The Observatory… might need a new title…

Now we are really motoring through this – 2 blogs in 2 days.

Melanie has just taken part in a three day symposium working with game designers which has proved extremely useful in refining our idea.

And this has led us to quite radically reimaging and distilling The Observatory.

In yesterday’s blog I began to refine and pin down the narrative experience we’re offering the children. We have the start of a format – essentially hunting down a unicorn in public space and returning it to its own world.

We still want to create a narrative rather than gaming experience but the lessons we can learn from the gaming world are very pertinent.

Namely – we don’t need to over complicate the back story or dwell in exposition, we are creating a theatre piece which happens with the real world as our arena and a game based goal as our audience experience.

So – in a nutshell:

A unicorn and a group of children have been transported into our world by a freak weather event. Our audience have to hunt the unicorn guided by the trapped children. Our adventure takes them through the shopping centre and High St and back to the theatre to the place where the storm bought the visitors into our world.

The experience needs to flow in a gaming sense – to have a sense of journey and play.

Our question now is to identify what the children need to do to lure the unicorn back

Unicorns are attracted to wisdom, imagination, quietness, solitude…

It feels like we are moving away from ‘The Observatory’ being the heart of the story. I don’t think that we still want the children to be looking at themselves on cctv or for them to be watching other children – it is becoming more streamlined – more elegant in its design.

However – it does look like we need another title!