An interactive graphic novel targeting sexual assault on college campuses
Team
- Stephanie Fawaz - Co-producer / Writer / Programmer
- Kirsten Rispin - Co-producer / Editor / Sound Designer
- Cewon Kim - Character Artist
- Wenyu Jiang - Background and Compositional Artist
- Mahardiansyah Kartika - Front-end Programmer
- Laxman Deepak Raj Jayakumar - Back-end Programmer / Video Editor
Overview
Decisions that Matter (DTM) was conceptualized, designed, produced, and released in a 15 week semester by a multidisciplinary team of graduate students from Carnegie Mellon University's Entertainment Technology Center. It was created in the spring of 2015, as part of the ETC project Patronus. Though many programs and applications are being instituted across America to teach college students about sexual violence and consent, there are still issues in recognizing the danger of potential situations of sexual assault, accurately portraying the ambiguity and social difficulty to act in many of these situations, and impressing the importance and consequences of immediate preventative actions.
The original goal of Patronus was thus to create a product that would teach incoming undergraduate students about the typical nature of sexual assault on college campuses and encourage them to intervene in these kinds of situations before they escalate. We decided to create DTM, an interactive graphic novel that educates and inspires people to bystander intervention towards sexual assault on college campuses. It was designed to involve the guest in a bystander role in a way that would make them emotionally invested in the incident, as well as educate them about common scenarios in which sexual assault occurs. DTM should leave guests educated on the situations in which sexual assault can occur as well as feeling empowered at the difference they can make with their actions.
Scope and Development
One of the most pressing issues we had during the creation of Decisions that Matter was our limited schedule - with only 15 weeks to ideate, design, write, edit, produce art, write code, playtest, iterate, and publish, we had to make many decisions that would allow our team the time to create a polished and effective product. Sexual harassment and assault and particular is a very complex and multifaceted issue, and we knew immediately that we could not cover every aspect of it in our product. We thus made two major design decisions early on:
- We would focus on the most statistically prevalent sexual assault scenario on college campuses in our story: male on female, peer to peer, acquaintance assault.
- We would use localized story branching: making different decisions in each scene would cause different consequences and events in that scene, but they would come back together for the next scene.
We came to the first decision because rather than split attention and empathy between many different scenarios and characters, sticking with one cast of characters and situations would produce a larger emotional impact. With the second, we would allow players to have their choices make a difference and have agency in the scenarios, but prevented the amount of art from ballooning into an unmanageable amount.
Story Development
Our original story plans had four main scenes, each building up on the last, showing a different aspect of possible sexual harassment or assault as well as developing familiarity with the characters, that led up to the climax in the last scene of the experience. The incidents are shown below:
The first incident, cat calling, was designed to introduce the guest to the various characters and the timed choice mechanic in a straightforward way, as well as establish the party in the last scene. Thus, it was played straight, with active choices being somewhat more rewarded by characters' attitudes. The second incident, questionable flirting, was designed to turn player expectations on their heads and establish the romantic interest between two of the characters. By choosing a more active intervention, the character Natalie would get angry at you, telling you that she was interested in the advances made towards her. The waters got further muddied in the third incident, walking with some female friends on the way to the party when accosted by a man on the street; rather than assault the girls, he simply wants to return Natalie's dropped ID. It was designed to debunk the rape myth of "a rapist coming out of a dark alleyway". The fourth incident was the party, where the final and most serious case of sexual assault occurs.
When testing the scripts and storyboards with students at CMU, we had a lot of playtesters react confusedly to the third incident. A lot of them thought that it sent a message of women not needing to be vigilant at night, and weren't taking away the intended rape myth deconstruction. We were also coming up short on time left for art in our 15 week semester, so because of its confused reception and our time constraints, we cut the third incident and left the three main scenes that are currently in DTM now.
Project Pipeline
Our complete pipeline for DTM turned out to be fairly complex, and needed a lot of coordination and frequent editing in earlier stages to ensure that we got the maximum amount of mileage of our character art. We had writers, storyboard artists, live actors, character artists and programmers to all line up in a smooth workflow, and we ended up going with the following pipeline:
We would begin with our written script, with stage directions and named characters, though no images.
We would then make quick storyboards that separated the script into rough panels, allowing us to see how we could roughly lay out the scene to allow for the appropriate distribution of speech bubbles. During this stage, we typically started editing dialogue to make it shorter and easier to read in comic format.
Once we had the rough storyboard panels, we were ready to move to our live actor photoshoot. We brought the actors into our school's green screen studio and directed them to take several photos with the direction of the scene, having given them all the script to look at beforehand. We would often take hundreds of shots per shoot to give us plenty of material to look through for the next stage.
We would then sift through our photos and pick out the shots we thought matched the dialogue we wanted per panel well. Our compositional artist could get started on background art, and we would take the photos into PowerPoint to draw up the final composition of the panels as they would appear in Decisions that Matter.
We would pass these compositions to our character artist to draw over to make our panels, which she lined and colored then passed to our programmers, who timed panel transitions and speech bubble appearances.
Even in this late stage, we could still shift around which art could appear where, and where the dialogue bubbles would finally appear as we compared the final art and decided what was most appropriate for it in the end.
Though it took some trial and error for our team to develop and perfect, this system ended up being very effective for us, especially in that it allowed us to get feedback every step of the way to update our dialogue and panel compositions before the time and effort was sunk in for our final art.