“It feels like I’m stranded on an island, shouting for help — but all the ships are passing by.”
In exploring the layered complexities of addiction, whether it be gambling, drug addiction, or others, we found a similar narrative throughout each extreme addiction. The journey throughout addiction was similar, and massively influenced by the relationships surrounding them.
Drifting is our take on the lonely, yet ironically social, journey of addiction.
Story/Experience Pitch
In a new planet, you find mysterious orbs that push you to new speeds. Before long, use turns into abuse as you struggle to find a way out in the mess that you've created.
You land in the tail end of a storm, barely shielded in your tiny boat. With the dense fog around, the only thing you can see are dim lights scattered in the distance. With a strong gust of the wind, the storm clears and the fog lifts to a beautiful, colorful world. It's a quiet and foreign universe, like the world under the ocean. You're safe inside your boat, barely rocking as the water ripples to the soft wind. Alone, the world is yours to explore.
Contrasting the monumental landscape are small floating orbs. Upon contact, your boat gains speed for a while. Soon, you race through the unfamiliar planet, marveling at how mountains fall and rise around you. You're going so fast the dim lights aren't even visible anymore, but then you begin to slow as the power of the orb wears off. You go in search of the next orb, following a trail of it as you dodge small splinters of wood. Before long, you realize that with every orb you hit, something in the world is destroyed. The sky darkens as pieces of coral and mountains break into pieces before you. A storm brews.
Now you come face to face to the chaos you've created, a broken land now back to harm you. Around you, shipwrecks of wooden boats cluster the ocean. Slowly drifting, you try your best to navigate as canyon walls close in towards you. Finally, an opening! You find two paths. One path is sparsely scattered with orbs, and the other is narrow and sprinkled with dim light. Abandoning the orbs, you drift slowly towards the lights. The lights are dim, but it's easier to see now in the dark. You follow it, painfully slow, and discover even more lights dotting the water. Dots become clusters as they lead you out of the debris and into the open ocean. You realize that you are not alone. These were signs of others that came before. Orbs fill the ocean around, but you know better now. Though the journey is still long, you continue on and follow the light.
Research
Insights
Goals
At the core of any addiction, the feeling of loneliness is what isolates and drives people deeper into themselves. Through our research, we decided to pull away from the addiction aspect and focus on the emotional journey of dependency. By approaching this sensitive topic of addiction and stripping it from the frames of prejudice, we come upon a universal emotion that everyone is familiar with. Maybe through identifying with the emotion first, we can approach the topic with more empathy; then eventually, understand how to help.
Create an experience with no other story context other than the feeling of curiosity, wonder, and loneliness through the game's atmosphere and the player's action in the world.
From concept to execution in the span of 7 weeks.
Screenshot from the experience. Drifting through the trenches.
Solution
This project was our abstracted take on a complex subject with a simple storyline and experience. Created with virtual reality in mind, we wanted the players to commit to simple mechanics, then slowly realize how their actions are affecting themselves and the world around them. Through multiple renditions of different scenarios, we've come up with our abstracted world of primal "reward and punish" system that drive us to do the things we do. In that sense, it makes our actions more understandable.
We worked in visual metaphors to keep the story to a minimum. For this particular experiment, we wanted to work with just the pure feeling of being somewhere, and encapsulate a a small journey in that moment.
Featured Video
A collaboration between Justin Leung, Joel Aaron, Chien-Kang Chen, Revel Rosa, and Annie Liao.
Created in Unreal Engine 4 for the HTC Vive.