Is death only the end of life or is it death that gives life meaning?
Dan is immortal. Dan is depressed. Accompany Dan on his journey through this story of life and death; explore what it means to truly live in this interactive entertainment experience.
Without A Time Limit (WATL) is an experiment in interactive entertainment. Inspired by Dante’s Inferno, WATL tells the story of a video game character who is burdened and depressed by his immortality. The daily grind of endless violence all in the name of entertainment has gotten our main character, Dan, down; immortality stole his life. In a freak accident Dan is injured and no longer knows if he is still immortal. Through this twist of fate and change of circumstance Dan’s life takes on new meaning; the possibility that he could die has infused his life with meaning.
The narrative experience is interwoven with a first person shooter game; the viewer becomes Dan. The viewer shares in the frustration, gruesome violence, and ongoing cycle that Dan struggles with.
The conceptual underpinning of the project is to use gameplay in a new way within the context of narrative. Traditionally, gamepley and narrative are structured as a stepladder. In order to progress through the narrative you have to complete levels. In WATL, gameplay acts as an emotional experience that redefines the relationship with character and our experience of the narrative. WATL harnesses the power of interactivity to create an emotionally interlocking structure.
WATL was created using two different game environments. The narrative elements of the work use the technique of machinima. We worked in the Sims2 environment. Using Sims2 was mainly a product of necessity; it was accessible and efficient. It was not an ideal environment for story telling as the characters in the game do have a ‘mind of their own’ and sometimes are a little difficult to control. But through the magic of movies and some fancy editing we made it work.
The gameplay sequences were created in the Unreal Tournament 3 Engine. This is traditionally a platform for modeling levels to compete in death matches. It is not designed to tell stories. Through some innovative implementation of the technology we were able to import our narrative sequences into the game and trigger them at the appropriate times. This was not without major difficulty though. The main issue was synchronizing the sound with the video and video quality in general.
We built three levels and a main hub. The levels play on stereotypical first person shooter environments. Each level has three ways to die (paralleling the 9 cycles of hell in Dante’s Inferno). A complete experience of WATL will take the viewer through five of the nine deaths allowing for a different experience a second time around.
Go behind the scenes with the makers of Without A Time Limit as they discuss the process and challenges of making the project. click here for the documentary