath suits as at the end of each day we jumped in the lake to refresh our brains feel “The Island”.

Visit the official page at the Master in Interaction Design, Lugano.
Thank you to Gaston for a very detailed report of the week..

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