Weekly Report 5 - 03/11/09

The team worked on the concept document for most of Monday 26th October, and Friday 30th October until the weekly meeting with Brian and Phil took place. The team discussed possible ideas for the two main project ideas (making the tester doubt his own judgement and creating a familiar setting but with differences that play on innate fears). Brian and Phil did not agree on using the University as the setting of the tests, as an inaccurate interpretation of it may cause a loss of immersion in the tester which is vital in creating any emotional effects such as paranoia. Instead they suggested it be set in a more general familiar setting such as a supermarket, office or library etc.

In regards to making the tester doubt their judgement, a number of good ideas were brought to the table. One member suggested a theme where the tester is attacked by enemies, and some will be scripted to die in one shot whereas others require a full clip or more in order to die. By doing this, the team may be able to trick the tester into thinking there's a method of killing the enemies correctly and efficiently. Another member brought up the idea where a team of testers have a ball, and must find out how to make a counter register points for doing something. They would play around until the counter randomly acknowledged a point and then they would try to recreate what they did in order to make the counter tick up again. However what they don't know was that the counter only went up everytime a goldfish in a bowl in the room completed a full circle, yet no one noticed.

The majority of the group meeting on Monday November 2nd was spent in the University's project room putting the concept document together. The work had been done, it was just a case of putting it into one document and making sure it was up to the team's standards. The team agreed upon provisional milestone dates and what these milestones should incorporate. The team also put together a first draft presentation to accompany the concept document.

On Tuesday 3rd the team did the presentation as a dry run for Claire and Amanda at 1.00pm. Claire gave useful feedback, the team needed more proof of background research and had to clearly define their interpretation of paranoia. The team also had to clearly suggest that there would be more than one event triggering paranoia and had to explain how they intend to measure paranoia and identify it amongst the similar emotions of excitement and arousal. It was also worth talking more about questionnaires than what had been said, and mentioning other forms of media that had acted as inspiration for some of the team's work.