This workshop will look at the ways a choreographer constructs an experience for an audience and how those tools could be helpful to game designers. We will explore how the arrangement of objects and the progression of movements create audience engagement.

1. ChoreographicThinking
andGames
BorisWillis, Associate Professor
ComputerGame Design
George Mason University
bwillis3@gmu.edu
@boriswillis
boriswillismoves.com
blackrussiangames.com

2. Warm Up

3. Build a Phrase

4. 1 to 10

5. Discussion
• Tools
• Iterations
• Design choices
• Observing
• Generating new ideas
• Awareness of self and others
• Puzzles
• Write down what you were thinking and
discovering in the process.
• Warm up
• Build a phrase
• 1 to 10

6. What is a choreographer?
Games are a series of
interesting decisions
-Sid Meier
Choreographer designs a series
of interesting decisions.
Anythinga game can be,
choreography can be!

7. What is a choreographer?
• Designs experiences for an
audience using movement,
lighting, sound, costumes,
props, sets, voice, text or
multimedia.
• Crafts movement performed
by a dancer, usually for an
audience.

8. DefiningDance
Danceis a transient modeof expression, performed in a given
form and styleby thehumanbodymovingin space. Dance
occursthroughpurposefullyselectedand controlledrhythmic
movements;theresulting phenomenonis recognized as dance
bothby theperformer and the observingmembersof a given
group.
–JoannKealiinohomoku

9. Defining
Games
A game is a system in which players
engage in an artificial conflict,
defined by rules, that results in a
quantifiable outcome.
- Katie Salen and EricZimmerman

10. Dance andGames
•A choreographerdoesn’t create a game.
•A game designer doesn’t create a dance.

11. MichaelJackson'sMoonwalker
https://cdn.pastemagazine.com/www/system/images/photo_albums/michael-jackson-videogames/large/michael-jackson-moonwalker-1.jpg?1384968217 https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/600x315/34/41/0f/34410fe4529aa3766e9f594b2a662249.jpg

12. Dance Central
Just Dance

13. Types of Dance
• Court Dance
• Concert Dance
• Social Dance
• Folk Dance
• Religious Dance
• …and more

14. Susan Rethorst
ChoreographicThinking
• “a kind of spatial emotional map of a situation, the
emotional psychological reading of place, and of people
in relation to that place and each other”

15. William Forsythe
• “A choreographic object is not a substitute for the body,
but rather an alternative site for the understanding of
potential instigation and organization of action to reside.
Ideally, choreographic ideas in this form would draw an
attentive, diverse readership that would eventually
understand and, hopefully, champion the innumerable
manifestations, old and new, of choreographic thinking.”

16. Dance
• The body is the driver of the experience.
• Movement is primary
• Space can move through the body
• Body can move through space
• Focus on body parts
• Focus on space
• Focus on objects

17. Bound
Plastic Studios

18. Natasha:A Gameof Dance
BlackRussianGames
Company E

19. Natasha: A
Game of Dance
▪Natasha offers an
example of
transmedia
storytellingthat takes
place across multiple
platforms and, in
doing so, transforms
audience members
into gamers.

20. Bound
• Staniszewski says of
Bound, “we don’t have
a story, but we have a
meaning” Thus, Bound
can be said to function
or “feel” more like a
poem or artwork than
like a goal-oriented
mission that a player
must achieve or win.

21. Comparisons
Dance andGesture
Audience/Performers/Creators
Movement/Gesture/Gesticulate
Movement for movement/Story
Games and Play
Players/Designers/Audience
Play/Games
Ludology/Narratology

22. ChoreographicThinkinginGames
Simplicity- Does the player understand where they are and what they need
to do right now? Can they do it, if not do they know how to figure it out?
Surprise- Does the player regularly experience something unexpected yet
believable?
Transformation- Does your game regularly change the player in some way
or give them a new outlook? Is the player or world different from the
game start?
Repetition- Does your game reinforce established ideas so the player feels
grounded?

23. Tools

24. William Forsythe
Synchronous Objects
http://synchronousobjects.osu.edu/

25. Dance ExchangeToolbox
http://danceexchange.org/

26. Story
Narrative
Write about
• Write about a time
that you felt
successful
1
Divide
• Divide the story into
a beginning middle
and end
2
Highlight
• Highlight the action
words and verbs
3

27. Movement/Rules
Draw
• Draw a outline of your
house or a house you
would like to live in
1
Choose
• Choose three objects
in the house
2
Choose
• Choose a number
from 1-10
3
Action
• Do head shoulders
knees toes and stop on
final number
4

28. Movement
Decide Decide if youwant to change the order of the movement. begin by
stating the action words/verbsConsider timing, sound, size of house
Manipulate Manipulate the third object into the first object with the body part
from the first room.Tell the end of the story
Transform Transform your body into the second object and locomote to the
third object in the third room.Tell the second partof the story.
Move Move the first object with the body partyouended on to the second
object in the second room.Tell the first partof the story

29. Discussion

30. Design a
level based
on your
house
Use the toolsUse
Change levelsChange
Change speedChange
Use turnsUse

31. How does the
player know
what to do?
• AudienceEngagement

32. Simplicity
• Affordance
• Clarity
• Feedback
• Understanding
• Familiarity

33. Surprise
• Unexpectedbut possible based on howyou
establishthe world

34. Transformation • Player, story, world, gameplaymust be different and
alteredin some way at theend of the game

35. Repetition
• Establishingthat what player is seeingis intended
• Remindingtheplayer what they needto do by
repeatingit
• Reinforcingideas

36. Game design as a walk in the woods

37. ChoreographicThinking
andGames
BorisWillis, Associate Professor
ComputerGame Design
George Mason University
bwillis3@gmu.edu
@boriswillis
boriswillismoves.com
blackrussiangames.com
End

38. BodyController TypicalController
• Doesn't feel like dance. Feels like running.

39. Peter Bayliss
Locus of manipulation
Bayliss argues that a player’s sense of
involvement in the actions of game-play “can
take many divergent forms” and the sense of
“being-in-the-game- world arises from the
player’s ability to control the locus of
manipulation and by extension their experience
of the game”
Feels like dancing.
Feels like jumping.

40. HenrikSmed Nielsen
• Nielsen links this transformational experience to a
somatic undertaking: “my relation to the game does not
disengage me from the world, rather it re-enacts my
condition of Being-in-the-world as a body... It is a
somatic experience that both naturalizes and decouples
our relation to the world” (Nielsen, 2010)

41. RikkeToft Nørgaard
• Nørgaard’s research aligns with Henry Jenkins’s theories
about video games as forms of “kinesthetic engagement,
more akin to experiences of architecture or dance than
film.”

42. EvgeniaChetvertkova
• Her style is a mixture of different body techniques mostly based on butoh
and improvisation. In her work as dancer and performer she focuses on how
does her body and internal psychological state may create a meaningful
movement composition. She also often works with visual images as well as
with soundscapes to complete dance-body-performance practice.

43. Self-Portraitin Movement
3 day laboratory with EvgeniaChetvertkova
• The idea of laboratory is to find the way howto create self-portrait in dance, considering dance as a body-
movement metaphor.
1. Represent your vision of yourself in different modalities: visual and auditory
2. And then use these representations as material, starting point to create through movements body existence
and manner of presence
3. Find words to define and analyze some characteristics or interesting points that underline personal
representations
Through comparing (or even becoming) ourselves to objects, textures, colors, sounds, animals, countries, texts,
buildings and others we will find a creative force of dance and body imagination.
Set up a question if body thinking(embodiment) as interpretation metaphor of an abstract concept is possible.
Embodiment can be understand as creating movement image based on inner sensations, mental images of inner
landscape that sometimes are difficult to be verbalized but vivid, touching and emotional.
We will work on sensibility and awareness of the body, presence, quality of movements.
We will work on dance not as set of movements in time and space, but rather on presence that produce a kind of
energy by means of body.
It is possible to regard this laboratory as art-diagnostics of characteristics of individuality that may appear as a unit
or as a movement or as an energy which takesshape(form) and represents itself in the world through materiality,
relations, thoughts,meanings or way of doing something.