my projects

My two final projects will be based off of the departure point ‘language’.

PROJECT IDEA ONE:

Personally, I was raised Catholic (though I’m not anymore) so the first thing that comes to my mind when thinking of language is the parable of the Tower of Babel. In summary, very early on in human existence, everyone could speak the same language and decided to all team up to create a tower that could reach heaven. God was not happy about this and decided to create different languages so that they could no longer communicate and build it together. 

“Come, let us go down and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.” 

I thought it would be fun to create a small simple game based on this parable. Essentially the player would be stacking different words to create a tower with the intention of reaching ‘heaven’ (the end). However, the game would get progressively more and more difficult, with words of other languages destabilizing the structure or other random challenges. If the player somehow reaches the end their tower will be destroyed anyway, and they will realize it is impossible to complete the game. The concept for my gameplay has been taken from similar stacking type games that are based solely on gameplay. Although it is technically a game, I want it to be more of an art piece, maybe more abstract and not necessarily very fun- in fact I want it to be frustrating. The intention is to convey a story and a message, not create a particularly fun game.   

The gameplay will be very similar to the app ‘Stack’ by KetchApp but obviously different and more difficult, and in 2D to make it simpler to code for myself. In terms of social impact this game obviously may be a little controversial. However, it is not my intention to be critical of the Bible or Christianity as a whole, but rather explore the implications of this specific parable. I think the contrast between technology and ancient parables could be pretty interesting to explore as well.  

PROJECT IDEA TWO:

The second idea will be a supplementary piece based closely off of my first project. It will have more of a creative focus in comparison to the first and is a relatively easier task to accomplish. I will create a poster of the Tower of Babel, I have not yet decided if I want the poster to be a tourist pamphlet, a newsletter-type or an enlistment poster, encouraging people to join the effort to building a tower to heaven.

I think this will help provide some much needed context for my first project since I don’t want to spoon feed my audience and I don’t think I’ll be able to provide an adequate narrative to my simple little game, so I think this piece will help nudge the audience in the right direction. I’ll likely make this in Adobe Photoshop/Illustrator in tandem with my first project.