Moodle FCEE 2021

Abstract: Gothic fiction has been reinvented several times, most recently in the 20th century for cinema and video games. This talk presents a snapshot of our ongoing attempts to reinvent Gothic fiction once again, using the distinctively 21st century medium of the Location-Based Augmented-Reality Game. Our games cast players as paranormal investigators who equipped with paranormal detection devices explore the real world in search for paranormal activity. By collecting and analyzing an increasing body of paranormal evidence, players gradually construct the story in their minds. The talk examines the way in which characters and techniques from Stoker’s novel were adapted for our recent game Bram Stoker’s Vampires and reviews the specific challenges associated with this adaptation. We discuss how the novel’s form as a deliberately fragmented collection of ‘evidence’ with pretension to veracity was reinvented for the purpose of immersing the players into the game world, and also review how we adapted Stoker’s use of transgression and transformation from the novel.

Bio: Mads Haahr has been Lecturer in the School of Computer Science and Statistics at Trinity College Dublin since 2000. He is a true multidisciplinarian with contributions in computer science as well as interactive digital media. Current active research areas are self-organisation in distributed and mobile systems and software support for location-based mobile games. He created the Internet's premier true random number service RANDOM.ORG (1998), co-founded the Crossings Electronic Journal of Art and Technology (2001) and is founder and CEO of the mobile game studio Haunted Planet Studios (2010). He holds a BSc in Computer Science and English (1996), an MSc in Computer Science (1999), both from the University of Copenhagen, and a PhD in Computer Science (2004) from Trinity College, Dublin. He is a member of the ACM and IEEE.

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