From Physical Sensation to Digital Presentation: Exploring Interdisciplinary Worldbuilding

This chapter is a sharing of the working process towards the development of a method for the creation of dances and dance events for fictional futuristic digital societies within a Massive Multiplayer Online (MMO) gaming community. Establishing it as the new field of Ludochoreology, the authors will explore the process of engaging with the process of movement and dances created for, and found within, online digital games. From a practice-as-research perspective, it highlights the collaboration between dance, music, and visual artists. It explores a variety of aspects related to physical and digital dance and movement creation and interaction for fictional dance cultures, its relationship with kinaesthetic empathy, and aspects of choreographic representation, in order to explore how the iterative dialogue of ‘making’ informs, transforms, and directs creative processes (Ingold, Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. London & New York: Routledge, 2013). The outcomes include the development of a range of dance activities and performative events that will take place in both the digital and physical worlds. These physical products will help to materialise the games’ concept art and musical compositions, allowing for the kinaesthetic experience to feed back into the ‘worldbuilding’ process, where the tacit knowledge is informing the “details and nuance in(to)the fictional world” (Hergenrader, “Gaming, World Building, and Narrative: Using Role-Playing Games to Teach Fiction Writing”. In Games+Learning+Society Conference 7.0. Proceedings. Madison: University of Wisconsin, 2011, 104). The research process therefore is a symbiosis of both practice and product that will influence the future of physical representation and interactions within game design, revealing through the creative process, questions and issues related to movement representation and cultivation, as well as producer/user interface.