The Poker World
The Poker World is a playable installation based on Xbox Kinect v1 inspired by the Red Queen effect from the book "through the looking glass" by Lewis Carroll.
This is a Kinect-based game running in the Openframeworks. The player data is get by Kinect and processed in the Openframework with the OpenCV addons. Players get poker cards to make sure their shape would not be too small so that eliminated by the game.
Concept and background research
"Now! Now!" cried the Queen. "Faster! Faster!" And they went so fast that at last, they seemed to skim through the air, hardly touching the ground with their feet till, suddenly, just as Alice was getting quite exhausted, they stopped, and she found herself sitting on the ground, breathless and giddy.
The Queen propped her up against a tree, and said kindly, "you may rest a little now." Alice looked round her in great surprise."Why I do believe we've been under this tree the whole time! Everything's just it was!"
"Of course it is," said the Queen." what would you have it?"
"well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else if you ran very fast for a long time, as we've been doing."
"a slow sort of country!" said the Queen. Now, here you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"
(Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, 1946)
The concept is that people have to keep going running so that they could keep still is quoted as a hypothesis in evolutionary biology by Leigh Van Valen which proposed that species must constantly adapt, evolve, and proliferate in order to survive while pitted against ever-evolving opposing species. This hypothesis against Charles Darwin's natural selection hypothesis. The former one proposes that one species could survive only if it has a faster-evolving process than other opposing species.
I referred to this concept in my experience design, the experiencer has to move their body to keep going collecting the poker cards so that they could survive in this game, otherwise, their shape would decreasing with the time elapsing.
Context
The basic game mechanism is that the size of the player avatar would increase when it eats porker card while it decreases if don't with the time elapsing. Players are supposed to move their body and collide with as many cards as they can. If the size is smaller than a constant size it would disappear and if it is large enough it would collide the cards automatically and the player does not even need to move anymore. it metaphors the biology world if the species do not evolve fast than other competitors they would die out and also our human society that if you do not move faster than your opponent you will be eliminated
The basic game mechanism is that the size of the player avatar would increase when it eats porker card while it decreases if don't with the time elapsing. Players are supposed to move their body and collide with as many cards as they can. If the size is smaller than a constant size it would disappear and if it is large enough it would collide the cards automatically and the player does not even need to move anymore. it metaphors the biology world if the species do not evolve fast than other competitors they would die out and also our human society that if you do not move faster than your opponent you will be eliminated
The scenes are designed to change when player get the porker and also moving their body which is mapping to the evolutionary biology world when one species evolves would rebuild the environment for their natural predators and prey or their competitors.
Some elements like ticktock are designed to create a tense atmosphere.
Exhibited at Peckham Digital Festival 2021, https://www.peckhamdigital.org/