Office Brawl

The prototype of Office Brawl has been designed and implemented by a group of five students at the RheinMain University of Applied Sciences, Wiesbaden, in a supervised project course in interactive media in one semester.

The result is a self-referential argument about Scenejo and its audio-visual appearance. Its 3D talking heads and synthetic text-to-speech (TTS) are ideal during the development process, because newly designed dialogue pieces can be experienced ad-hoc. However, the synthetic voices and the basic graphics raise issues of acceptability. This issue is the content of the conversation in Office Brawl. The two characters Lucy and Ben have been modelled, who have a controversy in an office setting:

  • Lucy is the creative director in the team, arguing that Interactive Storytelling can only be successful if voices and visuals are more up to realistic standards, so that they can express emotionally compelling content.
  • Ben is the chief programmer, a nerdy character who does not care that much about visuals, but argues that focusing on recorded output interferes with dynamic generative content in reaction to users.

They refuse to continue the work on their current project, because they are stuck in their office brawl, bashing each other without constructive arguments, rather using insults and reproaches. The player is the project manager, with the goal to lead them back to a constructive discussion and finally make them continue working. If he/she fails to moderate the debate, the situation escalates.

A new graphical representation has also been produced as audio recordings with synchronized photo animations in Reallusion’s Crazytalk animator. They are played back as video snippets in the Scenejo framework, which is currently under development.

Material

Credits

  • Concept, dialogue design, animations, Scenejo authoring: Florian Glock, Anne Junker, Marina Kraus, Christian Lehrian, Alexander Schäfer
  • Consulting and supervision: Ulrike Spierling, Steve Hoffmann
  • Voices: Marina Zvetina, Johannes Arnold, Alexander Schäfer
  • English dialogue translation support: Georg Struck
  • Authoring tool support: Christoph Knauf, Steve Hoffmann and the SAT team
  • Scenejo video client implementation: Claudia Stockhausen, Sebastian Weiß, Jamal Esenkanova and the Scenejo team