Nominee Drempelprijs Autonomous Practices 2019
Ultimate Dragon is an adventure game which lures you in with a promise: your personalised utopia. As you move through the fictional landscape in constant dialogue with the programme, your input generates a 3-dimensional digital landscape hidden behind its interface. The programme secretly constructs a world based on your activity in the game.
Every time the player is making a choice within the game, another layer is stacked onto their virtual terrain. This results in a feedback loop, depending on constant input from both sides of the screen. As soon as enough information has been stored, the personal landscape is revealed. Can the programme's creation compare to the world the player imagined based on the writing? Is technology able to translate their fiction into a liveable digital environment and if not, whose fiction is it?
The text adventure is the grandfather of computer gaming, reaching straight into the player's imagination, as their fantasy slowly unfolds within an interactive landscape. This role-playing game of depending on a mediator between the player and their desired information has expanded into a permanent interface over the years, limiting the users to a set of premade choices and paths.
These choices reflect in their digital environment, as their activity is being interpreted and fed back to them. Technology is giving us a hand with distorting our perceived reality and we grip it tightly. We are facing a new, gamified reality covering the means of its construction behind opaque interfaces. A personalised environment compromising your idealistic vision into its digitised representation.
Ultimate Dragon was built in collaboration with Animation student Auryn Parkinson, who created 3D sceneries for the game using Maya.
