The Interactive Pasts Conference 2: Mata Haggis-Burridge
3Video presentation for the Interactive Pasts Conference 2, October 8-10 2018, Center for Sound and Vision.
Mata Haggis-Burridge (Breda University of Applied Sciences NHTV)
Personal and Social Recent History in Fragments of Him
In 2016 and 2017 the video game Fragments of Him was released on PC, Xbox One, and the PlayStation 4. The game is a period drama and features a variety of English urban and suburban locations in the 1980s, 1990s, and the 2000s. In this talk, the game’s Creative Director and Narrative Designer, Dr. Mata Haggis-Burridge, discusses the ways in which real locations were chosen from his own history and interwoven with newly created spaces to support the world and story of the game. Factors such as the visual and audio choices of the developers will be explored to show how the locations grounded the game powerfully in the reality of England in these recent decades, suggesting how other creators may use, or be using, similar techniques in their work. The game’s locations reflect the class, age, and personal histories of both the characters and, inevitably, of the writer. The talk explores the boundaries of fiction and autobiography, the use of digitally-recreated spaces as locations for virtual storytelling, and the processes necessary to create an emotional sense of presence in a digitally rendered period drama.